Kwami Coleman

AWARDS AND HONORS

Coleman is the recipient of an honorable mention for the 2022 American Musicological Society, H. Robeter Cohen / RIPM Award. 

Coleman is the recipient of a 2020 Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship.

RELEASES

The Studio Museum, in collaboration with The National Jazz Museum in Harlem, has released Kwami Coleman's soundscape, “Echoes | Gestures | Abolition.”. This program pays homage to the many Black muscians who created music while incarcerated, and who have used their music as a way of processing, releasing, and protesting our prison system. 

In February 2017, Gallatin Faculty member Kwami Coleman released the Kwami Coleman Trio's debut jazz album Local Music. The release features 10 original compositions, some of which interpolate field recordings that captured between 2014-2016 in Coleman's neighborhood of Harlem.

PERFORMANCES

Coleman premiered the electric piano piece “Pregonera” along with a selection of prepared audio at the University of New Mexico’s Department of Music on March 7, 2020.

Coleman premiered the piece, “Past Leaves (Peanuts),” a 30-minute piece for electric piano, drum set, with prepared audio for a Black History Month event series by the Black Studies Department at The University of Missouri on February 15, 2020.

PUBLICATIONS

Coleman contributed the chapter “If Beale Street Could Talk, what’d be playing in the background? First notes on music, film, time and memory” for Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry, and New Audiovisual Aesthetics (Bloomsbury Press, December 2019).

His article “Everyone's Creative: George E. Lewis and Ubiquitous Improvisation,” was published in the Teachers College Record, Vol. 117, No. 10.

Coleman was invited as a keynote lecturer for the Graduate Student Symposium at Yale University’s Music Department on February 28-29, 2020.

Coleman spoke at Stanford University’s “Cardinal Chat,” held by The Fourth Annual Stanford University Black Alumni Summit at The Loews Hollywood Hotel in Los Angeles, CA on April 5, 2019.

Coleman was invited to “Heterophony: Texture, Technique, and Social Commentary,” part of the Musicology Colloquium Series at The University of Mexico in Albuquerque, NM, on March 7, 2019.