Marc T. Gaspard Bolin is a performer/scholar who has enjoyed a nearly three-decade-long career as a professional musician, arranger, and educator. As a performer and arranger, Marc has had the humble pleasure of working with some of the music industry’s most exceptional entertainers. His performing experience ranges across the entire spectrum of entertainment industries and platforms: studio recordings, soundtrack recordings, live concerts, television appearances, radio jockeying and on-air guesting, features in audio recordings and music videos across multiple streaming services, such as YouTube and Spotify, and technical advising for films.
His arranging experience includes commissions for three-part horn section, big band, wind ensemble, and orchestral formats in a variety of styles, from “pop” to rock, to R&B, to salsa, and jazz. Most recently, Marc received a commission from the Lexington Philharmonic Society to produce a 15-minute suite of music from Duke Ellington’s unfinished opera “Queenie Pie,” which Marc completed in 2008 for the Oakland Opera Theater. It was premiered in 2008 by OOT and went on to be performed by the Butler School of Music Opera Program at the University of Texas, Austin (2009), the Long Beach Opera (2014), and Chicago Opera Theater (2014).
As an ethnomusicologist, his work is grounded in his own jazz practice and is deeply informed by his collaborators. His dissertation, “The Second Line: A (Re)Conceptualization of the New Orleans Brass Band Tradition,” focuses on the dynamic relationships between music and religion and how jazz culture—and its practitioners—are represented in the canon. He is also a dedicated filmmaker, utilizing film as an integral component and sensorial mode of inquiry to construct new visual and sensory ways of knowing second line culture.
