Vincent Kelley is a PhD candidate in music studies at the University of Pennsylvania with interests in South Asian music, global jazz, social theory, music and religion, and the history of ethnomusicology. He received a BA in religious studies from Grinnell College in 2016 and an MMus in musicology and ethnomusicology from King’s College London in 2019. Vincent wrote his master’s thesis on the historical, aesthetic, and social relationships among the tabla, naqqara, and kathak performers in North India, which he is currently revising for publication. He has performed on drum set and tabla in jazz, Hindustani, and popular music settings in the United States and India. Vincent is also interested in Hindi, Urdu, and Persian languages and literature, and has received the American Institute of Indian Studies fellowship to study Urdu and the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship to study Persian. Vincent’s PhD research focuses on the political economy and aesthetics of jazz, Hindustani music, and Indo-jazz fusion in the late-twentieth century.
Vincent’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating jazz in post-Independence India through the lens of the Jazz Yatra music festivals held in Mumbai and Delhi from 1978 to 2003. The Jazz Yatra promoted the interaction between Indian classical music and jazz, and became the longest-running jazz festival in the world outside of the United States and Europe. For the project, Vincent is employing oral historical, ethnographic, and archival research methodologies to understand how pivotal economic, political, and cultural transitions in late-twentieth century India and the United States were influenced by and through the Jazz Yatra festival.