The Intersectionality of Music and Healing: How the Panamá Festival Brings Hope to and Cultivates Resilience in the Youth in Panamá City

Rachel Evenlyn Frazer

Advisors: Jenny Olivia Johnson & K.E. Goldschmitt, Music

Wellesley College

May 1st, 2020

1

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank every single person who encouraged me and supported me along this journey including, but not limited to, my mother Heather Frazer, my father Carlos Frazer, my advisors K.E. Goldchmitt and Jenny Johnson, as well as Alonzo Ryan. Thank you also to the Daniels Fellowship Committee for the generous award.

2 Table of Contents

Preface: Background 4

Introduction 9 Methods………………………………………………………………………………….15 Outline…………………………………………………………………………………..17

Chapter 1: Literature Review 22 ​ ​ Music and Health………………………………………………………………………..23 Exclusion of Women in Jazz…………………………………………………………….27

Chapter 2: How Jazz Music Can Heal and At-Risk Community 35 The Health of the Community in Panamá City, Panamá………………………………..36 How Music Can Be Used to Heal Individuals…………………………………………..42

Chapter 3: How the Jazz Festival Heals the Community of Panamá City 55 Education………………………………………………………………………………..56 Jazz as a Mechanism for Spreading Cultural and Social Awareness…………………....66 Music Festivals and Community Building……………………………………………...68 Fundraising……………………………………………………………………………...71

Chapter 4: The Exclusion of Women in Jazz 74 Jazz Under the Lens of Feminist Scholarship…………………………………………...76 The Panamá Jazz Festival and the Tokenization of Women…………………………….84

Conclusion 87 Limitations………………………………………………………………………………88 Personal Connection…………………………………………………………………….88 Call to Action……………………………………………………………………………90

Appendix 92 ​ References 102 ​

3 Preface: Background

My father was born in Villalobos, a small rural village in Coclé, Panamá. Growing up, I was told countless stories of the rivers, the beautiful and perfect weather, the fresh fruit from the trees, the people, and the music. I developed a deep sense of nostalgia for a place I had never seen and a home I had never known. He would always emphasize how lucky my siblings and I were to have toys, a roof over our heads and food on the table for every meal when he, as a child had to work in the sugar cane fields for pennies in order to help provide for his family of seven siblings. Being raised by his grandmother, without a father figure, while his mother worked in the city and only came home a few times a year, to say that he struggled is an understatement.

Even though in the eyes of society, I am considered low-income, because of these stories, I always felt privileged.

I longed for nothing more than to learn Spanish and travel there to meet my cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandmother. However, we never had the money for vacation, especially for travelling outside the country. Ironically, although my parents met when they made the mutual agreement to teach each other English and Spanish, I was not taught Spanish at home. Sure I learned a few words here and there but my mother was swamped trying to home-school her three children in every other subject, and my father worked such long hours that teaching his children the language that he had to put aside, in order to assimilate into U.S. society, was not his first priority.

Still I wished to connect to this side of my identity with everything I had. But when the summer of 2017 was approaching, this longing increased ten-fold. My father had been forced to

4 return to Panamá without a chance to say goodbye and without a clear explanation. Although our relationship was not perfect, my connection to him symbolized the half of my identity that he gave me. And the unresolved nature of that connection felt like a gaping wound on my psyche and mental health. I felt as though I would never get the chance to see him again and that my opportunity for more about who I am, was lost.

During this time however, I had just joined Wellesley BlueJazz and started taking classes in the music department with K. E. Goldschmitt. In this group, I found a community, I found a home, and I found a family that allowed me to be myself and get out of my comfort zone. In the classes, I learned how to dig deep into my sense of self and understand my identity, my own biases, and gained my own sense of radical ideas about health, music, identity, and society and was trying to find where they all connected.

Every year the music department brings an artist in residency to work with the students for a few days or a week at a time to teach them about their career paths but also to teach skills in improvisation and performance. It was then that I met composer and grammy award-winning jazz vocalist from Brazil, , during the same semester that I presented a paper

“Sound Healing: The Issues of Access” at a regional meeting of the Society for

Ethnomusicology, in which I explored the world of for the first time by investigating how sound healing practices have been commodified in the U.S. Luciana, who I endearingly refer to as Lu, inspired me beyond belief. To meet a woman from South America who embraced her tan skin and curly hair, who I could actually relate to, breaking down boundaries of what some people thought it meant to be a jazz musician was incredible.

5 Not only does she sing, she is also an excellent teacher, she plays virtually every percussion instrument you can think and of course knows her way around the keyboard. I was so inspired because she represented everything that I knew jazz could be. She burst the preconception that jazz music was for white old men and proved to me that I, with my curly hair and brown skin, had a place here, too. She told me words that I would never forget and showed me the courage that I already had to raise my voice and sing.

I wrote her a note at the end of the week to thank her for all that she had done for me and for inspiring me during one of the most difficult times in my life. She not only wrote an email in response but extended the invitation for lunch if I was ever in Los Angeles. Little did I know that

I would spend the entirety of the following two summers living by and working a internship at UCLA. As soon as I got there, I took her up on her offer and we had lunch. She gave me room to talk about my background, my family, my father, my identity, my desire to go to Panamá, my interest in helping at-risk youth, and my passion for using music to heal and immediately she gave me homework. She told me to research the Panamá Jazz Festival (PJF), to get in touch with its founders who live and work in Boston, and Patricia

Zárate-Pérez, and to ask about volunteering opportunities.

I immediately did as I was instructed and tears came to my eyes when I watched a video summarizing the festival. The PJF, established by Grammy Award-winning artistic director

Danilo and his wife, music-therapist and saxophonist Patricia Pérez in 2003, is a week-long fundraising event in Panamá City, Panamá comprising various educational clinics, symposia, and concerts. The proceeds are then given back to the Danilo Pérez Foundation (DPF) that provides free to these at-risk youth and is also presented as full tuition scholarships to

6 for young Panamánian musicians at the end of the week. The entire festival is dedicated to enriching the lives of the youth of Panamá. Due in part to a history of complicated relations between the U.S. and Panamá from the early 20th century to the present, there has been a weakening of the Panamánian National Army and the Panamá Defense Forces resulting in a drastic increase in drug trafficking, theft, murder, and other types of crime. This has led to dis-ease in the community that continues to result in the displacement of much of the population.

When he was nineteen, my father was one of the displaced citizens who was able to leave his home in order to have a chance at living a better life in the U.S. Although he was fortunate enough to have family in the U.S. to assist in this transition, many youths in Panamá do not have this option. The PJF is an opportunity for them to escape the cycle of crime and violence that many of them were born into. In order for this community to heal, social change is extremely necessary and Danilo and Patricia seek to accomplish this change through music. It was everything I cared about all wrapped into one.

I emailed them promptly and awaited a response. Later that day, as I walked down the street, blabbering on the phone with my soon-to-be partner about how amazing it all was and the fact that I might actually get to visit my imagined homeland, he informed me that these same individuals were his teachers at the Berklee Global Jazz Institute and that they held open forums every week during the school year. Throughout all of that next fall, I went to every single forum, as though it was another required course (I should have asked for credit). Finally the day came that Danilo was giving a masterclass. With the encouragement of my then partner Alonzo, I got over my anxiety for meeting him and walked right up to him, thanked him for his inspirational

7 words, introduced myself and informed him of my connection to Lu and to Panamá. In an instant, he embraced me, saying "Oh, so we're family!" I almost cried. He told me to come to

Patricia's class the next week and I went and introduced myself to her as well.

The next step was to find funding for the trip. I applied for a Wintersession grant, but, because I knew very little about what volunteering would look like, I was rejected. I felt discouraged and despaired until my mom, my partner, and multiple friends, especially my friend

Esther, encouraged me to keep going and advised me to start a GoFundMe and ask for the money through crowd-funding. I raised just enough for a roundtrip ticket, and one night after a master class, Alonzo, Patty, Danilo, their daughter Daniela and I all went to dinner and Danilo asked what I was thinking. I told them the whole story and asked if I could volunteer. They enthusiastically said yes and Patty and I agreed that I would specifically volunteer for the Music

Therapy Symposium.

The goal of this thesis project is to investigate how the Panamá Jazz Festival (PJF) can bring forth healing in the community by offering an alternative to, and potential treatment for, involvement in gang-related violence, crime, and drug-use, and also to critically analyze how and why women are excluded from this genre and therefore this healing process. I sometimes feel crazy when I talk about the sheer invisibility and exclusion of women from musical spaces, especially when I leave Wellesley. I feel crazy when I talk about radical ideals and truths because that is how the real world, dominated by white men, wants me to feel. That is exactly why I decided to pursue this thesis project, to stand up for what I believe, critically analyze the patterns and contradictions that exist in the genre that I have found a home in, and to call them out so that we can start to create a real difference. This project was a perfect culmination of

8 personal and academic interests and helped me connect to my identity and roots in ways that I never thought possible.

9 Introduction

It was the fourth day of the festival, Thursday January 16th at Villa Augustina in Casco

Antiguo, Panamá. It was a beautiful and temperate night. I was wrapped up in the sounds of people laughing, lyrically speaking in Spanish, singing, and playing exciting, upbeat music. The

Danilo Pérez Foundation Big Band led the jam session that night and they played magnificently.

They sounded like they had been playing as a group for years even though there were some members who were guests who had just arrived the weeknd before such as neuroscientist, Dr.

Walter Valverde. Most of the musicians were young adults, in their late teens or early twenties, others were founders, directors, and teachers of the foundation and festival.

Every single song had a certain Panamanian twist, no matter what jazz standard they played. They played simple, well known standards like “Blue bossa” and “Autumn Leaves'' but added a 3-2 clave rhythm and an underlying Afro-Cuban style habanera rhythm played on the bongos. Eric, one of my survey respondents, played quarter notes on the cowbell while he also played syncopated rhythms on the timbales. The player played a montuno or tumbao rhythm which further gave it an "Afro-Cuban” or “Latin Feel” and almost made it sound like salsa, which was a style born out of Afro-Cuban jazz.1 ​ The music filled the air, people danced in front of the stage next to rows of chairs filled with eager listeners. The weather was perfect, the breeze ran through the venue and the stars shone bright above the open rooftop. I stood there, practicing my Spanish with new acquaintances and asking questions about the foundation when I looked at the stage to watch a

1 Juan Flores, Salsa Rising: New York Latin Music of the Sixties Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, ​ ​ 2016).

10 friend take a tenor saxophone solo. And then I looked closer, and closer. And I realized that I had been overlooking something so crucial to my identity as a musician, a scholar, and a scientist. Of all the people on stage, there was only a single woman playing the piano and she did not even play on every song. I then felt the familiar “of course” shrug that I have felt so many times before when I have realized the gender inequalities that exist in the music world when I am apart from my oasis of female empowerment at Wellesley College.

When I noticed the injustices I was seeing, it became increasingly difficult to write about how great this festival was if it was only reaching half of the population. From that moment, I knew my thesis had to cover more than just the healing powers of the Panamá Jazz Festival and the Danilo Pérez Foundation, but it also had to critically analyze the patriarchal systems that determine scenes like the one I had just witnessed. These systems not only exist in the U.S. but also in Panamá; they exist not only in society but by extension, in music as well, and especially jazz music.

There are many frameworks that can help in understanding these disparities, why they exist in popular culture and jazz, how they affect people and especially women of color, and also how they can be transcended. For instance, in his revolutionary book The Souls of Black Folk, ​ W.E.B. Dubois introduced the term "double-" for the first time. He did so to describe the experience of being both black and an American, attempting to maintain a sense of self-consciousness and awareness while also seeing oneself through the eyes of a society that discriminates against you. To have double-consciousness is to constantly worry about how others perceive you, sometimes before you even learn how to perceive yourself, in order to navigate and survive in a prejudicd society. It is a two-ness and a duality.

11 While this philosophy was crucial for understanding the lengths that African-Americans have had to go through in order to survive in this society and still has pertinent relevance today, I have learned to be critical of dichotomies and dualities, especially when they do not include or make room for understanding gender. How then do we describe what black women in America have to go through? Or a woman of color in a Latin American society that is not as racially polarized as the U.S.? A possible addition to this philosophy to be inclusive of women could be triple-consciousness, in which a woman of color must see herself as a woman, as a person of color, and then see herself through the lens of society that discriminates against her and even threatens her livelyhood and life. Unfortunately, many women are not even given the luxury to consider themselves and their identities apart from the societal values and expectations that are forced upon her by her own society, her own culture, her own race, and even her own family.

In reality, I believe everyone has a version of double-consciousness or multiple versions of simultaneously belonging and not belonging due to the immutable aspects of one’s identity. I for one have experienced this as a mixed-race Latina child trying to find my place as one of the only brown kids at a white family reunion, and as the only Latina at the Christmas party at

Abuelo's that doesn't speak Spanish. I have experienced this while trying to navigate the world of science as a musician and the world of music as a scientist; while attempting to navigate both of these worlds as a woman of color and microaggression after microaggression and stereotypical assumptions of where I do and do not belong or how I should or should not behave; while understanding that I am a tokenized low-income student of color at a predominantly white, prestigious, and expensive institution that has not always accepted people like me. Instead, I

12 would like to suggest the idea of a multidisciplinary consciousness that is constantly being redefined and reshaped based on my experiences and based on the societies that I encounter.

A philosophy that attempts to expand on double-consciousness and reconcile racial divisions however, has already been recommended by ethnomusicologist Paul Austerlitz in his book Jazz Consciousness. He believes that jazz music creates a virtual world where we can work ​ ​ through and transcend these false and socially constructed dichotomies.2 This is not to say that music is a universal language that transcends all cultural and linguistic boundaries; in fact,

Austerlitz warns against this type of utopian conception. Austerlitz instead suggests the idea of cultural relativism developed by Franz Boas (in the late-nineteenth century) in which an individual attempts to have empathy for and understand other people's realities through those people's perspectives rather than imposing their own views onto those realities. This idea of having empathy for other cultures was a reaction to the dominant ideology in anthropology at the time of white ethnocentrism, where Europe was seen as the epitome of class and civilization. The uplift of western classical music has had repercussions on how many music programs are organized and funded even to this day.

The idea of cultural relativism is strikingly similar to the idea of “situated knowledge” proposed by feminist scientist and scholar Donna Haraway. Haraway suggests that there are two main frameworks for understanding how knowledge is created and disseminated. The first is the term radical constructivism which is an extreme application of cultural sensitivity where every type of knowledge is deemed as relative to the particular culture it came from. Under this framework there is therefore no one absolute truth but rather every type of knowledge is a human

2 Paul Austerlitz, “Introduction,” in Jazz Consciousness: Music, Race, and Humanity (Middletown, Connecticut: ​ ​ ​ Wesleyan University Press, 2005), xv.

13 invention. The second term is absolute objectivity which implies that there is only one absolute truth and everything that deviates from that truth is inherently wrong. Haraway uses “situated knowledge” as a bridge between these two frameworks and argues that we should situate ourselves in someone else's position before we make value based assumptions on whether their perspectives are right or wrong.3

While these frameworks are helpful for learning how to position oneself in a different context and develop empathy, there are some gaps. For example, while arguing that jazz music is an agent of inclusiveness that can bridge racial divides, Austerlitz neglects to discuss gender divides which have also plagued jazz music and led to the purposeful, generational exclusion of women. Additionally many discussions of race in the fail to consider the fact that race is not a universally understood concept and that some cultures define it differently.

In order to expand these frameworks to a Latin American context such as Panamá, the work of Deborah Pacini-Hernandez especially in her book, Oye Como Va!, is especially useful. ​ ​ While Panamá may not be the first place that pops into your head when you hear the word jazz,

Pacini Hernandez argues that “Latinos’ personal and collective hybrid genealogies have served to facilitate the bridging and crossing of musical borders.”4 She also argues that policies of segregation, including the one-drop rule, have created bipolar racial dimensions in the U.S. that make it more difficult for Latinos/as to find meaning, identity, and place in society. This difficulty is only amplified by the fact that Latin America has more flexible yet sometimes problematic constructions of racial identity. Finally, she emphasizes that “the universality of race

3 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial ​ Perspective,” Feminist Studies, Inc. 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. ​ ​ 4 Deborah Pacini Hernandez,“Introduction: Hybridity, Identity, and Latino Popular Music,” in Oye Como Va!: ​ ​ Hybridity and Identity in Latino Popular Music (Philadelphia, U.S.: Temple University Press, 2010), 9. ​

14 mixture on a genetic level, however, cannot and should not be interpreted to mean that it should be considered a neutral phenomenon lacking local significance or disconnected from structural hierarchies.”5 These structural hierarchies are exactly those that feminist scholars fight to expose and dismantle, a feat that I know is beyond the scope of this thesis but one I will attempt to begin.

Methods

When I actually attended the festival in January 2019, I taught two courses about music history while also volunteering as the social media coordinator for the Latin American Music

Therapy Symposium. During this experience, I noticed that although they lived in an “at-risk” community, many of the children were extremely bright and talented with great potential. As they took pictures with the various clinicians and notable musicians, it was apparent that the festival had an extremely positive impact in their lives.

This year in January 2020, I returned to the festival and planned to conduct a series of interviews with participants of the festival, modeled after scholarship in the field of medical ethnomusicology, to investigate the impact this festival has on the community. Ethnomusicology is a discipline based in music and anthropology that analyzes the social and cultural significance of musical traditions mainly outside of the Western world. This field has had many meanings since its creation and is still heavily contested today, but it notably prioritizes the study of musical elements that cannot be fully encapsulated by reading notes on a page. These elements include the socio-cultural backgrounds of the musicians who perform the music as well as the

5 Ibid., 4.

15 history of the music itself and who created it. Medical ethnomusicology examines in particular how these musical cultures intersect with healing cultures.

Because music is so inextricably linked with culture, it was extremely important for me not to adopt the mindset that music was a universal language that could connect me to the people in Panamá. This misconception of the universality of music is bothersome. Cultural sensitivity includes learning the language of the culture that is being investigated and it should not be assumed that music can automatically connect people from two different worlds. While music can bring people together, it cannot be taken out of context and fully understood without communicating with the people that are creating it.

I experienced a sense of disconnection the first time I travelled to Panamá because of my limited ability to communicate with the participants of the festival. Although I had some vocabulary and could get the general idea of a conversation, I could not fully grasp how much the festival meant to these individuals because of my inability to detect subtle changes in tone and inflection that are hard to catch unless you’ve studied the language. This disconnection coupled with my lifelong desire to learn the language of my father and his family prompted me to take an intensive Spanish course in the fall leading up to the festival. Not only did this preparation give me the confidence to speak to more people the second year, it also showed the individuals I met and interviewed that I was truly invested in the project. This helped them open up to me more without having to simplify their answers.

Through these connections that I made, I was able to get the contacts of several individuals so that I could set up in person interviews and also send out surveys with the same questions for a total of seven respondents. I again volunteered as a social media coordinator for

16 the Symposium. This time, I shared the added responsibility of writing and translating a blog that summarized each of the talks during the symposium, with my now good friends Sophie and Matt. This process gave me very unique insights on how music healing occurs in Latin America. I took notes during and after clinics, as I was walking through the halls of the festival, and even after having short conversations. The majority of my data I refer to in this thesis is therefore based on my own experiences and observations as a volunteer.

Outline

For this thesis, I hope to bring together the interdiciplinary worlds of sciences and public health, music and anthropology, and feminist studies to get one step closer to accomplishing the goal of bridigng objective and constructed knowledge about women performing jazz in Panamá.

Feminist ideology is not distinct from being able to understand how music can heal a ​ ​ community; you have to think about who is and who is not being healed and why. It is important to understand who has access to music education and healing practices along with those who may not have access or may not believe they have access. Haroway’s idea of “situated knowledges” allows us to put ourselves in someone else's shoes, to understand that people have different experiences based on where they are in society, how that placement directly affects how they define healing, and whether or not they believe they need to be healed.

I found a home in Jazz because of what it stands for: destabilizing power structures.

Before hip-hop, before salsa, before punk rock, there was jazz. Jazz, like these other styles, threatened the white hegemon because it presented a way for African-American individuals to

17 create and profit off of their art. Additionally, women have always been a part of creating and popularizing these styles, even if they were discouraged by their families because it’s not

“lady-like” and even if they are not mentioned in the history books.6 If these musical styles are all based on the idea of dismantling power structures, then why can we not use them, and why have we not used them in order to destabilize the most insistent power structure of them all: the patriarchy?

In order to understand my own experience at the Panamá Jazz Festival and how it heals the community, it must be done from the framework of cultural relativism and situated knowledge. A theory developed by Karl Marx and adapted into feminist scholarship, is that of

Feminist Standpoint theory which states everyone has their own unique social and cultural standing and will never be able to fully grasp the experience of someone in a different setting, but those who are marginalized are better able to accomplish this than those in non-marginalized groups.7 Therefore my experience as a Latina in the U.S. is inherently different from Latinas in

Panamá along with my experience as a jazz musician and my experiences with racism and sexism. While I cannot begin to completely grasp the perspectives of the people who live in

Panamá and are affected by this music festival, nor can I determine what “healing” is to them, as a member of a marginalized group, I can attempt to situate myself in their world.

Furthermore, there is a common misconception that the arts are separate from the sciences. In fact, even at Wellesley, we have the science center, (which multiple pre-med students and science majors reportedly call “home” and sometimes spend more time there than their own rooms) and we have the music and arts building, Jewett Arts Center. Even as a liberal

6 Angela Y. Davis, “Introduction.” In Legacies and Black Feminism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998). ​ ​ 7 T. Bowell, “Feminist Standpoint Theory,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed April 22, 2020. https://www.iep.utm.edu/fem-stan/. ​

18 arts college that promotes diversity, intersectionality and interdisciplinarity, these clear geographic isolations have profound effects on where people spend their time, view themselves, and the options they believe they have. However this is part of a much larger problem in the U.S. and many Western cultures. While science used to be heavily intertwined with art as a part of philosophy and even poetry, somewhere along the line, a border was created that separated culture from nature and science from art. Haraway coined the term “natureculture” as an attempt to bridge these two worlds,8 and feminist science scholar Banu Subramaniam emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinarity in her work and has decided to dedicate her life to bridging these worlds as well.9

Unfortunately, I am not equipped with the tools necessary to conduct neuroscientific brain scans or MRIs when people are listening to music, to try to defend its efficacy and its ability to heal. However, I do possess the agency to critically think and write about why there are such limited resources investigating the healing effects of music from a scientific standpoint.

Even further, I can investigate why the research that is being done prioritizes Western European

Classical heteronormative music like Mozart and Bach. In fact, one of the most widely read books on this subject that investigates how people interact with music in their lives and even after traumatic brain injuries is Oliver Sacks’ , and it does not discuss music outside ​ ​ the Western Art Music canon.10 Additionally, I can expose the fact that women are often

8 Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: ​ ​ ​ Routledge, 1989). 9 Banu Subramaniam, Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity (Baltimore: ​ ​ University of Illinois Press, 2014). 10 Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia (New York: First Vintage Books, 2008). ​ ​

19 excluded not just from these scientific studies but from the musical practices that can lead to healing in the community.

The first chapter of this thesis is a literature review in which I will expand on some of the topics that I listed above and that will be discussed throughout the rest of the chapters. In this chapter, I attempt to understand why the scholarship that exists surrounding music healing has not included jazz as a valid form of healing, and why serious scholarship around jazz history has, in some cases, excluded, tokenized, and essentialized women and women of color.

Chapter 2 goes deeper into understanding what it means to heal a community and what it means for a community to be at-risk in the first place. I analyze the association between crime and poverty and emphasize the fact that women of color are the most at risk in low-income communities. In addition, I discuss how healing is defined in the community of Panamá and how music can assist in the healing process of individuals in this community and at-risk societies in general. Chapter 3 finally expands on exactly how the Panamá Jazz Festival uses music to heal.

From its ability to be used as an educational tool, to its potential in raising money for causes, I strive to prove that music, and jazz music in particular, has far more value than simple entertainment. The way that music and music festivals such as the PJF can heal on individual as well as communal levels is discussed at length in this section. Additionally the intellectualization of jazz and how its advancement into the academy has affected its ability to be used as an agent for social change is examined. Chapter 4 then delves into understanding why women have been excluded from jazz historically, and from most power structures in general. Drawing on my own experience as a Latina in jazz, I attempt to reconcile this disparity and suggest ways that we can accomplish this reconciliation on a larger scale.

20

21 Chapter 1

Literature Review

Music has the profound power to heal people across both inter- and intrapersonal dimensions. On an individual level, music can be used as a therapeutic tool to target and assess physical and emotional ailments. It can be used to treat Parkinson’s disease,11 Alzheimer’s disease,12 and along with virtually any type of therapy for the mind and body. It has also been used for centuries all over the world in spiritual practices that facilitate healing of the mind, body, and soul. It has been used in Judeo-Christian religions, Candomblé religious practices in

Brazil, Sufi Islam and even Tibetan Buddhism to bring forth healing. Music can be used to entrain the body and bypass certain areas of the brain to help people gain control of their motor function after suffering from a stroke. People can also embody musical practices, and the nocebo and placebo effect can take hold, causing them to enter into trances, and convincing their mind and body that they are healing. Medical anthropologist Rebecca Seligman takes this one step further and incorporates the idea of bio-looping to understand how the mind and body can work together in a cyclical nature to lead to healing in her work on the Afro-Brazilian religious practice of Candomblé.13 I believe music can facilitate this process, especially in a trance or flow

11 Anna A. Bukowska, Piotr Krężałek, Elżbieta Mirek, Przemysław Bujas, and Anna Marchewka, “Neurologic ​ Music Therapy Training for Mobility and Stability Rehabilitation with Parkinson’s Disease – A Pilot Study,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9 (2016). ​ 12 Jonathan Graff-Radford, “How Music Can Help People with Alzheimer’s,” Mayo Clinic, April 20, 2019, https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/alzheimers-disease/expert-answers/music-and-alzheimers/faq-2005 8173. ​ 13 Rebecca Seligman, Possessing Spirits and Healing Selves: Embodiment and Transformation in an Afro-Brazilian ​ Religion (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). ​

22 state.14 Interestingly, jazz has the unique aspect of collective and individual improvisation that can induce flow states that bring people closer and more susceptible to healing.

On a communal level, music can bring people together after a tragedy or environmental disaster, and it can also be used as an avenue for raising money for such causes. For example, in

2006, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival adopted the motto “Witness the Healing Powers of Music” after the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina and used this festival to raise money for the community and bring people together.15 It can unite people in protest of dictatorships,16 and in favor of environmental causes.17 It also can cause multiple people’s heart rates to beat in time through the process of entrainment.18

Music and Health

In the book Music as Medicine: The history of music therapy since antiquity, many ​ ​ scholars contributed individual entries about music healing dating back to ancient traditions in

Europe and Asia throughout the middle ages, as well as more modern modes of music healing in music therapy as well.19 In Music and Health, specific examples and case studies of music ​ ​

14 Judith Becker, Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing (Bloomington and Indianapolis: ​ ​ ​ Press, 2004). 15 Ashley Khan, “Healing Music in New Orleans Festival’s Gospel Tent,” NPR.org, April 28, 2006. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5367455. ​ 16 Jasmine Garsd, “El Pueblo Unido: More Latin American Protest Songs,” NPR.org, October 11, 2012. https://www.npr.org/2012/10/05/162384391/el-pueblo-unido-more-latin-american-protest-songs. ​ 17 Sarah Gibbens, “African Musicians Use Song to Protest a World Marred by Climate Change.” National Geographic, January 10, 2019. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/01/conservation-music-spreads-environmental-message-afri ca/. ​ 18 Michael H. Thaut, Gerald C. McIntosh, and Volker Hoemberg, “Neurobiological Foundations of Neurologic Music Therapy: Rhythmic Entrainment and the Motor System,” Frontiers in 5 (2015). ​ ​ 19 Peregrine Horden, Music as Medicine: The History of Music Therapy Since Antiquity (Brookfield, USA: Ashgate, ​ ​ ​ 2000).

23 healing and therapy practices are outlined and discussed as part of a large collection of essays that contribute to our understanding of how music can be used to heal.20

However, because music is sometimes judged only on its aesthetic or entertainment value, it has almost become debased to an extent that many medical scientists doubt its efficacy as a healing agent. Music critic Ted Gioia, in his book Healing Songs, laments on the state of ​ ​ music research in that it is either isolated to time or space creating a dichotomy between

“diachronic” and “synchronic” perspectives. He states that there are actually so many more similarities between different cultures and by extension the music they perform as well. He complains:

The typical survey of “world music” misses these similarities as it moves from society to

society, treating each place – Japan, India, England, Australia, Cuba, Indonesia, and so on

– as though it were some isolated planet with different life-forms and perspectives;

ignorant of all that happens beyond its thin atmosphere, incommensurable with other

planetary bodies and resisting their gravitational pull.21

The reality is that there are many underlying similarities between different cultures that can make the idea of universalism very appealing. It is much more effective though to celebrate differences and diversity while simultaneously searching for these similarities that can bring people together.

Gioia posits that the reason music is not taken seriously as a healing mechanism is due to this larger issue as well. As he says,

The pervasive tendency to view works of music as merely artistic products, their value ​ ​ determined by considerations of their aesthetic or entertainment value, has served to

20 Even Ruud, Music and Health (Oslo, Norway: Norsk Musikforlag, 1986). ​ ​ ​ 21 Ted Gioia, “Preface,” in Healing Songs (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), x. ​ ​

24 marginalize such approaches, just as the positivist worldview of medical science has

tended to consider with suspicion therapeutic claims on behalf of anything as intangible

as music.22

Here Gioia explains how the large stigma around the idea that music can heal prevents the academy from funding many programs that will critically analyze how music can be used to heal the body. This trend is starting to change however. In fact, there are now projects funded by the

National Science Foundation (NSF) dedicated to the idea that musical experiences as a child can drastically affect the way the brain develops.23 Whereas many of these NSF funded projects choose to focus specifically on brain development, my research is motivated by trying to understand how young people develop as jazz musicians and how this development can lead to healthier lifestyles as well as choices that can increase overall health.

Medical ethnomusicology is perhaps the most important framework for understanding how this process is facilitated by the Panamá Jazz Festival which brings healing to the community of Panamá City, Panamá. Although music therapy is effective in many ways, in the

Oxford Handbook of Medical Ethnomusicology, the editors lament that music therapy ​ traditionally has used a “Western” biomedical framework for understanding health and disease in that it is mainly physical and when the physical nature of disease is addressed, then therapeutic effects can be reached. They counter this historical framework and instead postulate:

In contrast, traditional and long-standing practices the world over, which are among the

foci of medical ethnomusicology, include, along with the physical body, the neural,

22 Ibid., xi. 23 See website with bibliography of related research - , “Impact of Musical Experience on the Nervous System: Development of Sound Transcription, Cognitive Function and ,” National Science Foundation, 2011, https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0921275. ​ ​

25 psychological, emotional, and cognitive processes, sociocultural dynamics, spirituality,

belief, and the metaphysical as central concerns and modes of action that play critical

roles in achieving and maintaining health and, more important, can engage all aspects of

a human to move beyond therapy to create healing or cure.24

Healing is related to much more than a physical state of being and music therapy must realize this and work toward creating true healing rather than just treating physical illnesses. Similarly the aforementioned NSF funded studies mostly focus on Eurocentric classical music training rather than other musical styles including jazz. This is part of a much larger issue regarding the

Eurocentrism of music education that results in the debasement of music that is created by people of color, especially those that challenge hierarchies and systems of power.25 While more current research is being done on different forms of music healing in different cultures, it is not always situated in such a way that respects the cultures that it comes from.

The introduction to Jazz Among the Discourses edited by Krin Gabbard is filled with ​ ​ hints towards the reason why I believe jazz has not received a complete place in academia: racism. Gabbard addresses the fact that many scholars do not engage with jazz music critically enough because they fear that they may seem racist, thereby prolonging the process of legitimizing the art form;26 however I believe it to be more than that. As I wrote in a paper for a course on American Popular Music, jazz has not received its place in academia in the same way that for example, media studies has, because it was so long associated with blackness. That, in turn, led to its association with violence and crime. Therefore, these stereotypes propagate

24 Benjamin Koen, Gregory Barz, and Kenneth Brummel-Smith, “Introduction,” in The Oxford Handbook of ​ ​ Medical Ethnomusicology (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008), 7. ​ 25 K. E. Goldschmitt, "Centering Latin America in Pop Music Curricula and Scholarship," paper presented at The Future of Pop: Big Questions Facing Popular Music Studies in the 21st Century, Boston, MA, October 2019. 26 Krin Gabbard, Jazz Among the Discourses, 2nd ed., (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). ​ ​ ​

26 throughout the “legitimizing” process without calling it what it is: whitening. Similarly, while

Gabbard addresses feminist scholarship on media studies, he does not do so for music. He does talk about the “masculinity” of jazz, but nowhere does he mention how harmful the canonization of jazz can be for the women who are excluded or tokenized during this process.

Exclusion of Women in Jazz

My overarching argument for this thesis is that jazz music is a healing agent because of its ability to heal physically the minds and bodys of individuals and because of its potential to be politicized to mend schisms in society caused by white supremacy which I will expand on in later chapters. However, just as the contributions of women of color are sometimes rendered invisible and in the margins in healing practices (like medicine, science, psychology, therapy, music therapy, sound healing etc.), they can also be rendered invisible in political movements

(civil rights movements, feminist movements, etc.). Because I argue that jazz can be used as both an agent for healing and social and political change, it may seem only natural that women of ​ color are often excluded from playing instrumental jazz or pushed to the margins so that their existence in the art form is seen as extraordinary.

In fact, Audre Lorde wrote very effectively in the foreword to This Bridge Called My ​ Back, “to date, no US progressive political movement has fully incorporated into their analysis of ​ oppression and liberation strategy the specificity of the woman of color experience.”27 Whenever there is an issue about civil rights, feminism, etc. the experience of women of color is very often

27 Audre Lorde, “Foreword” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds. Cherríe ​ ​ ​ Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 2015), xxvii.

27 left out or pushed to the side. Then we experience a sort of institutionalized amnesia, where people just forget about the exclusion of women and naturalize it until we accept that this is just the way things are. We cannot talk about healing or sound healing without addressing the fact that traditional and ancient practices that were created by women and men of color from all over the world are being commercialized and commodified by the privileged white hegemon in ​ ​ countries like the United States and the U.K. Again, this erases the influence and the impact that women of color have had on these practices for centuries. We cannot talk about the fact that jazz can be a healing agent without addressing the fact that women of color who also were responsible for the creation of jazz, are erased and pushed to the side and rendered so invisible that when they do appear, it is considered a “breakthrough.”

While many people tend to over-romanticize music and assume that it is all inclusive, all accessible and a “universal language,” these types of generalizations are not only false but destructive as well. Music is in fact a powerful tool that can connect people from all walks of life, but that does not mean that it can be analyzed or understood outside of a cultural context.

The reality is that music has been gendered—it has been racist and sexist—because it has come from communities that maintained these values and therefore music reproduces these values in a cyclical nature that can be very deceiving.

When most jazz scholars write about music, they exclude women. Or if they do include women, they include a few examples as “tokens,” usually singers or piano players to make sure that they did their due diligence. But this comes at the cost of erasing the influences of many women who made valuable impacts on the jazz music industry. This erasure and exclusion

28 causes many young women who may think they are interested in jazz, to become discouraged for multiple reasons.

1. If they do join bands, toxic masculinity is rampant and they may choose to leave.

2. They do not see anyone like themselves in the history books.

3. Because they’ve been discouraged for so long (because it was thought that women

were too weak to play instruments) there is a lack of women playing in bands

nowadays so they don’t see themselves in the mainstream.

4. When they do perform well, they are treated as anomalies while men are

considered geniuses and innovators.

This exclusion of women is represented in Ted Gioia’s History of Jazz. In fact, when you search ​ ​ the word “she” in the entirety of the text, you only get 33 results, when you search for “he” you get over 290. When discussing the origin of jazz music, Gioia emphasizes the influence of Ma

Rainey and Bessie Smith on the creation of blues music and how even after their deaths, this influence and the influence of the blues permeated throughout jazz music. Even still, he chooses these two women who were both vocalists and emphasizes how their choices in life led to their eventual downfalls rather than solely speaking about their influences and innovations.28

He then continues with a lengthy five page biography of Scott Joplin who is credited with creating Ragtime and this time emphasizes his skills as an innovative composer as well as a pianist. He praises Joplin with positive words such as “Scott Joplin stands out as the greatest of these composers. In fact, the resurgence of interest in ragtime that began in the 1970s would be hard to imagine if not for the timeless appeal of Joplin’s music.”29 On the other hand when

28 Ted Gioia, “The Prehistory of Jazz,” in The History of Jazz, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, ​ ​ ​ 2011), 15-19. 29 Ibid., 23. ​

29 discussing the career of Bessie Smith, Gioia chose to focus more on the negative attributes of her career.

Yet ultimately Smith can be rightly viewed as, at least in part, the victim of the lifestyle

excesses that she celebrated in her music. Alcohol and smoking coarsened her voice; her

drinking binges led to violent outbursts, which made many in the industry wary of this

temperamental star; her marriage to policeman Jack Gee developed into the type of

exploitive personal relationship so often the subject of blues songs.30

This is also an example of how women are typically only referred to in relation to who they were married to. In fact, when discussing New Orleans style Jazz, again Gioia focuses on the man

Louis Armstrong at length and barely mentions his wife Lil Hardin Armstrong as a “colleague” in King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, when in reality she was an incredible pianist, composer, singer, and band leader in her own right “long before and even after her marriage to Louis

Armstrong.”31

In Jazz Cultures, David Ake attempts to understand how jazz has come to be studied the ​ ​ way it is now but hardly even mentions the ways that women innovated and were a part of this process as well. He brings together multiple fields of knowledge to try to understand this phenomenon as well as cultural hierarchy, gender construction of jazz and racial identity and difference but only mentions feminist scholarship a few times.32 Even though he speaks about the gendering of jazz in one of his chapters, he does not explicitly discuss the ramifications this has had on women.

30 Ibid., 20. ​ 31 Margaret M. Pick, “My Heart: The Story of Lil Hardin Armstrong,” Riverwalk Jazz - Stanford University ​ Libraries, 2000. https://riverwalkjazz.stanford.edu/program/my-heart-story-lil-hardin-armstrong. ​ ​ ​ 32 David A. Ake, Jazz Cultures (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002). ​ ​

30 Some scholars do focus on feminism in ethnomusicology. Not all female ethnomusicologists write about feminism however, but I believe that it is impossible to understand the healing benefits from this artform without considering who it is excluding. I am, regretfully, not even taking into consideration the larege number of transgender or gender nonbinary musicians and singers who are denied representation in this artform, including notable artists like jazz singer Billy Tipton. Nichole Rustin-Paschal and Sherrie Tucker also discuss the gendering of jazz. Their anthology Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz, privileges “gender ​ ​ analysis as a tool for exploring how the aesthetics of the music have been shaped, directed, and recorded by fans, critics, historians, and musicians and for examining the conditions of possibility that artists have maintained and developed as jazz has grown.”33

But why is this the case? Why are popular music and jazz perceived as masculine? There are several answers to this question but for one thing, there is the very war like and destructive lingo that is used as well as the idea of the cutting sessions which, like in hip-hop,34 goes against the idea that women are supposed to be dainty and fragile. This doesn’t mean that women are not in jazz because they would rather be fragile, but rather society has dictated that these two things

(femininity and toughness) do not coincide and therefore women, sometimes subconsciously, decide not to be involved.

In fact going back to the early days of instrumental music during the Renaissance period, women have been discouraged and excluded from playing “masculine” instruments or anything

33 Nichole Rustin-Paschal and Sherrie Tucker, Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies (Durham: Duke ​ ​ ​ University Press, 2008). 34 Tricia Rose, “‘All Aboard the Night Train’: Flow, Layering, and Rupture in Postindustrial New York,” in Black ​ Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (New York, NY: University Press of New England ​ Date, 1994), 21–41, 99–105.

31 that would result in them changing their physical demeanor or facial expression.35 The psychological effects of this thought process have carried on even today because of the societal expectations of women to behave in a “feminine” way which traditionally meant being still, and almost invisible without being too emotive. Furthermore, when women were deciding to become performers in the early days of the blues as one of the only professions they could pursue, they were often considered to be on the same level as prostitutes and they were not respected.36

In her introduction to Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela Davis comments on ​ ​ the fact that many blues analyses have disregarded the contribution of the women who created it in the first place. She also brings to light the fact that the blues were seen as low class and not up to par with the ideals of the Harlem Renaissance because much of the music discusses what it’s like to be a working-class citizen. This book focuses mainly on three women Gertrude “Ma”

Rainey, Bessie Smith, and .37 If someone were to define a “women in jazz” canon, these three artists would most likely be at the top of the list. However, this is at the expense of continuing the age old tradition of limiting women to the position of a vocalist and emphasizing that position as the norm. In reality, there were many notable female instrumentalists such as pianists Muriel Roberts and Terry Pollard as well as saxophonist Wilene Barton to name a few.

Additionally, patriarchies exist all over the world and in many Latin American countries the patriarchy is represented by the name “machismo.” This has caused many gender disparities, sexist stereotypes, in Latin American culture. So when we look at a jazz festival that occurs in a

35 Carol Neuls-Bates, Women in Music: An Anthology of Source Readings from the Middle Ages to the Present ​ ​ (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1996). 36 Lucy O’Brien, She Bop: The Definitive History of Women in Rock, Pop, and Soul (New York, NY: Penguin ​ ​ ​ Books, 1996). 37Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, 1998. ​ ​

32 Latin American context, without critical interrogation, some might view it as only natural that the issue of female exclusion should arise as well.

This issue of female exclusion has been examined closely in many Latin American musical contexts but one genre that has a history that is extremely linked to the history of jazz is salsa. Salsa was mostly created by latin american musicians in of New York city and ​ was heavily influenced by and born out of genres like Afro-Cuban jazz, Latin jazz and boogaloo as discussed in the introduction.38 In her book Listening to Salsa, Francis Aparicio, discusses the ​ ​ fact that both jazz and salsa were created by musicians with similar cultural, social and racial backgrounds. Because many of the musicians who created both of these genres were living in the margins of society, Aparicio argues that they “historically represented, because of [their] marginality, a delimited freedom with which to carve a space for social change and for cultural resistance.”39 Their placement in the margins of society has created a desire for them to create social change and resist cultural norms. However, Aparicio emphasizes that this process of social change usually left out women and rendered them invisible in the creation of the music. Now, when women salsa musicians are mentioned in magazines for instance, they are seen as remarkable novelties to be in such a male-dominated field.

The exact same can be said about the women who are tokenized in jazz history textbooks.

Aparicio also writes about how many times the role of male mentors and managers is emphasized when discussing these women’s success which is also represented in jazz history.

She also points out that the perception many people have is that taking a “feminist” view on this

38 Flores, Salsa Rising. ​ 39 Francis R. Aparicio, “Preface,” in Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures, ​ ​ (Wesleyan University Press, 2010), xxi.

33 phenomena can make female scholars seem like they are going against their culture. On the other hand, Aparicio emphasizes the importance of pointing out contradictions in popular expressions and incorporating them with critical analyses so that they are not just dismissed as imaginary, which is why I am choosing to discuss this topic in this thesis.

The intention of this thesis is not to criticize the Danilo Pérez Foundation (DPF) or the

Panamá Jazz Festival (PJF) for not having enough women involved, but rather to critically analyze the reason why this is the case in the first place. There are actually women associated with the DPF and the PJF. There is in fact a group specifically for women called “Las Hijas Del

Jazz” or “The daughters of Jazz.” While the idea of this group is amazing and inspiring, there still exists the sad problem that none of the regular members play horn instruments, most play piano, sing, or play drums/percussion (which is still relatively rare). Also the name implies a certain hierarchy that these women are only daughters which implies that jazz is somehow parental. If the history is examined, jazz is traditionally masculine so this name is rather patronizing. I hope to shed light on the wonderful work that is being done in this community while also providing commentary on the social implications that a foundation dedicated to jazz education can have on the people who have been most excluded: women of color.

34 Chapter 2

How Jazz Music can Heal an At-risk Community

The overall goal of this thesis project is to understand how a jazz music festival can heal the community of Panamá City, Panamá. However, before we can even begin to understand this process, it is important to carefully examine what it means to heal a community in the first place and to question if that community even needs to be healed. The meaning of the term “health” is often not a universal concept. Instead, it varies between individuals, communities, and organizations, due to larger socio-cultural-economic factors. For the purposes of this thesis project, the World Health Organization provides a comprehensive definition of health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” They also emphasize that “the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief or economic and social condition.”40 Using this definition as a framework, health is not limited to the physical state of not being sick, but rather includes mental and social ​ ​ wellbeing. While the WHO states that every human being is entitled to this right regardless of social and cultural background, the reality is that institutional racism and classism cause large disparities in health and crime all over the world. Based on this definition, I believe that poverty is the largest threat to a state of health for an individual or a community. Furthermore, because race and class are inextricably linked throughout the world, in the United States and, partially by extension, in Panamá, racism also threatens communities thereby placing them at risk.

40 Frank P. Grad, “The Preamble of the Constitution of the World Health Organization,” Bulletin of the World ​ ​ Health Organization 80, no. 12 (2002): 981. ​

35 In this chapter, I will first focus on the institutional dynamics in Panamá City, Panamá and in the world that cause disparities in health for low-income people of color that make programs like the DPF and PJF necessary for social and political change and healing. I will then transition to an explanation of how individuals are affected by these larger socioeconomic factors on biological and emotional levels to better understand what it means for a person and a community to be at-risk without projecting a “toxic savior” complex onto that community.

Intertwined in this discussion, I will offer examples for how music, and jazz music in particular, can mend the ailments that are caused by living in an at-risk community.

The Health of the Community in Panamá City, Panamá

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January 11, 2020

“Tenemos que irnos antes del anochecer,” my guide and supervisor, Alejandra, warned ​ ​ me as we walked from the Danilo Pérez Foundation to look for an outdoor concert in the square of Casco Viejo, Panamá. We had to leave before nightfall because it would be too dangerous for two women to walk around alone at night in this beautiful and historic town. Rather than question her, I quickly responded, “claro” (of course). This section of the city seemed like such a ​ ​ contradiction to me, and in fact, the repercussions of gentrification were apparent all over

Panamá City.

Casco Viejo, also known as Casco Antiguo which translates to “Old Quarter” is a historic district adjacent to Panamá City, established in 1519 as the earliest Spanish settlement on the

Pacific coast of the Americas. After experiencing slave rebellions, fires, and even a pirate attack,

36 the layout of the district has remained virtually the same with some ruins of cathedrals and convents still standing to this day.41 As we walked through the narrow old streets, I noticed a beautiful mix of Spanish, French and early U.S. American architecture and almost felt like I was transported back in time. Many small stores, restaurants and bars closely lined the sidewalks and the uneven reddish-orange brick roads caused me to stumble and trip several times.

The district was extended onto a peninsula that is surrounded by the Pacific ocean but the old ruins remain on the main ground. This peninsula, is normally swarming with tourists who shop for cheap molas (a traditional form of indigenous Panamanian art from the Kuna or Guna ​ ​ tribes) at the local tiendas (stores), and complain about not being understood by the local store ​ ​ owners when they refuse to even try to speak Spanish. Just meters away, however, there are run down buildings with chipping paint and boarded windows. This is the “dangerous area” that

Alejandra warned me about. During the day, people lined the sidewalks and sat in chairs outside stores but these were not tourists. There were no fancy coffee shops or gelaterias, and while these people did not seem harmful, I was still warned that crime was high in this area. We kept walking and looking for the outdoor concert which, although it was not directly connected to the festival, would be attended by many of the same participants.

The streets were lined with music. People were listening to salsa and bachata in their homes and stores and even on the side walks. Alejandra had to ask for directions because we could not determine what was live music and what was not. When we finally got to the square,

Alejandra saw and introduced me to some people she recognized, including Omar Díaz, a teacher at the foundation who later agreed to fill out my survey. Unfortunately, although the square was

41 “Archaeological Site of Panamá Viejo and Historic District of Panamá,” UNESCO, ​ https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/790/. ​

37 full of people, the bands that were supposed to play were extremely late and had not even started yet. The sun was going down and Alejandra again stressed that we had to leave before nightfall, and made a casual comment about how Panamanians are always late saying it was simply el ​ tiempo Panameño (Panamá time). I looked around at the dilapidated and partially demolished ​ buildings right next door to small shops and tenement looking housing and wondered how exciting it must have been for these people to be able to attend a free concert in the middle of their town.

I became confused as to why I was warned that this was such a bad part of town. These people seemed harmless and even kind. They did not seem like criminals and I did not feel unsafe in their presence. They were just there to listen to free music and yet, because of the warnings, I felt as though I was supposed to fear them.

-----

According to the WHO, a community is entitled to overall health despite socioeconomic or political backgrounds, but history shows us that this is not the reality. That being said, there are many factors that can lead to an unhealthy community. These include widespread diseases and chronic illnesses, insufficient healthcare systems, war, acts of terrorism, natural disaster and more. Additionally, all of these factors are especially exacerbated for communities of color due to governmental neglect and the long lasting effects of colonialism. Because of long histories of discrimination against indigenous peoples and people of color, socioeconomic disparities in these communities are damaging and can lead to disproportionate effects on the health of individuals in these communities. In this section, I will critically investigate how these health and economic

38 disparities often result in the association between crime and poverty in a community, and give specific examples of this association in Panamá.

Based on the warnings I received in my time there, I remembered the outdated definition of a slum given by a survey from the US Department of Labor in 1894, as “an area of dirty back streets, especially when inhabited by a squalid and criminal population.”42 This definition clearly equates poverty to crime. Contrarily, in his book Planet of Slums, Mike Davis more effectively ​ ​ characterizes a slum by “over-crowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure.”43 While Davis' latter characterization of a slum is more constructive because it highlights the other factors that can lead to an at-risk community and eliminates the automatic association between poverty and crime, many people are still unfortunately more likely to believe and spread the former definition, which leads to generalizations of poor populations as criminals and then warnings.

While some statistics do prove that an increase in poverty levels does correspond to an increase in crime rates, simply deducing that all people from low-income backgrounds are criminals does not begin to explain how the society that they are a part of has failed them in such a way that sometimes crime is the most reasonable or feasible option to make a living and support themselves and their families.44 The mindset of “poverty equals crime” blames the victims of institutionalized classism and racism that are continuously harmed and excluded by a government or society that does not care about them. The war on welfare, the war on drugs,

42 See Carroll D. Wright, The Slums of Baltimore, , New York, and Philadelphia, (Washington: Government ​ ​ Printing Office, 1894), 11-15. 43 Mike Davis, “The Prevalence of Slums,” in Planet of Slums (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 22-23. ​ ​ 44 See Erika Harrell and Lynn Langton, “Household Poverty and Nonfatal Violent Victimization, 2008-2012,” ​ Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 2014; Haiyun Zhao, Zhilan Feng, and Carlos Castillo-Chavez, “The Dynamics of Poverty and Crime,” Journal of Shanghai Normal University 43, no. 5 (2014). ​ ​

39 redlining in housing districts, deindustrialization and outsourcing are all examples of direct governmental attacks on poor people of color to maintain an elitist and capitalist system in the

U.S. since the 1980s.45 Additionally, because of the history of colonialism and slavery in both the

U.S. and Panamá, and the complexity of U.S. imperialism in Latin America, similar economic inequalities and systems of oppression exist there as well.

The U.S. has maintained a presence in Panamá dating back to the mid 19th century and, consequently, there was an inevitable exchange of cultural traditions especially during the building of the Panamá Canal in the early 1900s.46 While this exchange included jazz music, it also included negative customs such as a system of laws very similar to the Jim Crow laws in the

U.S. which led to increased segregation and mistreatment of darker-skinned Panamanians.47 In fact, as Executive Director of the PJF Patricia Zárate-Pérez informed me, this system paid darker skinned workers silver and white workers gold for doing the same amount of work while building the canal. Once the canal was finished, darker skinned Panamanians were segregated into the city of Colón and given no resources or governmental aid. Consequently, but not coincidentally, this is now considered one of the most dangerous areas in Panamá.

U.S. intervention continued into the 20th century when the CIA recruited the leader of the

Panamá Defense Forces, General Manuel Noriega to help control the spread of communism in

Central America. However, Noriega was notorious for drug-trafficking charges and in 1989 when Noriega was no longer considered an asset, the U.S. government attacked the country, not

45 Michael C. Dawson and Megan Ming Francis, “Black Politics and the Neoliberal Racial Order.” Public Culture ​ 28:1 (n.d.). 46 United States Department of State, “U.S. Relations With Panama,” accessed April 30, 2020, ​ https://www.state.gov/u-s-relations-with-panama/. ​ 47 Robert C. McGreevey, “Zone of Contention: The Panama Canal and the Workers Who Built It.” ed by Julie Grenne, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 11, no. 2 (2012): 300–302. ​ ​

40 just his regime, bombing and murdering thousands of innocent civilians.48 After this, many families were either killed or forcibly displaced from their homes resulting in an increase of poverty. The occupation of Panamá therefore weakened the economy, the Panamanian national army and the Panamá Defense Forces. As a result, crime such as drug-trafficking, theft, and even murder, increased drastically exacerbating the need for social change for the community.

My father told me a story of being so afraid during this time and having to protect his own family from looters that would threaten his home. One man came to their door with a weapon and demanded food. My father and his family were luckily able to escape and get help before they were harmed. While it would be easy to assume that this man was just a lone criminal who was taking advantage of a crisis, the fact that he asked for food proves that he himself was attempting to survive in an unstable world. He may have had a family to provide for and had no other option than to go to the nearest town in search of food. While it may be naive to believe that every criminal has a just reason for why they commit crimes, thinking about individual crimes from a broader perspective and situating oneself in someone else’s shoes, as

Donna Haraway would suggest doing, can help anyone to understand how external factors can lead to desperation and therefore crime. This example makes it apparent that crime does not simply increase because poor people are inherently criminals, but rather there are external factors and even acts of terror that can place these individuals in dire situations that can lead to them committing crimes. Crime causes dis-ease in the community which can lead to real implications on the health of individuals due to stress, violence, and trauma

48 HISTORY, “The U.S. Invades Panama,” accessed April 30, 2020, https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-u-s-invades-panama. ​

41 How Music Can Be Used to Heal Individuals

A common theme among my survey respondents was that an at-risk community was one that has a lack of access to clean drinking water, education, substantial infrastructure, and healthcare in addition to having increased rates of poverty and crime. Everyone confirmed that there were at-risk communities in Panamá and emphasized that the Indigenous and

Afro-Panamanian communities were especially at risk because of the factors like racism and classism discussed in the previous section.

In this section, I will describe how living in an at-risk environment can lead to physical and emotional health disparities and also provide examples for how music, and jazz music in particular, can treat these maladies. As I will discuss in this section, jazz music can help people relax, relieve stress, and induce healing trance states that can work together to help people of all ages cope with their daily lives. Especially for children in at-risk communities, these healing benefits can lead to happier and healthier lives and can help them develop resilience, which can lead to decisions that combat maladaptive behaviors. By teaching jazz in the community of

Panamá City, the Danilo Pérez Foundation delivers these healing benefits to children for free. I do not wish to argue that jazz music is the only or even the best possible type of music to be used for healing. To say this would simply be reiterating the common trope of creating hierarchies of musical styles. Instead, I hope to further challenge the outdated tendency of believing that

Western Classical Music (WCM) is the only music worth being considered for its healing abilities and shed light on the unique attributes of jazz including its heavy emphasis on improvisation, that make it a valid tool for healing individuals in an at-risk community.

42 We can assume that a healthy community should also include mostly healthy individuals regardless of race and class. However, poverty in and of itself is dangerous. Lower socioeconomic status can, in fact, lead to higher mortality rates. According to social epidemiologists Bruce G. Link and Jo C. Phelan, of Colombia University, “socioeconomic status is a ‘fundamental cause’ of mortality disparities - that socioeconomic disparities endure despite changing mechanisms because socioeconomic status embodies an array of resources, such as money, knowledge, prestige, power, and beneficial social connections, that protect health no matter what mechanisms are relevant at a given time.”49 I argue against the implication that socioeconomic status is a direct cause of mortality because this connotation takes away responsibility from the power structures that have created these disparities in the first place.

Similarly, some have tried to argue that being a person of color is a cause for certain diseases, and even higher infant mortality rates when conversely, it is the racist society that we live in that causes these disparities on personal, institutional, and internalized levels.50

Living in a low-income community causes stress, especially if that community experiences high crime rates due to the aforementioned societal impacts. The term stress is often defined as a state of real or perceived threat to homeostasis: the dynamic state of equilibrium that balances and steadies internal, physical, and chemical conditions such as body temperature, pH, and blood pressure. When an animal is exposed to something that causes stress (or a stressor) their body will respond involuntarily in order to maintain this homeostasis to the best of their ability. This response is regulated by the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis in the brain.

49 Jo C. Phelan, Bruce G. Link, Ana Diez-Roux, Ichiro Kawachi, and Bruce Levin, “‘Fundamental Causes’ of Social Inequalities in Mortality: A Test of the Theory,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 45, no. 3 (September 2004): ​ ​ 265–85. 50 Anne Pollock, “Sickening: Racism, Health Disparities, and Biopolitics in the 21st Century,” January 20, 2020.

43 Stress causes a cascade throughout this axis in which the hypothalamus produces certain neurotransmitters (corticotropin-releasing factor & vasopressin) that then signal the pituitary gland to produce hormones (adrenocorticotropic hormone) that cause the adrenal glands to produce glucocorticoids which inhibit more HPA activation, therefore maintaining a negative feedback loop of regulation and control.51 According to Yale Professor of Neuroscience Rajita

Sinha, there are examples of both emotional (interpersonal conflict, loss of relationship, death of family member, etc.) or physiological (hunger/food deprivation, sleep deprivation or insomnia) stressors that, if continuous, repetitive or chronic, can lead to dysregulation of the HPA axis and homeostasis which in turn can lead to maladaptive behaviors, including drug addiction.52

Music is an incredibly useful tool for reducing these ailments because of its unique ability to affect both the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems. The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for involuntary processes including regulation of heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure which are all involved in the aforementioned stress response.

Music has been proven to facilitate this regulation and calm the sympathetic nervous system’s responses to stress.53 In one study, women were randomly assigned to listen to relaxing classical music, water sounds or no sound at all. Then, they were exposed to a stressful event and their cortisol levels were tested to determine how well they were able to respond to that stress. While this research article only included women participants and unsurprisingly only used a classical music piece to address the healing qualities of music, it still sheds light on music’s unique ability

51 Sean M. Smith and Wylie W. Vale, “The Role of the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis in Neuroendocrine Responses to Stress,” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 383–95. ​ ​ 52 Rajita Sinha, “Chronic Stress, Drug Use, and Vulnerability to Addiction,” Annals of the New York Academy of ​ Sciences 1141 (October 2008): 105–30. ​ 53 Myriam V. Thoma, Roberto La Marca, Rebecca Brönnimann, Linda Finkel, Ulrike Ehlert, and Urs M. Nater, “The Effect of Music on the Human Stress Response,” PLoS ONE 8, no. 8 (August 5, 2013). ​ ​

44 to reduce cortisol levels and help people prepare for stressful situations so that those situations do not have prolonged effects on an individual’s health.

In terms of the parasympathetic nervous system which is in control of voluntary movement, sound healing treatments have been shown to reduce pain for patients with fibromyalgia.54 This study used low-frequency sound stimulation (LFSS) treatments which drive

“neural rhythmic oscillatory activity.” In other words playing certain frequencies for patients who were suffering from severe pain and sleep loss, was able to help regulate and entrain their natural brain wave activity and block pain receptors to ease their pain. The model they used for understanding how music affects the brain was one of a complex neuromatrix in which “sensory, cognitive and affective dimensions are fully credited with affecting pain perception, and these dimensions are subject to cognitive-evaluative (attention, expectation, anxiety, valence) and motivational-affective (neurotransmitter, hormonal, limbic) inputs.”55 Essentially pain perception is extremely complex and cannot be attributed to one specific part of the brain but rather a sort of network that encompasses both perceived (if one believes they are in pain) and physical (if one is physically being harmed) signals. This represents how we as humans have a level of control on our health and our pain.

In this study, they also reported that chronic pain is related to a condition called thalamocortical dysrhythmia (TCD) and that the frequency of the brain waves in this area of the brain was 40Hz. What is interesting is that 40Hz is not a traditional note on a standard Western classical music (WCM) scale that is tuned to the A440 system. The closest note to this is a low E

54 Lili Naghdi, Heidi Ahonen, Pasqualino Macario, and Lee Bartel, “The Effect of Low-Frequency Sound ​ Stimulation on Patients with Fibromyalgia: A Clinical Study,” Pain Research & Management : The Journal of the ​ Canadian Pain Society 20, no. 1 (2015): e21–27. ​ 55 Ibid., e22. ​

45 at 41.20 Hz. However, this was not always the standard in classical music. In fact, before the

International Organization for Standardization determined that this would be the exact tuning for orchestras in 1955, many orchestras tuned to different frequencies and some, like the New York

Philharmonic, still do not follow this standard.56 While it is important to have some standardized measurements such as the exact length of a meter, standardizing sound and especially music can lead to the exclusion of many non European styles and scales. For instance, Javanese gamelan music has two distinct scales that have five or seven pitches in each "octave," as it would be described in WCM.57

Even these scales have unique pitches that are not necessarily on the standard WCM scale. When sound is standardized, a hierarchy is created and the implication that music outside of this standard is wrong is ingrained in many people and in the training of many musicians.

Therefore music from other cultures like those in Java, can be seen as out of tune or even incorrect. This standardization could also contribute to the association of classical music with intelligence and why WCM is often seen as the only music worth investigating for its potential healing effects. Ironically though, our bodies create and resonate at frequencies on their own tuning scale that are not necessarily in tune with either Javanese music or WCM, as demonstrated by the TCD experiments. This is not to say that there is one style of music that is perfectly in tune with our bodies that we should all use to heal; however, I hope to shed light on the fact that when human beings attempt to standardize something that is culturally so diverse,

56 James Bennet, II, “Why Do Orchestras Tune to an A-Note Pitch at 440 Hz?,” WQXR, July 5, 2017, https://www.wqxr.org/story/why-do-we-tune-a-note-pitch/. ​ 57 Marc Perlman, and Carol L. Krumhansl, “An Experimental Study of Internal Interval Standards in Javanese and ​ Western Musicians,” 14, no. 2 (1996): 95–117. ​ ​

46 like music, we embed our own ideals of what is right and what is wrong, and that can lead to the exclusion of other cultures and other genres.

Additionally, while this study used computer generated sounds to treat the patients, there are instruments called singing bowls that have been used for treatment such as this for centuries.

This is also referred to as vibroacoustic therapy which, in its inception was less Eurocentric than traditional music therapy as it relies heavily on traditional healing methods from Tibetan

Buddhism. Interestingly, many of the singing bowls used in these traditional practices are tuned as tritones which are assumed to have some type of healing property. However, while this interval was actually banned from being in orchestral music by the Catholic church and termed the “Devil’s interval,"58 it is still used as a clever harmonic substitution in jazz music. This substitution commonly occurs when the dominant seven chord is exchanged with another dominant seven chord that is a tritone away from the first. This allows an improvising musician to add many additional notes that can give the piece of music more color and give the musician more freedom. While it may sound out of tune to some, as I have discussed, tuning is relative and we should not imbue morality onto a particular interval.

Ironically though, many people have created singing bowls and tuned them to be exactly in tune with chords and scales from WCM believing that these would have the most therapeutic effects. Or, like the study mentioned above, they completely take away the instruments and replace them with speakers. This process almost completely erases the rich history behind this healing practice and also removes it from being associated with spirituality. In fact, a google search of vibroacoustic therapy and Buddhism produces very few results of these two terms

58 To learn more about how singing bowls work and their history see: Shakti, “The Tuning of Tibetan Singing Bowls,” The Secret Lives of Singing Bowls (blog), March 18, 2011, ​ ​ https://nagashakti.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/the-tuning-of-tibetan-singing-bowls/. ​

47 together. This is just one example of how traditional music healing practices are appropriated into clinical practices without recognition. According to Koen:

There often remains an assumption across disciplines that the standard by which any

music can be understood, appreciated, judged, analyzed, or deemed worthy of embracing is

a “Western” one. This leads to thinking that the best music for health and healing would

naturally come from "Western" models. As a result, an area like medicine, which has a

long-standing interest in music's potential effectiveness to promote health, improve

function, or facilitate healing, is at risk of inheriting a narrow view of what music is,

thereby stripping it of its potential power.

I do not wish to claim that Tibetan Buddhism sound healing techniques are inherently greater than WCM techniques, but I hope to emphasize that every type of music could have therapeutic qualities, and it is important not to uplift one genre or style of music over all others whether it be for entertainment, intellectualization or healing.

While I discussed the scientific explanation for how stress causes actual biological dis-ease by suppressing the immune system, illness and healing can also be understood from a psychological and spiritual sense. Therefore, separating musical healing practices from a cultural and spiritual context could, as Koen suggests, potentially reduce its capacity to heal. In fact, when asked to define healing for individuals and communities, a common theme among the answers of the survey respondents was that health involves being free of illnesses of the body, mind, and spirit. In his response to my survey, Omar Díaz, a participant of the festival for the past seventeen years and a teacher at the foundation since 2008 defined healing in a similar way:

RF: ¿Cómo definirías la curación/sanación? Para individuos y para las comunidades. ​

48 - How do you define health/healing, for individuals and for communities?

OD: Como mejor calidad de vida, cuando se suplen necesidades básicas de vida y ​ espirituales también.

- As a better quality of life, when basic life and spiritual needs are met as well.

Díaz emphasized that healing is not simply having basic life needs like healthcare and resources, but also having spiritual needs met as well.

In almost every religious and spiritual practice around the world, music is used as a tool to worship the divine and even induce trance states that can facilitate healing. For example, in her discussion of spirit possession and trance states in the Afro-Brazilian religious practice of

Candomblé, Medical Anthropologist Rebecca Seligman discusses the placebo effect in which participants of a study or recipients of a certain drug can be given a treatment that has no real healing effect on their body while simultaneously being told that they are being healed. This in turn causes their body to have real biological effects that can heal them. Seligman highlights that

“if we take the time to really think about what this means -- that consuming a substance that by definition can have no effect because it is inert (i.e., a sugar pill) makes people feel better simply because they believe it will -- then we begin to more fully appreciate the power of ideas, of expectations, of meaning to affect bodily change.”59 This example represents how incredibly susceptible we are, as human beings, to our lived experiences in shaping our health. If we have this power to essentially heal ourselves with our mind and our ideas, then we also have the power to make ourselves unhealthy under the same logic. If individuals living in a low-income community internalize the deterministic ideals that they are at-risk, less-than, and destined for a

59 Seligman, “Introduction,” in Possessing Spirits and Healing Selves, 1–45. ​ ​

49 life of crime and poverty, then they can embody these worries and eventually develop chronic illnesses or maladaptive and self-destructive behaviors that can cyclically result in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Judith Becker’s Deep Listeners also discusses how people who are more sensitive to ​ ​ music can have or undergo trance states when they hear particular songs or participate in certain ceremonies.60 The concept of flow, which is a similar experience to trance, was described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as a “holistic sensation that people have when they act with total involvement.”61 This is more commonly described as being “in the zone” where time seems to fly by because you are completely engaged with what you are working on. Both flow and trance states create a sense of altered consciousness and separation from reality, or at least the perception of separation. Becker believes that certain people are more susceptible to altered states of consciousness (ASC) than others, referring to these people as

“deep listeners.” Her hypothesis for how music facilitates these ASCs is "…that strong emotional stimulated by listening helps precipitate the onset of a trancing consciousness characterized by focus, by duration, by limiting the sense of self, and by the surety of special knowledge – the gnosis of trancing.”62 Essentially, when people have profound emotional responses to listening to music, it helps them focus and limit their sense of self. When one limits their sense of self, they are more likely to forget about their worldly struggles, including the stress of living in an at risk community. Trance and flow states can therefore help to facilitate emotional and physical healing and music induces these altered states.

60 Becker, Deep Listeners. ​ 61 Karen Stansberry Beard and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Theoretically Speaking: An Interview with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on Flow Theory Development and Its Usefulness in Addressing Contemporary Challenges in Education,” Educational Psychology Review 27, no. 2 (2015): 353–64. ​ ​ 62 Becker, Deep Listeners, 68. ​ ​ ​

50 These ASCs are also found in other religious practices as ethnomusicologist Katherine

Hagedorn discusses in her essay on the Sufi Islam practice of Qawwali and the Afro-Cuban ​ ​ practice of Santería.63 Hagedorn reflects on how non-religious people consume these practices ​ ​ because of music's ability to transcend geographical and temporal boundaries through recordings.64 While this is at the risk of potentially stripping the music of its cultural context,

Hagedorn suggests that "perhaps the consumption of these musico-ecstatic traditions, even in their secularized, objectified states, helps the listener transcend despair, fulfilling (in an admittedly limited way) one of the purported goals of organized religion."65

Therefore, it is the music induced altered state itself that can be an accessible healing form without the necessity of becoming a practitioner in the religion. As demonstrated by these different examples of religious practices, even if they are secularized, they can still be effective in helping people transcend despair and worldly troubles. Similarly, although jazz music is not a religious practice, it can also facilitate similar ASCs which could also lead to transcendence of despair. Within jazz music, participants are encouraged and taught how to enter flow states during their performances and practices. While practice is essential for being able to do this well, during improvisation, a jazz musician has to focus extremely hard on what they are hearing, thinking, composing, and finally playing. Studying and practicing jazz trains individuals to become a type of deep listener which can lead to an altered state of consciousness and therefore healing.

63 Katherin Hagedorn, “‘From This One Song Alone, I Consider Him to Be a Holy Man’: Ecstatic Religion, Musical Affect, and the Global Consumer,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 45, no. 4 (2006): 489–96, ​ ​ https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5906.2006.00323.x. ​ 64 Ibid., 491. ​ 65 Ibid., 494. ​

51 ASCs can help individuals take their mind off of the stress of living in an at-risk, low-income community. However, this stress is also exacerbated and prolonged by trauma.

Trauma can take on many forms but is often associated with witnessing or experiencing violence towards oneself or others. This can include individual physical or emotional abuse as well as witnessing the murder of or violence against a family member, friend, or simply someone in your community on a first-hand basis. Trauma of this kind can even cause post-traumatic stress disorder which is defined as “re-experiencing a traumatic event, avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma and emotional numbing, and increased arousal.”66 Although rates of PTSD are higher in at-risk communities and communities of color, due to lack of access to health care resources, lack of funds for and stigma around mental health care, and various other barriers, these communities tend to have higher rates of undiagnosed, and therefore untreated, symptoms.

67

If we simply look at poverty as a risk factor, the stress of not being able to provide for oneself or one’s family can lead to maladaptive behavior such as reliance on drugs and alcohol.

Drug and alcohol abuse can lead to violent behavior as well and can result in physical abuse of vulnerable victims, especially women and children. These people are considered even more vulnerable because of the societal values perpetuated by the patriarchy, in which women are typically taught and encouraged to be quiet, timid, and caring of others before themselves.

Additionally, domestic violence is proven to disproportionately affect women of color in

66 Parto, Jacklyn A., Michele K. Evans, and Alan B. Zonderman, “Symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder ​ Among Urban Residents,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 199, no. 7 (July 2011): 436–39. ​ ​ 67 Regina G. Davis, Kerry J. Ressler, Ann C. Schwartz, Kisha James Stephens, and Rebekah G. Bradley, “Treatment Barriers for Low-Income, Urban African Americans with Undiagnosed Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,” Journal of ​ Traumatic Stress 21, no. 2 (2008): 218–22. ​

52 low-income communities.68 If children experience and witness this violence from an early age, they are also at risk for developing post traumatic stress disorder, and other mental illnesses which can also beget maladaptive behaviors, further perpetuating the cycle.69 Even before they are born, children can be victims of this violence and can have reduced birth weights if their mothers are sent to the hospital with a domestic violence induced injury.70

After describing my project to Diego, one of my interviewees, he asked me if I had heard about the Adverse Childhood Experience quiz. This is a simple questionnaire that attempts to assess whether individuals have experienced violence in the home during their childhood and the score that is obtained can correlate to later challenges in life. While this quiz can be a useful tool for understanding some risk factors for children, it fails to take into account many external factors that can also be considered adverse childhood experiences such as racial discrimination, housing insecurity, the impact of natural disasters and more. Additionally, according to Harvard

University's Center on the Developing Child, some children are able to develop resiliency if they are provided support in other ways that can combat these adverse experiences.71 This can even lead to epigenetic changes in which an individual's environment can physically change their genome, and therefore positively impact their response to stressful situations.72

68 Patricia Tjaden and Nancy Thoennes, “Full Report of the Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence ​ Against Women: Findings From the National Violence Against Women Survey,” National Institute of Justice, 2000. 69 Kathryn Collins, Kay Connors, Sara Davis, April Donohue, Sarah Gardner, Erica Goldblatt, Anna Hayward, ​ Laurel Kiser, Fred Strieder, and Elizabeth Thompson, Understanding the Impact of Trauma and Urban Poverty on ​ Family Systems: Risks, Resilience, and Interventions (Baltimore, MD: Family-Informed Trauma Treatment Center, ​ 2010). 70 Anna Aizer, “Poverty, Violence and Health: The Impact of Domestic Violence During Pregnancy on Newborn ​ Health,” Journal of Human Resources 46, no. 3 (2011): 518–38. ​ ​ 71 Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, “Take the ACE Quiz – And Learn What It Does and ​ Doesn’t Mean,” accessed April 13, 2020, https://developingchild.harvard.edu/media-coverage/take-the-ace-quiz-and-learn-what-it-does-and-doesnt-mean/. ​ 72 Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. “What Is Epigenetics? The Answer to the Nature vs. ​ Nurture Debate.” Accessed April 29, 2020. https://developingchild.harvard.edu/resources/what-is-epigenetics-and-how-does-it-relate-to-child-development/. ​

53 Therefore, none of these risk factors guarantee that a child will develop maladaptive behaviors. Even though statistics and surveys show correlations, what many people fail to fully comprehend is that correlation does not prove causation. We cannot say that poverty causes

PTSD, or that poverty causes increased rates of domestic violence, or that being a low-income person of color causes you to be more-at risk for certain diseases. While all of these things may be associated with each other, understanding the cultural, economic, and political surroundings of a community is crucial for understanding why a community may be at risk in the first place and comprehending how and why some people are able to persist through these challenges.

Furthermore, if we analyze these data from a critical perspective, it helps to prevent a toxic savior complex. We have to approach the process of healing carefully so that we do not assume that these communities are helpless and lack agency. Understanding the fact that many at-risk communities are at risk due to political and cultural power structures like classism and racism helps shed light on the fact that it is not the fault of the victims. Therefore, if we hope to heal a community, instead of viewing it as a service because we are so kind-hearted, we need to view it more as a reparation in which we can use our privilege to mend the schisms that gave us that privilege in the first place. While we cannot dismantle these power structures on our own, we can intervene at the level of choice. We can create programs and movements that equip children with tools for resiliency. We can help them realize that they are not fixed in a deterministic cycle, show them that they have some choices for living a better life, and provide them with the resources to be able to make these choices in a safe environment. That is how you heal a community, and that is exactly how the Danilo Pérez Foundation and the Panamá Jazz

Festival heal the community of Panamá.

54 Chapter 3

How the Panamá Jazz Festival Heals the Community of Panamá City

Music is a highly versatile tool that can be used for many things. However, there is a common and relatively recent misconception that music is simply for entertainment purposes and is therefore devalued as a legitimate profession, educational tool, or healing practice. There is a bigger reason for this that has to do with enlightenment and the separation of the arts and ​ sciences.

Based on the definitions of at-risk communities discussed in the previous chapter, music cannot clean the water that people drink or move them out of unreliable housing but it can accomplish many things. Music can spread positive messages, reduce stress, provide opportunities, educate, reinforce social and political movements that enact real social change, and it can inspire. My original hypothesis was that music and the DPF and PJF provide opportunities for youth in Panamá simply by giving them an alternative to getting involved in drugs and gang-related violence. While many of my interviewees and respondents agreed with this hypothesis, there were additional comments and suggestions that are also helpful for understanding this healing process.

In this chapter I will discuss the various ways that the DPF and PJF utilize music to heal the community of Panamá with special emphasis on the unique way that jazz music in particular facilitates this process given its complex cultural history and its capacity for self-expression and freedom. I will specifically describe how music can lead to positive social change and healing through education, cultural awareness, and fundraising.

55 Education

Along with entertainment and healing, music can be used as an educational tool to not only encourage kids to stay in school but also assist them with the learning process. Additionally, receiving a musical education can open many doors and provide numerous opportunities for the students of the foundation and those that participate in the festival. When asked about why the festival is able to heal the community, many of my interviewees referred to education as a crucial aspect of the healing process. Similarly, when asked about what made a community at risk in the first place, many mentioned that lack of access to a good education put children at risk.

Firstly, before the festival and the foundation were conceived of, Danilo Pérez's father

Danilo Enrico Pérez Urriola realized that incorporating music in the classroom had an immense effect on the ability for the students to retain information and perform better on exams. By bringing music directly to the children and engaging their creative side along with their critical thinking skills, Pérez Urriola was able to help these children have more confidence in the classroom which would eventually lead to lower drop out rates. While many people may assume that they need a strong musical education to bring music into the classroom, there are several resources online that provide easy examples of exercises that you can do with students to help them learn concepts from history to science, and even math.73

In addition to being a powerful tool in other classes, music theory and analysis classes also help teach concepts like math in terms of rhythms and note lengths and even physics in terms of frequency and pitch. According to Diego, a student of the DPF for a full year and a

73 To learn more about how music can be used as an educational tool see Maria Alegria, “Music as a Teaching ​ Tool,” Edutopia, accessed April 19, 2020, https://www.edutopia.org/blog/music-teaching-tool-maria-alegria. ​ ​ ​ ​

56 volunteer/translator at the festival, the DPF provides classes and lessons for specific instruments and ensembles along with music history, theory and analysis. All of these classes help equip the students with the tools necessary to effectively play their instruments, that they are provided with by the foundation, and to use their music as a tool for self-expression and social change. They are expected to maintain certain grades and are tested regularly on their knowledge. Students are also required to have a certain attendance percentage to stay in the foundation to ensure that everyone is learning at a similar pace. While this type of education would cost hundreds of dollars, and lessons alone can be very expensive, all of these costs are free for the students and accessible to them as long as they are willing to put in the work to maintain their studies.

Providing virtually any kind of free music education to the public and especially children could help them develop resiliency and be more interested in school. In order to retain students and be more effective in helping them heal however, the way the music is taught is of utmost importance. In much of jazz music, there is a great deal of freedom while improvising and even when playing melodies. In fact, when playing out of the popular book of jazz standards called the

Real Book, many musicians will take liberties with the melodies and use the notes on the page as ​ more of a guideline rather than a strict set of rules. Many notable musicians will push their instruments to the extremes and play in a manner that may sound unclean or wrong to someone unfamiliar with the style. Similarly, instrumentalists and singers alike can bend notes to make them veer off of tune for short moments before resolving. Even playing a purposeful note that is not in the chord that is written on the page, can be seen as a bold move rather than a dire mistake.

Some of the most popular jazz musicians in the canon, including player and pianist are commonly quoted as saying there are no wrong notes in jazz.

57 Freedom in improvisation is not limited to jazz music and freedom of expression can be reached in some classical playing. Additionally, not all jazz pedagogy adopts this idea of no wrong notes and some jazz music programs can be very fear-inducing and strict. While strict models of music education may seem attractive for helping young children from at-risk communities learn about diligence and hard work, it can sometimes have adverse effects.

In her field work on classical music students in the U.K., ethnomusicologist Anna Bull discusses how classical music is often associated with higher or middle class social standings and therefore represents a way for low-income students to have a sort of social mobility. She writes that “classical music was a way for some of the lower-middle-class young people in my study to improve their class position, whether through getting music scholarships to private schools, going to courses and making friends with ‘proper middle-class people’, or gaining admission to high-status universities.”74 Because children start to associate their ability to play well with their ability to maintain that certain level of class, they internalize mistakes much more and think that it is a problem with their own self worth.

Bull also describes Richard Sennet’s idea of practicing as though it were a craft and being able to find joy in it but emphasizes that:

It would be possible to have a musical learning environment where fear is not such a

pervasive part of the experience. Developing an embodied craft through play and

curiosity, as Sennett’s view of the ideal conditions of craft practice describes, cannot

happen in an environment where high levels of external control engender a fear of

making mistakes.75

74 Anna Bull, “‘Getting It Right’ as an Affect of Self-Improvement,” in Class, Control, & Classical Music (Oxford: ​ ​ Oxford Scholarship Online, 2019), 73. 75 Ibid., 86. ​

58 Children in at-risk communities face enough fear as it is in their daily lives. As I described in the previous chapter, there are several aspects of their environments that can cause stress and trauma, the last thing they need is to be scared into practicing. Not every classical music education is like this, but the emphasis on play and freedom in jazz can allow for even more cultivation of curiosity if it is done in a supportive manner. Fear induced models of education could cause burnout and exhaustion which would lead to children dropping out of their programs.

If a child internalizes their mistakes, they may develop the mindset that they are less than, and may become annoyed or discouraged by rigid conventions and they could be more likely to discontinue their education. Jazz allows them to make mistakes and play them off as intentional, it allows them space to make their own meaning, it allows them to fail, but not just fail, fail collectively with their band, their teammates. Everyone is working together to achieve a common goal. When asked about how the jazz festival can heal an individual, Eric who has been involved in the PJF since he was a kid ten years ago, mentioned that jazz was a clear example of teamwork and that the way he has learned jazz is that it calls for “the collective failure to reach an agreement and not watch over the aforementioned problems negatively affecting the general health of the community.”76

The team work in jazz and the freedom to make mistakes and fail together is encouraging for young developing minds who do not always want to, and should not have to, be perfect.

Allowing children to know it is okay to mess up, and encouraging them to just keep playing, is so much more valuable for teaching them life lessons and resilience.77 They can take these messages home and realize, if they get in trouble once, it does not mean they are destined for a

76 Eric Blanquicet, “La intersección de la música y la curación: cómo el Festival de Jazz de Panamá trae esperanza a ​ los jóvenes en la ciudad de Panamá,” Survey Response, March 24, 2020. 77 Bull, Class, Control, & Classical Music, 87. ​ ​ ​

59 life of crime. Jazz allows kids to redefine their musical and personal narratives which can encourage them to break the cycle and live healthier and happier lives.

While this education occurs during the academic year, the PJF only happens once a year but provides an incredible opportunity for students to make connections, learn from the greats, and become even more inspired to change the world for the better. At the festival, students from the foundation are encouraged to volunteer and young musicians from other Latin American countries such as Costa Rica and Chile, are also brought to Panamá for a chance to attend clinics and concerts, and even to audition for scholarships to universities. While there is a fee for each day of the festival and each concert and jam session, volunteers are able to attend some of these events for free and therefore gain more access to a musical education.

In the educational clinics, workshops and master classes, musicians, educators and artists from all around the world give short lessons about their craft to the audience and then answer any questions that people may have. This gives students the opportunity to speak directly with some professionals they may have never thought they would meet and even take selfies with their heroes. In each classroom, the participants are energetically engaged with what is going on and are eager to learn from the lecturers. If participants have their instruments, they can even be invited up to play as an example for the rest of the class. This provides them with an opportunity to show their skills or to improve, and above all make a connection with the lecturer which could lead to greater opportunities in the future. The concerts can also serve as an educational tool in which students can closely observe the performers and learn techniques or get ideas for their own soloing. The jam sessions especially allow students to sign up and play in front of dozens of people and show off their skills while playing with and learning from professionals.

60 Moreover, the audition process allows some students to earn a full-tuition scholarship to

Berklee College of Music, New England Conservatory, or the Conservatory of Music Puerto

Rico. I found it interesting that many of my interviewees mentioned the fact that the PJF gives students the opportunity to leave Panamá and study abroad in the U.S. Because the U.S. was the birthplace of jazz, this is a way for these students to gain more credibility and connections. The key idea here is that these people return to Panamá to make a difference in their own community and spread the knowledge that they have gained while abroad. The PJF grants them this opportunity that they would not have otherwise had, in the hopes that they will return and change their communities for the better. By getting out of the cycle of poverty and crime that they may have been susceptible to in Panamá, they are better able to make decisions that will positively affect their health. Therefore the festival can in fact lead to healing.

Three prominent historical examples of musicians that represent this kind of musical migration are pianist, Luis Russell, flautist and saxophonist Mauricio Smith, and singer Rubén

Blades. Russel won the lottery and used the money to move to New Orleans in 1917 when he was just a teenager and went on to become close friends with , joining him on tour and greatly influencing the way the jazz rhythm section would be played for years to come.

78 He had some success in Panamá as a musician before moving to the U.S. but his connection with Armstrong undoubtedly skyrocketed his career. Smith attended the Panamánian National

Conservatory in 1951 and later moved to New York where he ended up playing with musical giants such as Mongo Santamaria, Tito Rodriguez, and even .79 Both of these

78 Margaret M. Pick, “Feelin’ the Spirit: The Luis Russell Story,” Riverwalk Jazz - Stanford University Libraries, 2011, https://riverwalkjazz.stanford.edu/program/feelin-spirit-luis-russell-story. ​ ​ 79 John Stevenson, “Obituary: Mauricio Smith,” , Guardian News and Media, 2002, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/aug/23/guardianobituaries1. ​

61 musicians would travel back and forth between the U.S. and Panamá to inspire younger musicians to continue their craft. A more recent example is Rubén Blades, one of the original

Salseros who performed with a famous group called the Fania All-Stars and who had a lasting ​ impact in salsa history.80 Blades grew up in Panamá and became a famous musician only after receiving a degree from Harvard Law School. Blades continuously brings his musical experiences and fame from the U.S. back to Panamá to spread his political messages and desire for social change.81

While jazz may not seem like an odd genre of music to be utilized as an educational tool because of its inclusion in many universities and even high schools all across the United States and elsewhere in the world, it is important to note that this was not always the case. In fact, I argue that it is exactly the fact that jazz music used to be criminalized that it is both a useful educational tool and also a tool for activism, which I will discuss in the next section.

When jazz was first created, it faced intense scrutiny from the white middle class mainstream public for myriad reasons. Among these reasons were claims that it was sinful, sexual and caused participants to become involved with drugs and petty crime. Ultimately, this backlash was more of an attempt from the hegemonic public to prevent African Americans from gaining any sense of commercial or consumer power. Jazz was also associated with racist stereotypes like barbarism and exoticism; in fact, Anne Shaw Faulkner wrote in The Ladies’ ​ Home Journal that “jazz originally was the accompaniment of the voodoo dancer, stimulating the ​ half-crazed barbarian to the vilest deeds... That it has a demoralizing effect upon the

80 Juan Flores, “Fania’s Latin Thing,” in Salsa Rising: New York Latin Music of the Sixties Generation (New York: ​ ​ ​ Oxford University Press, 2016). 81, “Rubén Blades,” The Legends: Latin Music USA, PBS, accessed April 20, 2020, ​ ​ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/latinmusicusa/legends/ruben-blades/. ​

62 has been demonstrated by many scientists.”82 Because of this collective hysteria surrounding the music, it was initially considered unworthy of a place in musical education,83 and therefore, even in the 1960s when the music had already existed for over 40 years, few institutions actually welcomed jazz musicians or offered it as a field of study.84

Because of this limited access, in the earliest stages of jazz education the association with petty crime and theft was further promulgated due to the fact that one of the only teaching books available was a compilation of hundreds of uncopyrighted jazz standards called the Real Book ​ that circulated in the black market.85 In order for jazz to be taken seriously by the academy, it first had to become popular music so that demand for education could increase.

There is a common myth that jazz music only became popular once white musicians like

Paul Whiteman, Bing Crosby and Benny Goodman started playing and adapting the music.

While these musicians had a huge impact on spreading jazz to a wider and white-r audience,86 this is not the full story. In fact, this narrative harmfully takes away agency from the black artists that created and popularized the genre. In reality, many black musicians had great success in the popular music market including Louis Armstrong who was incredibly famous for a long while before revitalizing his career with his song “Hello, Dolly” that actually rose to number three on the Billboard top 100 in the U.S. in 1964 third only to two songs by the Beatles.87

82 Anne S. Faulkner, “Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?,” The Ladies’ Home Journal, 1921, 16, 34. ​ ​ 83 “Where the Etude Stands on Jazz,” The Etude, 1924. ​ ​ 84 Nate Chinen, “Learning Jazz,” in Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century (New York: Pantheon Books, ​ ​ ​ 2018), 120. 85 The latest editions of this book are legal and correct some of the transcription errors of the previous editions. ​ 86 Scott Devaux and Gary Giddens, “New York in the 1920s,” in Jazz (New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., ​ ​ ​ 2009), 117. 87 “Top Records of 1964,” Billboard, 1965. ​ ​

63 On the other hand, some black musicians attempted to elevate the genre by making it sound more classical and Eurocentric such as James P. Johnson with his song “You’ve Got To

Be Modernistic” which, from the perspective of some of the pioneers of the Harlem Renaissance like Langston Hughes, could be seen as a “desire to run away spiritually from his race… to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization.”88 was instrumental in determining what would be classical jazz music and started the Jazz at Lincoln

Center Orchestra in the 1980s, a venue that was formerly associated with only the most sophisticated classical music. This orchestra became extremely popular even to the extent that they were able to bring Rubén Blades to sing a salsa with them on stage, which would not have been possible had it not been for Marsalis. After this moment of uplift, according to author Nate

Chinen, “jazz had become synonymous with respectability, befitting the designation of

‘America’s classical music.’ It was refined and safe, a signifier of adult sophistication suitable for coffeehouse ambience or the advertising of luxury goods.”89 It is ironic but significant that sophisticated music is associated with music that is normally heard in the background and therefore far removed from popular culture.

The modernization and increased commercialized education of jazz has brought about both positive and negative repercussions. In fact Kamasi Washington, saxophonist from

University of California Los Angeles who, in addition to having a successful career as a bandleader and composer, collaborated with Kendrick Lamar on the album To Pimp a Butterfly, ​ ​ expressed in an interview with Chinen that he believed “young audiences, particularly young black audiences, often saw jazz as impenetrable or pompous, stringent or arcane. He didn’t see

88 Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” The Nation, 1926. ​ ​ 89 Chinen, Jazz, 5. ​ ​

64 why the music had to succumb to cerebral interiority, alienated from the movement of bodies in rhythm”90 This was not always the case and many musicians strived to innovate and adapt the music in ways that were not related to obtaining sophistication though. Even though this talk around inaccessible sophisticated jazz may be the common rhetoric around jazz in the 21st century, Danilo Pérez often tries to reconnect the music to the body. During a master class at the

Berklee Global Jazz Institute, Pérez encouraged the audience to feel the music and get out of ​ ​ their heads. He even questioned the educational system of music, asking, “is the system correct?

Homework is supposed to be fun, I mean that’s why we chose music, because we want to have some kind of joy when we’re doing this.”91 It is his goal to bring back the joy and embodiment of the music rather than getting caught up in the technicalities of it.

My original thought was that without the uplift of jazz as a more sophisticated genre, the opportunities for helping young musicians stay off of the streets of Panamá by sending them to the U.S. would be very minimal; yet, as demonstrated by Russell, Smith, and Pérez, it would still be possible. However, instead of waiting for students to win the lottery like Russell, Pérez goes straight to the source, recruiting and nurturing local talent in Panamá and then raising money to bring them to the U.S. If jazz was not institutionalized, it may have not had as much of a lasting presence in the U.S. or in Panamá, making it more difficult for youth in Panamá to pursue educational opportunities.

The evolution of jazz in the U.S. and in Panamá has made it possible for it to be used as an avenue for social change, but the tendency to over-intellectualize the genre has caused some exclusion of young black audiences and, as I will discuss in the following chapter, women as

90 Ibid., 10. 91 Danilo Pérez, “Berklee Global Jazz Institute Master Class,” Boston, MA, December 5, 2018.

65 well, especially in the U.S. In order for jazz to be used for social change anywhere in the world, a delicate balance must then be accomplished in which the music gains proper respect and admiration for how ingenious and intellectual it can be, while also remaining accessible enough to maintain the interest of a larger demographic. A balance that educational institutions and foundations for the arts such as the DPF strive to maintain in an ever changing society.

Jazz as a Mechanism for Spreading Cultural and Social Awareness

As we have seen, music is a valuable medicinal, and educational tool, but it can also be used to inspire beyond belief; bringing communities together and spreading cultural awareness.

Music can bring people together in a way that nothing else can. It can be used in political protests, community building exercises, and can even contain hidden messages about oppressive regimes. During protests, participants can chant popular songs or bring in drums to help them keep time and keep everyone together. This type of rhythmic entrainment is extremely beneficial for helping social movements. Music festivals are also great ways to spread messages that will promote activism in a community. Jazz specifically developed out of specific social and cultural practices that make it even more effective at accomplishing this task. Music is an avenue for spreading messages about the problems that exist in society and, when coupled with a mission that strives to get children out of at-risk situations, it can be extremely powerful.

From its very inception, jazz has represented a social movement whether it was intentional or just a repercussion of the way that society viewed the musicians who were finding new avenues for making money from their creativity. Not everyone was a self-proclaimed

66 activist, some musicians just found this to be the only way to make money, or gain respect.

However, simply by going against cultural norms, each one of the first jazz musicians contributed to social change more than they may have thought.

One of the precursors to jazz music, the blues, originated from songs sung by human beings that were stolen from their homes in Africa and forced into slavery in the U.S. and had to find ways to cope with the inhumane conditions that were inflicted upon them. While not all blues were about the struggles that these individuals had to go through, this music gave them an opportunity to heal through singing about their hardships and dreaming of a day when they would be free. Much of the early jazz music that is out there was based off of the blues and in fact, during the civil rights movement, there was a resurgence of these kinds of messages in the music and jazz was used as a tool for inciting a revolution and creating social change.92 When students learn about this history behind the music, they become aware of the struggles and injustices that existed in these time periods and that still persist to this day for African

Americans. Learning about this history can encourage students to stand up for what is right and to call out injustices when they see them, increasing cultural and social awareness and leading to greater change. This social awareness can be spread to a larger audience and be even more effective in a music festival setting.

92 Scott Saul, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University ​ ​ Press, 2003).

67 Music Festivals and Community Building

During a music festival, or any performance for that matter, artists have the opportunity to speak between their sets or between songs. This is a unique opportunity for them to discuss the background behind certain songs and the cultural context in which they were created. These messages can be extremely powerful in a music festival setting where you are surrounded by strangers and therefore potentially more inclined to experience some cultural sensitivity towards your neighbors.

For those who feel isolated or disconnected from their community, festivals are great opportunities for people to either connect to local businesses and causes in their community, or to meet other people who they have things in common with. Normally, in the standing area of a festival, there is very little space between festival goers and they will often be crammed together forcing the need for occasional small talk. Despite the loud music and cheering that can sometimes drown out any attempt at speaking, there is always something to talk about with other concert goers, whether it be the shared experience of liking a certain artist or genre, or finding the humor of being physically uncomfortable due to the weather conditions, and a crowded atmosphere.

According to Founder and Director of Sound Healers Association, Jonathan S. Goldman, communal experiences and interpersonal relationships can indeed be used as therapeutic tools:

Perhaps as a group of people sing a tone together, they begin to vibrate together

and achieve a kind of group resonance. Or perhaps the sense of unity is triggered by the

release of endorphins which causes the singers to feel the mutual effects of these natural

68 opiates and achieve a shared state of consciousness. It may even be more metaphysical

than this: Perhaps vocal sounds link people with what the ancient mystics called “The

Sound Current” and establish their connection with the divine aspect of music. Whatever

the reason, time and time again groups of people, merely by toning together, immediately

become aware of their link with one another. Barriers of separateness disappear and a

group consciousness emerges from this communal aspect of music.93

This group consciousness is more likely to lead to interpersonal relationships the longer they continue. The fact that most festivals last more than a day therefore allows for stronger community building. For example, if two groups of people meet one day of the festival, and plan to meet up the next day, there is a higher potential for them to make a lasting connection. In fact, many of my respondents said that the reason why the festival has such a healing impact was due to the fact that it brought people from all walks of life together for one week out of the year under the same mission of creating social change. During my time there, I met individuals from

Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, El Salvador, the U.S., and of course Panamá who were all dedicated to learning how they could heal their communities through music. Because we all shared this common goal, we have remained in contact and built long-lasting friendships that could potentially lead to working relationships in the future.

Festivals are not optimal environments for individuals with social anxiety or agoraphobia

(the fear of being in crowds or open spaces), and they are normally not very accessible to those with special needs. That being said, a smaller festival, as opposed to a concert, could be a potential avenue for coping with these fears through exposure therapy. An individual could get

93 Jonathan S. Goldman, “Toward a New Consciousness of the Sonic Healing Arts: The Therapeutic Use of Sound and Music for Personal and Planetary Health and Transformation,” Music Therapy 7, no. 1 (1988): 28–33. ​ ​

69 the experience of hearing live music, being in nature, and potentially meeting new people even from the seating areas away from the stage. In a concert setting, this would not be an option, as they would be forced to either sit in a seat directly next to someone or be crammed into the general admission pit in front of the stage. A festival would then be a more optimal healing space rather than a show or concert as the individual has more agency in deciding where they spend their time.

The outdoor environment of most festivals also helps connect individuals to nature and their community. In fact, there is a field called nature therapy that focuses on healing individuals coping with emotional and psychiatric difficulties:

Nature Therapy claims that the intensity of postmodern life has reduced the individual’s

ability to connect to others and to the environment, as well as to various parts within.

This perspective believes that the ability to connect, integrate and feel complete are

important “happiness factors”; their loss can damage overall well-being and can cause

psychiatric and health difficulties.94

By having the various jam sessions and final concerts outdoors, the PJF helps to facilitate community building and healing through nature therapy and entrainment. Additionally having the shared goal of healing the community through music that is communicated by the artists, speakers, doctors, and directors themselves throughout the entire festival inspires attendees to go back to their communities and share what they have learned and what they have gained from the experience further bringing forth social change.

94 Ronen Berger and Maya Tiry, “The Enchanting Forest and the Healing Sand: Nature Therapy with People Coping with Psychiatric Difficulties,” The Arts in Psychotherapy 39.5 (2012): 412–16. ​ ​

70 Fundraising

I have hopefully demonstrated how music can lead to larger social change due to its healing and educational qualities, as well as its ability to inspire larger groups of people to make a difference in their communities. However, in order to be able to support the community the way it does and provide so many resources for children in Panamá, the PJF must also serve as a fundraising event.

I visited the Danilo Pérez Foundation in Casco Viejo and was given a tour by my guide,

Alejandra. We walked through rooms filled with keyboards, drum sets, and percussion instruments lined with brightly decorated walls and artistic murals. The building was old, some of the paint was chipping off the walls, and there were clear signs of water damage but the character of the place was so bright, even in the lower basement area. While the building had so much history and character, I completely understood the fact that the foundation was in need of a new building in order to better support their students. That coupled with the fact that this was not the safest area of town, made it very necessary to raise funds to create a new meeting place.

There seems to be a bias against non-profit organizations asking for money but it is necessary for these organizations to keep operating and keep making a difference in the lives of children. Many music festivals are organized completely for profit. In fact the founder of

Coachella, one of the most popular music festivals in the U.S. Philip Anshutz is a conservative multimillionaire who funds campaigns and charities that support causes that are in stark contrast

71 to many of the values that the musicians that perform there potentially have. This includes campaigns of Congressmen who oppose the legalization of abortion and same-sex marriages.95

While he may donate some of his money to charity like the Elton John AIDS Foundation to maintain a good public presence, there tends to be the issue of “Big Philanthropy” in which millionaires and billionaires give money to charities solely in order to get huge tax write-offs so that they are still able to maintain their fortunes.96

During festivals, like the PJF, there are several booths from local and international businesses that use this as an advertising opportunity and also to earn revenue. They tend to have to pay a fee to the festival in order to get a booth but they could also redirect some of the funds that they earn to go towards the community. In addition to these booths, the concerts, jam sessions, educational clinics and symposia also bring funds to the PJF and DPF that go right back into the community.

In the wake of tragedy or natural disaster, there have been benefit concerts in which bands will perform for low cost or free and the majority of the ticket purchases go to the cause.

From the LIVE AID concert in 1985 with Queen as the headliner that raised over $38 million dollars for those who were starving in Africa to the “America: A Tribute To Heroes in 2001” that raised over $200 million for the United Way’s September 11 Telethon Fund, benefit concerts have had varied success.97 If a music festival was able to accomplish a similar feat, it could raise an even larger amount of money for a cause. Causes however, normally gain larger followings and donations depending on their severity and urgency. In terms of raising money for an at risk

95 Juliana Rodríguez Pabón, “Philip Anschutz and Where His Coachella Money Goes - LatinAmerican Post,” ​ accessed April 20, 2020. 96 Joanne Barkan, “Plutocrats at Work: How Big Philanthropy Undermines Democracy,” Social Research 80, no. 2 ​ ​ (2013): 635–52. 97 Meg Swertlow, “8 Biggest Benefit Concerts of All Time and How Much They Really Made,” E News, 2017. ​ ​ ​

72 community, it could be difficult as many people may be unaware of the urgency of the situation.

However, the DPF and PJF stress the importance of this message and the urgency of helping at-risk youth throughout the year and therefore are able to gain more support for their cause.

73 Chapter 4

The Exclusion of Women in Jazz

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I will admit that I romanticized the PJF when I first attended the festival. I had seen ​ videos that emphasized the mission statement and classrooms full of students who were eager to learn. When I attended for the first time, I was in awe. For one thing, I was sweating in the middle of January with a view of the ocean from my dormitory and the sounds of busy streets and tropical birds that I had dreamed of since I was little, outside my window. My Spanish was not great by any means, but I met a few people who spoke English and helped me learn a few words here and there. I was able to teach classes about the history of music and jazz in particular, ​ to the best of my knowledge, making sure I included conversations about race and gender relations and how they shaped the history. But something was lost in translation, as my volunteer ​ translator looked uncomfortable when mentioning the words “African-American,” “black musicians” etc. I realized then that I had a different understanding of race because of my position as a U.S. citizen in a country that has a very different experience than that of the U.S. in terms of their history of slavery, abolition, emancipation, and racism. I tried to be sensitive to the topic ​ and avoid saying problematic things but ultimately I wanted to be radical enough to discuss topics that are often uncomfortable and I got a positive reaction from the audience. Still I realized through that one look with my translator when he looked to the ground, grabbed the back of his neck and tilted his head to the side, that cultural sensitivity is extremely important and crucial for helping people understand your stance.

74 Ultimately, the first time I visited the jazz festival resulted in lasting connections and friendships, mostly with people who spoke English, and I therefore became inspired to write this thesis project. I saw first hand how important this festival was to the participants and the teachers, the volunteers and the directors, and I could understand and feel how healing was occurring through the PJF and DPF.

However, the second time around was truly life changing. My ability to speak Spanish increased ten-fold and my confidence for trying was unwavering. This opened many doors and provided many connections that I did not have the year before. I was even more inspired by the talks about music healing that I could actually understand, I had conversations with people about ​ what they cared about without them having to go through the extra step of translating, and I felt the power behind music and behind the PJF in how it brought people from all walks of life together for one common purpose.

I fully embraced the experience, and stayed up as late as possible so that I would not miss a moment or a single opportunity, which as one of my interviewees also pointed out, was ironically the opposite of my definition of self-care and led to a burn out towards the end of the week. There was a collective high of sorts where everyone was elated even if they had only four hours of sleep the night before. My roommates and I would wake up to salsa music blasting in the living room and we would dance while making breakfast and preparing coffee for the long day ahead. I have never experienced anything quite like this and that is why I was thoroughly confused as to why I felt such a lull when I came back to reality and tried to write about it. I can trace this hesitation back to the fourth night of the festival in which I watched the Danilo Pérez

Foundation Big Band perform a set before one of the jam sessions, and then again when I saw

75 the musicians that lined up for the jam afterward, and again when I watched the one “all-female” jam session that broke out in which only a handful of female musicians actually came up to the stage.

-----

Jazz Under the Lens of Feminist Scholarship

I realized I had over romanticized the foundation and festival because there were so many women in the organizational process, in fact, during the meetings of the coordinators, the three main executive directors and coordinators of the foundation and festival were all women. This made me forget about the gender disparities that of course exist everywhere in the world, especially in popular music genres including jazz, which is traditionally and historically perceived as masculine and unwelcoming to women. However, after studying feminist scholarship and frameworks for understanding gender disparities, I have learned to analyze disparities like this through a critical lens that sheds light on the institutional and societal systems that create and propagate them.

As discussed in the introduction of this thesis, women have always been involved in the creation and popularization of jazz. Their erasure, invisibility and exclusion, is not a coincidence but is also not the fault of any one person. When we try to place the blame on one specific person or villain, we lose track of the fact that these disparities are systemic and cultural and we accomplish very little in terms of how to change things. I am therefore not going to use this chapter to fill in the gaps of the history of women in jazz, in fact projects like Natalie Weiner's

76 “Jazz 1959,” do this quite well.98 I instead wish to discuss why they have been excluded and understand the ramifications that exclusion has for young girls of color in at-risk communities in terms of their access to healing. Moreover, I hope to argue, using my own experience in jazz at

Wellesley, that this genre can be used to dismantle the very power structures that have kept it segregated for so long.

The first tendency in understanding the disparity of women in jazz to ask the question:

“Why are women not recognized in the history of popular and subcultures?” One answer is that they may be discouraged from engaging in such cultures in the first place. In fact, scholars such as Nancy Macdonald suggest that when women do participate in a subculture (in this case specifically graffiti and hip-hop culture), they “gain an automatic and tainted set of traditional feminine qualities. These construct [them] as a timid, delicate little thing with absolutely no fear threshold and a tendency to burst into tears at the slightest hint of danger.”99

This could also be used as an explanation for why women historically have not participated in certain jazz traditions such as cutting sessions, in which players approach the band stand to attempt to prove their abilities during a jam session and can get cut by the leader of the session or the audience if they are not performing well enough. Similar traditions are also seen in many other artforms uniquely created by African-Americans including hip-hop rap battles, deejaying and breakdancing competitions, and even queer ball-culture. While these traditions have all previously been considered subcultures due to blatant and institutionalized

98 Nate Sloan, “Jazz 1959 (with Natalie Weiner),” Switched On Pop, accessed April 22, 2020, ​ ​ https://switchedonpop.com/episodes/jazz-1959. ​ 99 Nancy MacDonald, “Constructive Deconstruction: Graffiti as a Tool for Making Masculinity,” in The Graffiti ​ Subculture: Youth, Masculinity, and Identity in London and New York (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), ​ 94–150.

77 racism, in recent years, these cultures have become popular culture. However, traditionally, cisgender women of color have been excluded from all of these spaces.

To say that cis women are simply too delicate to put themselves in potentially dangerous or fear-inducing situations is reductionist. Improvising and composing music in front of an audience is terrifying, especially if there is a possibility that you may get kicked off the stage but many women would welcome this challenge if not for a society that demands they perform certain characteristics of an idealized femininity. Even when women attempted to advocate for themselves during this time such as Rito Rio,100 a band leader of a prominent all female group, they did so by propagating stereotypical gender traits about playing in a feminine manner, bringing people together and nurturing the community, and finally, looking beautiful while playing “like men.”101 Contrarily, and on a larger scale, this further hinders the argument by solidifying these stereotypes even more. This is an example of internalized sexism in which even women had to succumb to these stereotypes in order to make a place for themselves in jazz.

Additionally, if we are to place all of the emphasis on the question of why women are not involved in these popular are subcultures, we also run the risk of propagating the same lie that women have not been involved in these cultures at all, and that if they do succeed, they are seen as anomalies and novelties. One alternative, suggested by historian of technology and also gender studies Ruth Oldenziel, is that we instead question why men have been so historically involved in male dominated fields rather than focusing all of our attention on why women have been excluded:

100 Rito Rio, “Women Musicians Not Inferior Says - Rito Rio,” Down Beat, February 1938, 4. ​ ​ 101 Sherrie Tucker, Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s, 2000. ​ ​

78 An exclusive focus on women's supposed failure to enter the field … is insufficient for

understanding how our stereotypical notions have come into being; it tends to put the

burden of proof entirely on women and to blame them for their supposedly inadequate

socialization, their lack of aspiration, and their want of masculine values. An equally

challenging question is why and how boys have come to love things technical, how boys

have historically been socialized as technophiles.102

Simply limiting our analysis on why women are not included both blames them for their absences in the history books while simultaneously solidifying the lie that they were never there in the first place. Women, and especially women of color, have been involved every step along the way in all of these cultures but their contributions are diminished and erased due to stereotypical language and defaulted blame.

Additionally, as mentioned in the introduction, when women are included in the history books, the ones that are mentioned are usually singers or maybe piano players. While limiting women to these “socially acceptable” roles in music is not historically accurate, it is also important not to devalue these contributions and the critical role that vocalists had in the creation of jazz. In fact, there were also many men who sang in the early days of jazz but most history textbooks emphasize instrumentalists at the expense of vocalists. According to Lara Pellegrini

“these histories give the impression that once African American men gain access to instruments, they abandon the voice in favor of tools that do a more efficient job of achieving musical sophistication, the basis for their musical evolution and potential legitimization in the white

102 Ruth A. Oldenziel, “Boys and Their Toys: The Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild, 1930-1968, and the Making of a ​ Male Technical Domain,” Technology and Culture 38 (1997): 60–96. ​ ​

79 world.”103 Playing instruments rather than singing was therefore seen as a way for these musicians to have a sort of social mobility. It is important again here to pose the question of why men were so inclined to seek this mobility through instrumental music rather than simply asking why women were not included.

Pellegrinelli argues that from its very inception, jazz music's precursors, the blues and ragtime, have been gendered as feminine and masculine respectively due to their connection with the voice versus instrumental excellence. The blues are considered closer to nature and ragtime is ​ thought to be more intellectual, removed from the spiritual and natural and therefore more advanced. These notions have carried on and have had longer lasting effects that are often ​ subliminal and naturalized. For example in an article written in 1919, bandleader and composer ​ James Reese Europe describes that playing jazz is a “racial” and “peculiar” thing that is unique and natural for African Americans to play.104 Europe did not believe that black musicians should attempt to copy white music but ragtime pianist Scott Joplin on the other hand wanted to be more modernistic and even wrote an entire opera. He wrote music that attempted to uplift the genre of ragtime which further made the blues seem less valuable.105

This naturalization of the blues is dangerous as it can lead to the erasure and debasement of women.106 In fact, this same trope of making women seem closer to the natural, more primitive world, and men being at a higher level have also been seen all throughout science with

103 Lara Pellegrinelli, “Separated At ‘Birth:’ Singing and the History of Jazz,” in Big Ears: Listening for Gender in ​ Jazz Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 34. ​

104 Grenville Vernon, “That Mysterious ‘Jazz,’” New York Tribune, March 30, 1919, 5. ​ ​ 105 Gioia, The History of Jazz, 24. 106 For more detailed information on how colonialism and naturalization can lead to debasement see David Spurr, ​ “Debasement: Filth and Defilement,” in Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and ​ Imperial Administration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). ​

80 many artistic renditions of the so-called great chain of being. Even in the earliest classifications of plant life, Carolus Linnaeus not only chose which parts of a plant would be ascribed as male and female but also “gave male parts priority over female parts in determining the status of the organism in the plant kingdom's taxonomic hierarchy.”107 Scientists and historians have continuously embedded their own values, albeit racist or sexist, onto the narratives that are used to define what is considered truth and fact. These understandings of gender and a woman’s place in relation to men has seeped into popular culture and jazz.

While it is important to understand that music has much more value than simply entertainment as demonstrated in chapter 3, it is crucial that we understand that entertainment has value in and of itself and should be taken seriously so that we don't devalue the art form and so that we do not erase all of the contributions of women. Women should be able to be instrumentalists yes, but if they choose to be vocalists, it is not feminist to tell them that they cannot. Instead it would be feminist to dismantle the outdated power structure that says that singing is closer to nature and therefore, more primitive and less valuable. This again goes back to the institutionalization of jazz that I discussed in chapter 2. As jazz has evolved, so has its removal from the body or spirituality and extension to instruments and complex modes of listening and thinking that do not involve embodiment. Furthermore, Pellegrinelli summarizes how the obsession with modernist and innovative men in jazz history has led to the erasure of women:

Finally, these strategies in combination—‘‘great man’’ histories that render the artist as

hero, the divorce between jazz and its entertainment contexts, the removal of its

107 Londa L. Schiebinger, “Introduction,” in Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science ​ (Newbrunswik, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 4.

81 associations with vernacular culture, and, hence lyrics—all contribute to the erasure of

women. In general, the ideology of the ‘‘artist’’ gives women and singers little symbolic

capital; they may find a place among the muses that inspire male creativity, feeding the

wellspring of anonymous folk material from the past, but they rarely count as important

historical figures or icons. If demanding art music is made by men for men as

connoisseurs, then the elimination of singing as women’s primary form of participation

helps make jazz into a ‘‘serious’’ (i.e., male) domain.108

Because of the overemphasis on the idea of the great man when separating jazz from entertainment, women are excluded and almost always only considered when in relation to those men rather than as individuals with influence and agency. Not only are women pigeonholed into singing, they are done so, even now, so that they are more easily shoved to the side and not taken seriously because singing has been devalued as a serious jazz musical form.

The issue here is not just about music. The underlying problem is first, the separation of the sexes and the gendering of societal roles and the second is about the overarching over-intellectualization of technology as having to be removed from the spiritual and removed from nature. Because women and the concept of femininity are traditionally associated with nature and spirituality, they are erased and moved to the side through this authentication process.

The answer is not to simply replace the men instrumentalists with women, this does not solve the problem. As Ingrid Monson noted in her essay “Fitting the Part,” when women do become killer instrumentalists, they do not automatically earn respect; rather, they are treated as anomalies and are expected to perform over-sexualized versions of themselves in order to be

108 Pellegrinelli, “Separated at Birth,” 42.

82 seen as entertaining. Furthermore, they feel that they have to overcompensate for their womanhood as though it were a “mark against them, by being exceptional instrumentalists and sight-readers. She expresses I had come to realize that no matter how well I played, audiences would always react ambivalently—not because of me, but because of the gendered assumptions in our society about what instruments are appropriate for women to play.”109

Additionally, simply replacing men with women will not change the racial and demographic disparities in jazz. In the introduction to her book dedicated to all female jazz bands in the 1940s, historian Sherrie Tucker sheds light on many of the stereotypes and contradictions that haunted female instrumentalists and jazz musicians during this time and emphasizes that racial disparities were still rampant.

In the same way that simply setting out to prove that women played in bands does not

dismantle the gender constructions embedded in dominant swing discourse, discussion

black women's band participation does not guarantee a departure from the ways in which

race discourse operates in jazz and swing histories. The feminized spaces of swing are no

more race neutral than the masculinized spaces.110

She stresses here that we cannot just change the history books to include women and pretend like there was no discrimination in the first place in terms of race or gender, but instead we must critically analyze the power structures in our society that allowed for these disparities to exist.

Furthermore, my experience at Wellesley as an active member of the BlueJazz Program has been overwhelmingly positive. However, it is a very clear example that simply creating an

109 Ingrid Monson, “Fitting the Part,” in Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies, eds. Nichole Rustin-Paschal ​ ​ ​ and Sherrie Tucker (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 280. 110 Sherrie Tucker, “Introduction: ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t in the History Books,’” in Swing Shift: ​ “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 1–29. ​

83 all female group does not erase gender or racial disparities. I use the term all-female here very loosely due to our numerous siblings who are gender non-conforming as well as visiting students from other universities and our hired band mates who identify as male. There are still relatively few members of color which again is not the fault of any one person or institution but rather a systemic and historical issue. The reason that I found a home in WBJ despite the fact that, like

Ingrid Monson, I do not necessarily “fit the part,” is due in large part to the way that the directors

Paula Zeitlin and Cercie Miller emphasize support, encourage soloing and taking risks, and value effort. The reason that WBJ works so well is not because we are all women doing exactly what men do; it is that we are doing it differently. Instead of hierarchies of playing and competition, we embrace, support and encourage one another. These may be traditionally feminine qualities, but that does not take away from the validity of this approach.

The and the Tokenization of Women

Finally, I discussed Las Hijas in the introduction as the example that there are women in the DPF and PJF. They performed their own concert during the week with special guest Patricia

Zárate-Pérez who played her saxophone but also rapped to some of the songs. At the end of the week on January 18, 2020, they performed on the main stage during one of the most attended timeslots. There were four vocalists, two percussionists, a pianist, a bassist and one visiting violinist. Because of the unique voices of the vocalists, it must have been difficult to harmonize each of their parts when they sang at the same time. Because of the exclusion of women from playing traditionally masculine instruments, they had to treat their voices like instruments but each person had their own timbre and accent that created some harmonic tensions. However,

84 because of the nature of jazz to purposefully sound out of tune at some moments, it was not clear if these tensions were an intentional artistic choice or a repercussion of the difficulty in harmonizing four distinct voices. They performed well but there were a few sections that sounded less rehearsed than some of the other groups that performed that night. In a conversation ​ I had with one of the members, she mentioned that there was not a lot of commitment in the group during rehearsals. She expressed that some of the members felt like they did not need to practice as much because they were guaranteed a chance in the spotlight and on the largest stage of the festival due to the novelty of their existence in the first place.

A careful balance needs to be found where the traditional stereotypes of jazz as masculine and toxically competitive are dismantled in favor of more accepting and inviting characteristics like WBJ in order to maintain a level of community and commitment. Ultimately a jazz music festival that accomplishes what the PJF does but also strives to break down the preconceived notions of gender roles would be a step in the right direction to healing everyone in an at-risk community especially those who are more at risk simply because of the labels that were imbued upon them at birth as a woman of color. Because of the unique history of jazz and its ability to mold, change and adapt, it is a very likely possibility that this balance can be found but we need to wake up the masculine metaphors in jazz and expose the history of its exclusion of these women first without placing blame, but working towards equality. Then, and only then, can we use music to heal a community.

85

86 Conclusion

Throughout this thesis, I have argued that the Panama Jazz Festival can heal at-risk communities in Panamá because of the rich history behind jazz music, the ability for music to be used as a therapeutic tool, the educational opportunities and connections that can be made, and the fact that certain musical educations can help students develop resiliency. I have also demonstrated that there are complicated reasons why few women are actual students involved in the program that do not necessarily point the blame at any one person but rather the patriarchal systems that have existed and propagated this exclusion. While the PJF and DPF do amazing work in their community, these systems and traditional modes of understanding music and instruments as gendered will continue to exclude women unless we work to intervene and change the history and the future.

Women of color are the most vulnerable citizens in at-risk communities, and yet, because of the power structures that put them in these situations in the first place, they are the least likely to be able to access resources like the PJF and DPF. Simply increasing the number of women of color in programs like these will not erase the history of their exclusion. In fact, we need not erase this history. Instead, we need to expose the injustices where we see them rather than allowing them to remain unspoken. We need to call out the history books for their exclusion of these women and work towards not just changing the world of music education but the greater hegemonic systems like the patriarchy overall before we can expect these issues to become resolved. From the understanding that no two communities are the same and that health is relative, through large festivals like the PJF and DPF in many parts of the world, this message

87 could be spread through music and through communities. Using this festival as a model, I believe that real social change and healing can happen, not just for young boys but for everyone.

Limitations

I recognize that my ability to make connections and conduct interviews was very dependent on my appearance, my identity as a Latina, and also my very friendly personality. I wanted to interview more women but was limited in the number that were actually in the program, and also navigating what I thought they were thinking of me, more so than I worried about men. For example, asking one of my interviewees to meet me at a mall for a quick chat and interview almost felt like asking them on a date and I worried more about women being confused by this request than men. However, I was still able to make friends with some women in the foundation and ask them their opinions. My sample size is small and not random like I had hoped, but my questions were more geared toward understanding the perspectives of a varied individuals and how they believed the festival was successful in the community. Next year, while pursuing my PhD in neuroscience so that I can continue to investigate the healing impacts that music has on the brain, I plan to go back to the festival again and hopefully follow through with more interviews and pay more attention to the problem of the exclusion of women.

Personal Connection

In conclusion, this project is extremely personal because I owe my success all throughout grade school and even in college to my involvement in music education and my ability to access

88 these resources for free. I have no doubt that my ability to persist through all the hardships in life had to do with the skills that I learned as a music student. I was lucky to have supportive teachers that cultivated my curiosity rather than criticizing me excessively which helped me balance out the negative aspects of my life. But I became tired after a while. I became tired of the microaggressions when older white men would comment on the fact that I played a “boy's instrument” or were surprised when I made the cut for Region Band tryouts. I became tired of people constantly assuming that I played traditionally more feminine instruments in the orchestra like flute or clarinet rather than a brass instrument. I became tired of reading history books of music and reading the same names of white European men rather than composers from all over the world. I became tired of going to classical music concerts and orchestras in the U.S. and searching through the stage to find anyone who had skin that looked like mine, especially in the horn section.

Because of this exhaustion, I became less and less interested in performing in classical music ensembles. Learning about jazz and world music was my saving grace, it showed me that I had a place. Seeing the WBJ Big band comprised of mostly women perform for the first time led by a female conductor, meeting Luciana who represented that jazz didn't have to just be white men, and learning about music from all over the world, kept me invested in music at Wellesley, ultimately leading me to find my place, and my family, and helping me develop resiliency throughout college. Moreover, taking classical music courses at Wellesley has also allowed me to open my eyes and do research on classical composers from other parts of the world, including

Latin American women as well. It has shown me that not all WCM is created by white men, and that there are people out there doing the same work but that is not getting the recognition. I have

89 learned that it is not that classical music is inherently or purposefully exclusionary and that even jazz and some world music have the issue of excluding women of color. I have learned that it is not the genre or the people themselves who perform the genre that cause this, but rather it is the repercussion of systematic racism and sexism.

This project is deeply personal because I truly believe that some very close family members of mine would have been able to develop this level of resiliency had they had the same opportunities I had. To learn in a safe and caring environment rather than a toxic one. To be taught music not just as an avenue for becoming famous but as a tool for developing resilience in every aspect of your life. Not all classical music pedagogy revolves around the idea of perfection and not every jazz program revolves around the ideas of imperfection and support. But again, this is why we need to make these spaces more welcoming to women and young girls.

Call to Action

While it is crucial to not limit women to only behaving in traditionally feminine ways, the feminine stereotypes that promote caring and supportive networks rather than traditionally masculine critical and harsh ones, offer more opportunities for resilience. If we wish to make music education programs more open and accessible to everyone, we cannot simply replace all of the teachers with women who teach in the same way as men have traditionally, and pretend like the problem is solved. Instead we must work to change all musical educational systems to be more accepting, more supportive, less toxic, and more cultivating so that students will stay involved. Not just because they want to be famous musicians but because they can learn valuable

90 life lessons from their studies, be inspired by their mentors and peers, and develop resiliency that will help them get through any tough time in their lives rather than turning to drugs and crime. If we do not change the pedagogy of music to be more supportive, the problem of excluding women will only increase or we will train young girls to behave in toxic ways rather than training young boys to behave in supportive manners. In order to heal everyone, we need to adopt more inclusive practices that do not discriminate based on gender and emphasize that there is a place for everyone despite your cultural background, economic standing, and gender.

I believe that music festivals like the PJF and programs like the DPF can be extremely effective at healing the community, but we need to expose the issues that exist in history and work toward changing the patriarchal systems and powers that be before we can truly heal a community.

91 Appendix

Survey Responses and Translations

Jaime Fung-Casiano - March 6, 2020

1. Experiencia / participación: ¿Cuánto tiempo ha estado involucrado y cuál ha sido su experiencia con el Festival de Jazz de Panamá y la Fundación Danilo Pérez? Dos años, excelente experiencia ambos años - Two years, excellent experience both years

2. ¿Cómo definirías la curación/sanación? Para individuos y para las comunidades. Sanación puede estar relacionado a ayudar a aliviar enfermedades así como también condiciones que no necesariamente son enfermedades como la ansiedad o el estrés.

- Healing can be related to helping to alleviate illnesses as well as conditions that are not necessarily illnesses like anxiety or stress.

3. ¿Qué significa para una comunidad estar en "riesgo"? ¿Cuáles son algunos ejemplos? Que puede ser afectada abierta y fácilmente por cualquier tipo de amenaza. Ejemplo: riesgo social, acceso a cualquier tipo de educación, delincuencia, corrupción, etc - That it can be openly and easily affected by any type of threat. Example: social risk, access to any type of education, crime, corruption, etc.

4. ¿Cuál comunidades son "en riesgo" en la ciudad de Panamá? Aquellas que son de difícil acceso, sin escuelas, sin personal docente, sin infraestructura y programas sociales - Those that are difficult to access, without schools, without teaching staff, without infrastructure and social programs

5. ¿Cómo puede su comunidad afectar las elecciones que hace que afectan su salud general? - N/A

6. ¿Crees que la música puede ser parte del proceso de curación? ¿Si es así, cómo? La música puede ayudar a la curación de diferentes maneras. Sirve como relajante y desestresante al escucharla como al ser uno el que toca el instrumento. Así como también a desarrollar nuevas habilidades y otras regiones del cerebro que no generalmente usamos. - Music can help healing in different ways. It serves as relaxing and stressful when listening to it as being the one who plays the instrument. As well as developing new skills and other brain regions that we don't generally use.

7. ¿Ayuda el Festival de Jazz de Panamá a sanar a la comunidad de Panamá? ¿Si es así, cómo?

92 El festival de jazz resulta muy útil como una herramienta para combatir el riesgo social, promover la educación, incentivar a las personas a seguir aprendiendo acerca de su instrumento, conocer a nuevas personas etc. - The jazz festival is very useful as a tool to combat social risk, promote education, encourage people to continue learning about their instrument, meet new people, etc.

8. ¿El Festival de Jazz de Panamá ofrece oportunidades para tomar decisiones que impactan positivamente su salud? ¿Si es así, cómo? Si - Yes

9. ¿Cuál es tu parte favorita del Festival de Jazz de Panamá? Conocer gente nueva y compartir con amigos/gente nueva, aprender - Meet new people and share with friends / new people, learn

10. ¿Crees que este tipo de festival ayudaría a otras comunidades de todo el mundo? ¿Cómo? Si, porque este tipo de festival ayuda a esparcir la cultura y al mismo tiempo abre las puertas a que mucha gente tenga acceso a esto. Hay muchas personas que no tienen los recursos para pagar por esto y aprender pero el festival ofrece muchas becas y ayuda para incentivar a que estas personas también puedan participar. El festival también ofrece becas las cuales ayudan de igual manera a todos. Este tipo de festivales debería hacerse más seguido. - Yes, because this type of festival helps spread the culture and at the same time opens the doors for many people to have access to this. There are many people who do not have the resources to pay for this and learn, but the festival offers many scholarships and helps to encourage these people to participate as well. The festival also offers scholarships which help everyone equally. These kinds of festivals should be done more often.

Eric Blanquicet - March 24, 2020

1. Experiencia / participación: ¿Cuánto tiempo ha estado involucrado y cuál ha sido su experiencia con el Festival de Jazz de Panamá y la Fundación Danilo Pérez? Llevo 10 años Involucrado en el Festival de Jazz de Panamá,Ha sido una Experiencia Increíble ya que marca un Ántes y un Después en mi vida hablo en los Factores de ser Músico y a la vez un individuo que sirve de Herramienta llevando un mensaje Positivo a la Sociedad. - I have been involved in the Panama Jazz Festival for 10 years, It has been an Incredible Experience since it marks an Before and After in my life I speak in the Factors of being a Musician and at the same time an individual who serves as a Tool carrying a Positive message to the Society.

2. ¿Cómo definirías la curación/sanación? Para individuos y para las comunidades. Estos dos conceptos Curación/Sanación para los Individuos dentro de una comunidad pudiera Defirnirlo como: Menos Pensamiento Individual,Más Pensamiento Colectivo. - These two concepts Healing / Healing for Individuals within a community could Define it as: Less Individual Thought, More Collective Thought.

93 3. ¿Qué significa para una comunidad estar en "riesgo"? ¿Cuáles son algunos ejemplos? Para Decir que Una Comunidad está en Riesgo es Notar la Vulnerabilidad de la Mísma que viéndose Afectada de diversos Factores Llámese: *Biológico *Social *Espacio Físico los Lleva a Sufrir Múltiples Problemas. A continuación Algunos Ejemplos: *Falta De Educación *Contraer Enfermedades y múchas otras cosas. - To say that a community is at risk is to notice the vulnerability of the same that being affected by various factors, call it: * Biological * Social * Physical space leads them to suffer multiple problems. Here are some examples: * Lack of education * Contract diseases and many other things.

4. ¿Cuál comunidades son "en riesgo" en la ciudad de Panamá? En la Ciudad de Panamá Tenemos Varias Comunidades en Riesgo para mencionar: *Santa Ana *Curundú *Barraza *El Chorrillo *San Miguel - In Panama City we have several communities at risk to mention: * Santa Ana * Curundú * Barraza * El Chorrillo * San Miguel

5. ¿Cómo puede su comunidad afectar las elecciones que hace que afectan su salud general? Un Ejemplo Claro de Trabajo en Equipo es El JAZZ es una Herramienta que más que musical es Trabajar en conjunto Llama a la Colectividad El No llegar a Ponerse de acuerdo y no Velar por los Problemas antes mencionados Afecta Negativamente La Salud en General de la Comunidad. - A Clear Example of Teamwork is JAZZ is a Tool that more than musical is Working together Calls the Collective Failure to reach an Agreement and not Watch over the aforementioned Problems Negatively Affects the General Health of the Community.

6. ¿Crees que la música puede ser parte del proceso de curación? ¿Si es así, cómo? Definitivamente Que sí estoy convencido que La Música puede ser parte Importante del Proceso de Curación. Cómo? Comprobado Está si tuvieramos Más Teatros y Espacios Públicos debidamente acondicionados donde los músicos,Bailarines,Cineastas,etc pudieran exponer su Arte de esta Manera tendríamos mejores Comunidades. - I am definitely convinced that Music can be an Important part of the Healing Process. How? Proven It is if we had More Theaters and Public Spaces duly conditioned where musicians, Dancers, Filmmakers, etc. could expose their Art in this way we would have better Communities.

7. ¿Ayuda el Festival de Jazz de Panama a sanar a la comunidad de Panamá? ¿Si es así, cómo? El Festival De Jazz de Panamá Si Aporta Positivamente con la Educación a la Sanación de Panamá. De La siguiente Forma: Soy un Fiel Testigo de la Gran Gestión que realiza El Maestro Danilo Pérez y su Esposa Patricia Zárate junto a la Fundación Danilo Pérez que hoy Día Múchos Jóvenes hemos sido Beneficiados y se siguen Beneficiando con los Programas Educativos de Prestigiosas Universidades Como:Berklee College Of Music,New England Conservatory,Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico,etc vengan a Panamá y así tener la Oportunidad de Audicionar. Año Tras Año se otorgan Miles de Dólares en Becas y se movilizan Miles de Jóvenes de las Diferentes Provincias y de diferentes Países para Disfrutar de los Beneficios que te ofrece en Calidad Educativa el Festival de Jazz de Panamá.

94 - The Panama Jazz Festival Does Contribute Positively with Education to the Healing of Panama. In the following way: I am a faithful witness of the great management carried out by the teacher Danilo Pérez and his wife Patricia Zárate together with the Danilo Pérez Foundation, that today many young people have been benefited and continue to benefit from the educational programs of prestigious universities such as : Berklee College Of Music, New England Conservatory, Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico, etc. come to Panama and thus have the opportunity to audition. Year after Year Thousands of Dollars are awarded in Scholarships and Thousands of Young People from the Different Provinces and from different Countries are mobilized to Enjoy the Benefits that the Panama Jazz Festival offers you in Educational Quality.

8. ¿El Festival de Jazz de Panamá ofrece oportunidades para tomar decisiones que impactan positivamente su salud? ¿Si es así, cómo? El Festival De Panamá Aporta Múcho a La Salud Con el Simposio de Musicoterapia y las Clínicas Musicales. De la Siguiente manera: Este Simposio año Tras Año trae a Profesionales de La Musicoterapia,Las Artes y la Salud en sus Diferentes Ramas a capacitar con Herramientas de muy Altos Estándares a las Personas que asisten al mísmo,así podemos Tomar Decisiones que impactan positivamente Nuestra Salud en la Sociedad. - The Panama Festival Contributes Much To Health With The Music Therapy Symposium And Musical Clinics. As follows: This Symposium year after year brings Music Therapy, Arts and Health Professionals in their different branches to train people who attend the same with very high standards tools, so we can make decisions that positively impact our Health in Society.

9. ¿Cuál es tu parte favorita del Festival de Jazz de Panamá? A mi en lo Personal me encanta La Parte Educativa (Clínicas) porque Interactuas de Cerca con los Artistas y Esto ha aportado múcho a mi Crecimiento Musical y Personal como un Profesional. Aparte que Este factor es el que me lleva a comprender la Parte Musical en Los diferentes conciertos - I personally love the Educational Part (Clinics) because you interact closely with the artists and this has contributed a lot to my musical and personal growth as a professional. Besides that This factor is what leads me to understand the Musical Part in The different concerts

10. ¿Crees que este tipo de festival ayudaría a otras comunidades de todo el mundo? ¿Cómo? Si Creo y estoy convencido totalmente que Ayudaría a otras comunidades del Mundo. La Manera es La Siguiente: Aquellos Festivales de Jazz como el de Panamá que su parte principal es velar por la Educación,Cultura y Salud en General son considerados Movimientos Culturales por ende si deberían Tener MÁS APOYO EN GENERAL por el Impacto Positivo que causan en la Sociedad. "Una Sociedad sin Cultura es Considerada Una Sociedad sin ALMA" - Yes, I believe and I am totally convinced that it would help other communities in the world. The Way is Next: Those Jazz Festivals like Panama, whose main part is to ensure Education, Culture and Health in General are considered Cultural Movements, therefore they should have MORE SUPPORT IN GENERAL due to the Positive Impact they cause in the Society. "A Society without Culture is Considered a Society without SOUL"

95 Oscar Cruz - March 24, 2020

1. Experiencia / participación: ¿Cuánto tiempo ha estado involucrado y cuál ha sido su experiencia con el Festival de Jazz de Panamá y la Fundación Danilo Pérez? He participado en las 17 versiones del Panamá Jazz Festival,la experiencia con el festival y con la Fundación ha sido una experiencia de vida,de aprendizaje,de educación continua,de reforzar los valores humanos a través de la música,de la mano con nuestro mentor Danilo Perez - I have participated in the 17 versions of the Panama Jazz Festival, the experience with the festival and with the Foundation has been an experience of life, of learning, of continuous education, of reinforcing human values through music, hand in hand with our mentor ​​ Danilo Perez

2. ¿Cómo definirías la curación/sanación? Para individuos y para las comunidades. Utilizando la música como puente o medio para llegar a la comunidad con mensajes positivos y de prevención,podemos curar y sanar. - Using music as a bridge or means to reach the community with positive and preventive messages, we can heal and heal.

3. ¿Qué significa para una comunidad estar en "riesgo"? ¿Cuáles son algunos ejemplos? En las comunidades humildes de nuestros Panamá aún les faltan necesidades básicas como agua potable,viviendas condenadas porque ya no son salubres,esas comunidades están en permanente riesgo de salud. - In the humble communities of our Panama they still lack basic needs such as drinking water, condemned houses because they are no longer healthy, those communities are in permanent health risk.

4. ¿Cuál comunidades son "en riesgo" en la ciudad de Panamá? Donde se encuentra la población indígena y afro - Where is the indigenous and afro population

5. ¿Cómo puede su comunidad afectar las elecciones que hace que afectan su salud general? Tomar medidas estrictas de salud y proponerlas para que se garantiza salud de primer nivel por igual a toda la población - Take strict health measures and propose them so that first-class health is guaranteed equally to the entire population

6. ¿Crees que la música puede ser parte del proceso de curación? ¿Si es así, cómo? Totalmente la música puede ser parte de la solución del problema de salud,por medio de mensajes musicales, conciertos para concientizar a la población,la música es el pretexto para llegarle a la comunidad. - Music can totally be part of the solution to the health problem, through musical messages, concerts to raise awareness among the population, music is the pretext to reach the community.

7. ¿Ayuda el Festival de Jazz de Panamá a sanar a la comunidad de Panamá? ¿Si es así, cómo?

96 El Panamá Jazz es el evento cultural más grande de todo Panamá,por este proyecto se pueden canalizar campañas de concientización a la comunidad sobre la salud,de hecho se hace el simposio de musicoterapia. - The Panama Jazz is the largest cultural event in all of Panama, for this project you can channel awareness campaigns to the community about health, in fact the music therapy symposium is held.

8. ¿El Festival de Jazz de Panamá ofrece oportunidades para tomar decisiones que impactan positivamente su salud? ¿Si es así, cómo? Por medio del simposio de musicoterapia que se hace dentro del marco del festival de jazz,donde vienen profesionales de la salud. - Through the music therapy symposium that takes place within the jazz festival, where health professionals come.

9. ¿Cuál es tu parte favorita del Festival de Jazz de Panamá? Todo lo que se hace en el festival es favorito para mí. - Everything that is done at the festival is a favorite for me.

10. ¿Crees que este tipo de festival ayudaría a otras comunidades de todo el mundo? ¿Cómo? Totalmente si ayuda y sigue ayudando a otras comunidades en el mundo entero por ser un festival y una fundación ejemplos para el mundo del arte,más que muestro proyecto se centraliza en la parte social,de cambiar socialmente el mundo por medio de la música - Totally if it helps and continues to help other communities around the world for being a festival and a foundation for the art world, more than our project is focused on the social part, of socially changing the world through music

Omar Díaz - March 29, 2020

1. Experiencia / participación: ¿Cuánto tiempo ha estado involucrado y cuál ha sido su experiencia con el Festival de Jazz de Panamá y la Fundación Danilo Pérez? Hola saludos, si estoy oficialmente en la Fundación trabajando como profesor desde el 2008. Y participado en los Festivales desde el 2003. - Hello greetings, I am officially at the Foundation working as a teacher since 2008. And participated in the Festivals since 2003.

2. ¿Cómo definirías la curación/sanación? Para individuos y para las comunidades. Como mejor calidad de vida , cuando se suplen necesidades básicas de vida y espirituales también,. - As a better quality of life, when basic life and spiritual needs are met as well.

3. ¿Qué significa para una comunidad estar en "riesgo"? ¿Cuáles son algunos ejemplos? No existencia de sistemas de salud, viviendas precarias, ignorancia acompañada con falta de educación, no oportunidades y segregación.

97 - Non-existence of health systems, precarious housing, ignorance accompanied by lack of education, no opportunities and segregation.

4. ¿Cuál comunidades son "en riesgo" en la ciudad de Panamá? A mi consideración las más apartadas. Nuestras comunidades indígenas y los de menores recursos económicos y materiales. - In my opinion the most remote. Our indigenous communities and those with the least economic and material resources

5. ¿Cómo puede su comunidad afectar las elecciones que hace que afectan su salud general? Con una campaña de concienciación en la que la empatía juega un papel importante para mirar con justa razón la realidad del país. - With an awareness campaign in which empathy plays an important role to look with just reason at the reality of the country.

6. ¿Crees que la música puede ser parte del proceso de curación? ¿Si es así, cómo? Totalmente de acuerdo. Llevando música a todas las áreas del país, y no solo enfocándose en el entretenimiento también haciendo docencia sobre la realidad actual que va casada con nuestra historia. - Totally agree. Taking music to all areas of the country, and not only focusing on entertainment but also teaching about the current reality that is married to our history.

7. ¿Ayuda el Festival de Jazz de Panamá a sanar a la comunidad de Panamá? ¿Si es así, cómo? Creo que sí. Por medio de la educación, y las oportunidades que nos ha dado para salir de Panamá y estudiar en el extranjero. - I think so. Through education, and the opportunities it has given us to leave Panama and study abroad.

8. ¿El Festival de Jazz de Panamá ofrece oportunidades para tomar decisiones que impactan positivamente su salud? ¿Si es así, cómo? /Por supuesto. Mi salud espiritual, intelectual por medio del convivió con personas y culturas e idiosincrasias de otras partes del mundo. - Of course. My spiritual, intellectual health through coexisted with people and cultures and idiosyncrasies from other parts of the world.

9. ¿Cuál es tu parte favorita del Festival de Jazz de Panamá? Los talleres. - The workshops

10. ¿Crees que este tipo de festival ayudaría a otras comunidades de todo el mundo? ¿Cómo? Por supuesto. El jazz, la música se convertiría en un pretexto para vernos, oírnos y conocernos entre tantos descontentos y problemas mundiales. - Of course. Jazz, music would become a pretext for seeing, hearing and knowing each other among so many discontents and world problems.

98 Beatriz Freire - April 15, 2020

1. Experiencia / participación: ¿Cuánto tiempo ha estado involucrado y cuál ha sido su experiencia con el Festival de Jazz de Panamá y la Fundación Danilo Pérez? 1 año, 2 PJFs y todo mi tiempo en la fundacion/PJF ha sido una de mis mejores vivencias porque me ha blindado mucha experiencia como estudiante, voluntaria y como artista tambien. la gran mayoria de mis amigos aqui en panama los conoci en el PJF y hemos continuado con nuestros proyectos afuera del PJF. pero igual el PJF es algo tan bueno para todos nosotros que lo esperamos por el resto del año - 1 year, 2 PJFs and all my time at the foundation / PJF has been one of my best experiences because it has shielded me a lot of experience as a student, volunteer and as an artist as well. The vast majority of my friends here in Panama met them at PJF and we have continued our projects outside of PJF. but still the PJF is something so good for all of us that we wait for the rest of the year

2. ¿Cómo definirías la curación/sanación? Para individuos y para las comunidades. para ambos creo que sea lo mismo: estar junto de quien queremos y quien nos quiera, haciendo lo que mas gustamos hacer. para mi, el ultimo PJF fue un muy buen ejemplo de sanacion porque las semanas anteriorer, hasta meses, yo estuve muy deprimida como no habia estado en ~1año. pero cuando vino el festival, yo siempre estaba ocupada con la musica, en la clase, los conciertos o los jams, conociendo gente nueva o re-encuentrando a amigos que habia conocido el PJF pasado y catching up, lo q sea. siempre habia algo q hacer, algun lugar donde ir, y esa experiencia me hizo regresar a mi mejor. por eso creo q todo lo que me trajo el PJF y la fundacion fue sanacion de una manera :-) - for both I think it is the same: being together with who we want and who loves us, doing what we like to do the most. For me, the last PJF was a very good example of healing because the previous weeks, even months, I was very depressed as I had not been in ~ 1 year. But when the festival came, I was always busy with music, in class, concerts, or ever, meeting new people or meeting friends who had met the past PJF and catching up, whatever. There was always something to do, somewhere to go, and that experience brought me back to my best. That is why I think that everything the PJF brought me and the foundation was healing in a way :-)

3. ¿Qué significa para una comunidad estar en "riesgo"? ¿Cuáles son algunos ejemplos? hay riesgos ambientales como hurricanes que pueden destruir hogares, politicos como las guerras, hay riegos de la salud publica como la pandemia que ponen comunidades como las personas de edad en riesgo, riesgos economicos como lo que seran las consecuencias de la pandemia en el stock market por ejemplo - mucha gente se esta perdiendo su trabajo y asi no podra mantener su nivel de vida - there are environmental risks such as hurricanes that can destroy homes, politicians such as wars, there are public health risks such as the pandemic that put communities such as the elderly at risk, economic risks such as the consequences of the pandemic in the stock market for example - a lot of people are missing their jobs and thus will not be able to maintain their standard of living

99 4. ¿Cuál comunidades son "en riesgo" en la ciudad de Panamá? las comunidades indigenas, las personas de edad, las comunidades con bajos recursos - indigenous communities, the elderly, low-income communities

5. ¿Cómo puede su comunidad afectar las elecciones que hace que afectan su salud general? si hablamos de la pandemia, por ejemplo, mi salud sera afectada si los demas deciden salir de sus casas y difundir el virus. de esa manera, me ponen a mi en riesgo porque asi, si yo necesito salir, no puedo sin antes tener que correr el riesgo de ser infectado - If we talk about the pandemic, for example, my health will be affected if others decide to leave their homes and spread the virus. that way, they put me at risk because, if I need to leave, I cannot without first having to risk being infected

6. ¿Crees que la música puede ser parte del proceso de curación? ¿Si es así, cómo? si porque la musica junta a las personas y hace que se compartan momentos mas facilmente porque es una cosa que todo el mundo tiene en comun. a todos nos gusta la musica, no importa que tipo. - Yes, because music brings people together and makes it easier to share moments because it is something that everyone has in common. We all like music, no matter what type.

7. ¿Ayuda el Festival de Jazz de Panama a sanar a la comunidad de Panamá? ¿Si es así, cómo? si - por un ratito, todo el mundo se junta y disfruta de la musica y la educacion JUNTOS y parece que todo el resto de lo que no es bueno, desaparece por una semana maravillosa... lo expliqué en la pregunta 2 porque sí fue una experiencia de vida que me sanó a mi :-) - yes - for a little while, everyone gets together and enjoys music and education TOGETHER and it seems that all the rest of what is not good, disappears for a wonderful week ... I explained it in question 2 because it was a life experience that healed me :-)

8. ¿El Festival de Jazz de Panamá ofrece oportunidades para tomar decisiones que impactan positivamente su salud? ¿Si es así, cómo? si - aunque si lo considero sanación, yo hice bastantes cosas que me parecen ahora en retrospectiva ser el opuesto de "cuidarme bien". por esa razon, me da la oportunidad de reflexionar tambien y tomar mejores decisiones adeltante. durante el festival, ya que siempre estuve ocupada y que no paraba 1 segundo, hubo un dia donde no comi nada simplemente porque me olvide. hubo noches en que no me dormi pero segui despertandome temprano el dia seguiente para ir al festival. cuando me di cuenta de la locura que fue olvidarme de comer, vi que habia que cambiar mis rutinas y crear una estructura cualquier para que no pasara de nuevo. - yes - although if I consider it healing, I did quite a few things that now seem to me in retrospect to be the opposite of "taking good care of myself". For that reason, it gives me the opportunity to reflect too and make better decisions ahead. During the festival, since I was always busy and did not stop for 1 second, there was a day where I did not eat anything just because I forgot. There were nights when I didn't fall asleep but I kept waking up early the next day to go to the festival. When I realized how crazy it was to forget to eat, I saw that I had to change my routines and create any structure so that it would not happen again.

100 9. ¿Cuál es tu parte favorita del Festival de Jazz de Panamá? los jams! - The jam sessions

10. ¿Crees que este tipo de festival ayudaría a otras comunidades de todo el mundo? ¿Cómo? si, de la misma manera que nos reune como una comunidad y que crea nuevas comunidades, claro que las comunidades demas en otros lugares tambien lo podrian disfrutar. quizas hacerlo con algo mas que la musica, la danza o el teatro, la comedia. - Yes, in the same way that it brings us together as a community and creates new communities, of course other communities in other places could also enjoy it. Maybe do it with something more than music, dance or theater, comedy.

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