Ancestral Ballads: A Conversation on Tuning in to the Natural World

Bamboula: Jazz Studies in Motion Resident Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe will be in conversation with director of the Land Memory Bank and Seed Exchange Monique Verdin, creative director of Bamboula: Jazz Studies in Motion Dr. Denise Frazier, and  co-founder of Bamboula: Jazz Studies in Motion Dr. Courtney Bryan around the topics of sound and the environment. 

This event is free and open to the public.

Thank you to our co-host, the Community Book Center, and Jazz Generations Initiative, The New Quorum, Jazz Foundation of America, and the Mellon Foundation.

Tao Leigh Goffe, PhD, is the founder and Executive Director of Dark Laboratory and author of a book by the same title published in 2025 by Doubleday. A Black feminist theoretician, she is Associate Professor of cultural history and literary theory with a focus on the environmental humanities and geology at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY). She has worked in the past at institutions including Princeton University, Cornell University, Leiden University, New York University, and Johns Hopkins University. Her research is rooted in decolonial thought, literature, and theories of labor that center Black feminism’s engagements with Indigeneity and Asian diasporic racial formations. Dr. Goffe did her undergraduate training at Princeton where she developed a deep passion for molecular biology and dark room photography, which she studied there as well as literature. She earned her doctorate from Yale University.

Courtney Bryan, a native of New Orleans, Louisiana, is “a pianist and composer of panoramic interests” (New York Times). She is a Steinway Artist and 2023 MacArthur Fellow, and currently serves as composer-in-residence with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra.

Recent premieres include Dreaming (Freedom Sounds), performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble at New York’s Kaufman Music Center; Visual Rhythms, a new art-inspired orchestral piece for Jacksonville Symphony; House of Pianos, which Bryan premiered in 2023 with the LA Phil New Music Group (chamber ensemble version) and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (full orchestra version); and Gathering Song (libretto by Tazewell Thompson), composed for bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green and the New York Philharmonic.

Other recent works include Blessed, commissioned by Opera Philadelphia and produced as a film that weaves together musical recordings and footage from New Orleans, New York, and Philadelphia; Syzygy for violin and orchestra, premiered by Jennifer Koh and the Chicago Sinfonietta; and Yet Unheard for soprano, chorus, and orchestra, commissioned by The Dream Unfinished and premiered with Helga Davis.

Bryan’s work has been presented in a wide range of venues, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Miller Theatre, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Blue Note Jazz Club, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

Monique Verdin is a transdisciplinary storyteller, citizen of the Houma Nation and director of The Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange, responding to the complex interconnectedness of environment, economics, culture, climate, and change in the Gulf South. Monique is currently working to support the Okla Hina Ikhish Holo, a network of Indigenous southeastern gardeners, to grow food and medicine sovereignty in the lower Mississippi River Delta and is a Bvlbancha Liberation Radio collaborator. Monique is co-producer/subject of the documentary My Louisiana Love and co-author of Return to Yakni Chitto : Houma Migrations.

Denise Frazier is the Creative Director for Bamboula: Jazz Studies in Motion. She previously worked as the Programming Director for Prospect New Orleans. She is an educator, musician, and interdisciplinary artist from Houston, who has lived and worked in New Orleans since 2002. She was a 2023-2024 MLK Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the assistant director of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University, a place-based research Center that grants fellowships and organizes public programming, immersive experiences, and collective contemplation about the bio-region stretching from Texas to Florida and its connections with other regions around the world. Her research interests currently include the Gulf South and the Anthropocene, sound studies and the political, social, digital, natural, and built environments of the Gulf South and Circum-Caribbean. She is also the manager, co-founder and violinist/vocalist/percussionist of Les Cenelles, a string and technological interfacing ensemble that performs African Diasporic music through a prismatic lens that honors African and Indigenous ancestors and chronicles ecological realities. As a company member of Goat in the Road Productions, Frazier has used her skills as an actor and as a musical composer in immersive performances and collaborations that tell lesser-known stories surrounding sexuality, politics, liberation, and colonialism.

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