Jonathan A. Gómez is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the USC Thornton School of Music who studies Black American musics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as musics of the African diaspora more broadly. Gómez is particularly interested in working interdisciplinarily between music studies and Black studies, excavating the ways that Black people have turned to music as a site of identity formation, collaboration, community building, and political action. In this work, he aims to foreground the voices and experiences of Black musicians, listeners, and writers in the process of understanding how music means for Black people.

Gómez’s research interests are consistently informed by his practice and experience as a jazz saxophonist. He has studied jazz and improvisation with Gary Keller, Mark Small, Rich Perry, Hal Crook, and George Garzone. He appears as a saxophonist on pianist Roberto Magris’s 2016 album, Live in Miami @ the WDNA Jazz Gallery, and Rhode Island-based group Geo Trio’s 2019 release, We Made an Album!.

Gómez has presented his work at meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and the Rhythm Changes International Jazz Conference. He earned a Ph.D. in Historical Musicology with a secondary field in African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and he holds an M.A. in Musicology from Michigan State University and a B.M. in Studio Music and Jazz from the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music.