Work
- CEOJuly 22, 2017 to presentNew Rochelle, New YorkJLP integrates the principles and practices of jazz into leadership and team development growth.
About Greg
- Proud father, happy husband, devoted friend, writer, passionate lover of jazz.
I've written about jazz for 20+ years: features, reviews, previews, interviews, and even scholarship. I've interviewed hundreds, some in short interviews as for the online jazz series I hosted for 20 half-hour episodes over two seasons, Jazz it Up!, others in long-form discussions as for the Harlem Speaks interview series of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, for whic I've served as co-producer for seven years.
I try to cover jazz with what Ralph Ellison called a "complex double vision," from within the cultural complex of its creation and innovation, but also with stylistic and analytic references that frame the music within the discourse of art, culture, philosophy, and history.
The rich work of Albert Murray is indispensable to this approach, as indicated in my short piece, "Greg Thomas and the Professor," published in Albert Murray and the Aesthetic Imagination of a Nation (Pebble Hill/University of Alabama Press, 2010), and my afterword to Murray Talks Music: Albert Murray on Blues and Jazz (Minnesota University Press, 2016).
As CEO of the Jazz Leadership Project, I apply the vision of the blues idiom and jazz to enact leadership, team development, and diversity growth in organizations.
Favorite Quotes
- Ralph Ellison: "The point of our struggle is be both Negro and American and to bring about that condition in American society in which this would be possible. In brief, there is an American Negro idiom, a style and a way of life, but none of this is inseparable from the conditions of American society, nor from its general modes or culture--mass distribution, race and intra-national conflicts, the radio, television, its system of education, its politics.
If general American values influence us; we in turn influence them--in speech, concept of liberty, justice, economic distribution, international outlook, our current attitude toward colonialism, our national image of ourselves as a nation. And this despite the fact that nothing which black Americans have won as a people has been won without struggle. For no group within the United States achieves anything without asserting its claim against the counterclaims of other groups. Thus, as Americans we have accepted this conscious and ceaseless struggle as a condition of our freedom, and we are aware that each of our victories increases the area of freedom for all Americans, regardless of color.
When we finally achieve the right of full participation in American life, what we make of it will depend upon our sense of cultural values and our creative use of freedom, not upon our racial identification. I see no reason why the heritage of world culture, which represents a continuum, should be confused with the notion of race." From "Some Questions, Some Answers," 1958
Albert Murray: "As for the blues statement, regardless of what it reflects, what it expresses is a sense of life that is affirmative. . . the very existence of the blues tradition is irrefutable evidence that those who evolved it respond to the vicissitudes of the human condition not with hysterics and desperation, but through the wisdom of poetry informed by pragmatic insight.”
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