Marc T. Gaspard Bolin teaches in African American Studies and Ethnomusicology at UCLA and in the Department of Music at Cal Poly Pomona. His teaching spans African American music, jazz history, ethnomusicology, music history, and low brass performance, including work with tuba and euphonium students. He is an ethnomusicologist, low brass specialist, performer-scholar, and public music educator whose work focuses on African American music, jazz, New Orleans brass band traditions, second line culture, and the relationship between sound, history, public life, and political imagination. 

His research examines how music organizes community, carries memory, and shapes public culture, with particular attention to African American musical heritage, the African diaspora, improvisation, vernacular performance, and jazz as a social and political practice. He is the author of Continuities at the Center of the Jazz Universe, a book project on Congo Square, second line culture, brass band traditions, soundwork, and African American musical continuity in New Orleans. He is also co-author of the two-volume textbook project Jazz Cultures in Motion: Dialogues of Continuity and Change, which connects close listening, jazz history, social context, and public-facing music scholarship for undergraduate audiences. As a performer, educator, and arranger, he has worked across jazz, classical, brass band, and public-facing musical contexts, bringing scholarly research into accessible conversation with live performance.