In December 2024, just before the start of Spring Semester, Wade Dean received some bad news.
At the time, He was teaching courses in music theory and jazz history at Spelman College in the Atlanta University Center. He also co-directed “Noire,” the music department’s contemporary music ensemble.
And with the new term approaching, Dean learned that the department did not have the funds to continue paying him to direct Noire.
“It was like a gut punch,” said Dean. “It’s a real privilege to be teaching at Spelman, and to be working with those students. And it really felt like January 2025 was the wrong time to be telling young Black women that they didn’t have a musical voice to contribute.”
For Dean, the conundrum hit close to home. Music and teaching had been close to him for a long time, long before he came to UCLA in 2015 for his doctoral study in musicology. It extended back deeply into his childhood, when music first entered his life.
Dean originally learned how to play music in the fifth grade, when a crush on a girl in his class led him to learn saxophone. He had grown up around music—his mother was a pianist who sang with the church choir, his father had a huge record collection, and his uncle had played in Count Basie’s band. He auditioned for the middle school band and made first chair.
“Music for me was never a vocation, it wasn’t a talent to develop,” said Dean. “It was how I understood the world. It was melody and harmony. It was storytelling. It helped me relate to other people.”
Dean went on to study music performance and education at the University of South Carolina and then the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. He played alto sax in Philadelphia bands, including with the GRAMMY-Award nominated gospel group Tye Tribbett & G.A. (Greater Anointing) for George Clinton’s birthday celebration at the Apollo and a Martin Luther King celebration at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. He also fronted the Wade Dean Enspiration.
Dean was working as director of Jazz at the University of Pennsylvania when he met the pianist and noted music historian Guthrie Ramsey, a Penn music professor. One day over lunch, Ramsey told Dean that he was going to get his Ph.D. To be clear, Ramsey did not advise Dean that he should get his Ph.D, he simply told him that he would get it.
“I told him he was crazy, although a little more colorfully,” recalled Dean, laughing. “I wasn’t being disrespectful—it’s just how we talked to each other in Philadelphia.”
But Ramsey kept on about it, and Dean began to explore what it meant to study music in its social and historical contexts. He found a larger musical world to explore. The love songs of Curtis Mayfield, for instance, might tell stories of individual love and loss, but they also spoke more broadly to black communities, reminding people of their inner beauty and humanity. Dean was hooked.
He applied to several graduate schools, eventually choosing UCLA, where he went to study with Robert Fink, musicology professor (currently the acting dean of The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music). It was the beginning of an intellectual journey, one that opened up new worlds. It also required new skills, and Wade found himself (as most graduate students do) occasionally struggling with the materials and the workload. It was then that mentors stepped up.
“One quarter, Bob Fink met me nearly every week over barbecue to talk over the book lists. [Professor] Ray Knapp, checked in on me to make sure I was making progress,” said Dean. “They didn’t have to do that. There was something about the way they took that responsibility that really stuck with me.”
It was a formative experience. When Dean reflects now on his intellectual development into the scholar he would become—a Mellon EPIC scholar and frequent historical contributor to the documentary series “Unsung” on One TV—his memory is replete with the guidance mentors provided.
All of which informed Dean’s own thinking at Spelman College in December 2024, when he was faced with the unfortunate prospect of losing the contemporary music ensemble for want of funding. Dean had to make a choice: say goodbye to the students, or continue teaching the ensemble, unpaid.
Even if the circumstances of the decision were hard, Dean’s decision was not. He committed to seeing the ensemble through the year, donating his time to keep them going. It was a way of affirming his values. It was a way of honoring his mentors. And it was a way of standing with the Spelman students, whose own commitment had been steadfast.
“One of the students in that ensemble, a bassist, came up to me at the end of this last semester and thanked me,” said Dean. “She thanked me for taking a chance on her. She’s about to begin her own graduate study at Georgia State University. I couldn’t be prouder.”
