Jackson Albert Mann is a cultural historian of music-making in the international left and a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Refusing to sacrifice her socialist principles for commercial success, folk-blues-jazz singer Barbara Dane dedicated her life to bringing music from around the world back to where it belonged: in the hands of the people struggling to change it.
Italian composer Luigi Nono’s career told the story of European communism writ large: brash and revolutionary at the height of the 1960s and ‘70s, reflective and uncertain as the Italian Communist Party collapsed and the possibility of radical change receded. His life is a reminder that no artist is free from the politics of our time.