About
Mark Lomanno is a PhD Candidate and Graduate Fellow in ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a Master of Arts Degree in Jazz History and Research from Rutgers University-Newark and Bachelor of Arts Degrees in Music and Latin Literature from the University of Richmond. Currently, he is writing a dissertation, titled “Improvising Difference: Constructing Canarian Jazz Cultures,” which studies how jazz musicians in the Canary Islands and their diaspora negotiate local and global isolation through improvising musical and discursive performances that play across established notions of bounded cultural identity and musical genre. Other ongoing research projects include the history of Afro-Cuban and African American collaborative jazz performances, Duke Ellington’s Far East Suite, Middle Eastern jazz, and Afro-Caribbean popular piano music of the late 19th and early 20th century. He has also conducted ethnographic research in Cuba and Brazil. Selected conference presentations include papers delivered at the annual meetings for the Society for Ethnomusicology and American Comparative Literature Association, and at the 2009 Echoes of Ellington conference at UT, for which he received recognition as an emergent jazz scholar. In addition to trade publications, Mark’s work has been published in the edited volume “Discover Jazz” (Prentice Hall, 2011) and the journal African Music. He also has forthcoming contributions in the peer-reviewed journal “Jazz Perspectives,” the Grove Dictionary of American Music, the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Latin Music and Facts on File’s Encyclopedia of the Caribbean.
In addition to his scholarly research, Mark maintains an active career as a jazz pianist. His most recent recording is “Tales and Tongues” (Harriton Carved Wax, 2011), with Le Monde Caché, a San Antonio-based jazz group that plays Brazilian, Afro-Latin and Jewish diasporic repertoire. While studying at Rutgers, he performed widely in New York City and managed a jazz club in Harlem. He has premiered several compositions by the electro-acoustic composer Matthew McCabe, and his performances of works by Ignacio Cervantes and Manuel Saumell are featured on the 2007 documentary, “Cuba: Rhythm in Motion.” At Rutgers-Newark and UT, Mark has taught courses in American popular music, Western European music history, and traditional and popular world musics.
