Professor’s Article Explores How a Work by Dave Brubeck Documented the Black-Jewish Relationship

The Milken Archive recently published an article by Dr. Kelsey Klotz, lecturer in the Department of Music, that explores the 1969 work by Dave Brubeck, The Gates of Justice. “Negotiating Jewish Identity in Dave Brubeck’s The Gates of Justice” looks at the musical documentation in Brubeck’s work of Black-Jewish relationships, as well as the relationship between Jewish communities and mid-century American whiteness. The research was also presented at the 2020 American Musicological Society Conference in November 2020 and is part of Klotz’s forthcoming book, Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness, under contract with Oxford University Press.

Klotz researches jazz pianist Dave Brubeck’s career, music, and reception in the 1950s and 1960s. Her previous articles have been published in Dædalus: The Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, American Studies, Journal of Jazz Studies, and Jazz Perspectives.