Photo by Emanuel Wallace
SHORT BIO: AJ Kluth is an (ethno)musicologist researching issues of aesthetics, identity, and ethics in global popular and experimental musics. Recent projects include work related to jazz and gender, genre drift and identity, Afrofuturism and hip hop, and the aesthetic slippage between utopias and societies of control. He serves as musicology faculty at Hunter College in NYC where he teaches courses exploring African American musics, Western art music, and global popular musics through lenses of critical historiography, social justice, and philosophical aesthetics. In addition to his work as a researcher and teacher, Kluth is a collaborative improvising saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist invested in Black American Music and musical experimentalisms. He has worked extensively in Chicago, NYC, Los Angeles, and Northeast Ohio.
LONG BIO: Dr. AJ Kluth is an (ethno)musicologist researching issues of aesthetics, identity, and ethics in popular and experimental musics. Recent projects investigate issues of jazz and gender, genre drift and identity, Afrofuturism and hip hop, and the aesthetic slippage between utopias and societies of control. Kluth’s articles have appeared in the Journal of the Society for American Music, Journal of Jazz Studies, The International Journal of New Media, Technology, and the Arts, the collected volume Sonic Identity at the Margins, and DownBeat Magazine. An in-progress book, White Zombie: Jazz, Race, and Revenant Culture, investigates the ongoing development of the “jazz is dead” phenomenon, tracing how unresolved social and aesthetic asymmetries play out along racial and gender lines in jazz as taught, performed, and imagined, making varied “asks” of those invested in the space. He routinely presents research at conferences throughout the United States, UK, and Europe.
Broadly investigating contemporary musics via historical analysis, cultural theory, and aesthetic philosophy, Kluth approaches music as a human behavior implicated in the reinscription of cultural values and invisibilized power structures, but one that is also capable of refiguring them. He earned a BA degree in Applied Music from UW Green Bay (2003), a MM in Jazz Saxophone Performance from DePaul University (2006), a MA in Humanities and Social Thought from NYU (2013), and a PhD in Ethnomusicology (Systematic Musicology Specialization) from UCLA (2018).
Before joining Hunter College in 2026, Dr. Kluth taught at Case Western Reserve University and UCLA. He has supervised undergraduate student theses that used ethnography, historical methods, as well as musical and textual analysis on diverse topics including gender and sexuality in contemporary DIY music recording, developing methods in music therapy, musico-cultural outcomes of globalization, jazz and recording aesthetics, and more. As a dissertation committee member, he has supported graduate students researching hip hop and archival memory, horror film sound design and gender/sexuality, and identity construction through sound in animation
While teaching at Case Western Reserve University (2019-26), Kluth organized study groups related to music and decolonization and continues to facilitate public-facing discussions about music, class, and race. In 2023 he organized Toward a Different Kind of Horizon at the Cleveland Museum of Art that comprised several days of class visits, panel discussions, and a collaborative concert with Moor Mother, Lonnie Holley, Lee Bains, and Mourning [A] BLKstar. This event fostered interdepartmental collaboration (CWRU’s Department of Music, English, and African and African American Studies concentration) and fostered engagement with more than six hundred students and community members. In October of 2024 organized “Thinking Sound, Archives, and Identities: Close Listening,” a multi-day partnership with Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Museum of Art focusing on Nakagawa’s sound work, “Peace Resonance: Hiroshima/Wendover.”
As a bandleader, session musician, and section player he has enjoyed a career working in Chicago, NYC, and Los Angeles, and Cleveland markets. A top call saxophonist and woodwind doubler, he has worked with numerous local and touring artists as well as Broadway national tours including The Tina Turner Musical, The Wiz, Company, Mrs. Doubtfire, Funny Girl, MJ: The Musical, Some Like It Hot, Suffs, and The Great Gatsby. Apart from his own releases on OA2 records, recent collaborations with Cleveland artists include In Search of Our Father’s Gardens (Astral Spirits), and Soothsayer (American Dreams).
email: kluth (dot) aj (at) gmail (dot) com
AJ Kluth 