About this Artist

Marc T. Gaspard Bolin is a performer-scholar with a nearly three-decade career as a professional musician, arranger, and educator. He teaches jazz and ethnomusicology in the Department of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles; Jazz and the Political Imagination in the Department of African American Studies; and world music, ethnomusicology, and tuba/euphonium at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He has collaborated with leading jazz artists such as Kamasi Washington and Kenny Burrell and genre-crossing performers including Big Sean, Evanescence, John Legend, and Kanye West. His realization of Duke Ellington's unfinished opera Queenie Pie was originally commissioned by the Oakland Opera Theater and has since been staged by opera companies in Austin, Long Beach, and Chicago. His community-based work, which includes festival archiving, youth ensemble leadership, and collaborative ethnographic film, underscores a sustained commitment to cultural memory, public engagement, and intergenerational storytelling. His current research centers on overlooked continuities in New Orleans jazz traditions.