Jazz at St John's
- Date 26 January 2026 - 7.00 p.m.
- Location Garden Quad Auditorium, St John's College
Dr Samuel Boateng is a Ghanaian jazz pianist, composer, visual artist, playwright, and filmmaker. He is also a Career Development Research Fellow in music at St John’s College, Oxford and holds a PhD in music from University of Pittsburgh as well as a Master’s in ethnomusicology from Kent State University. As an ASCAP, ACLS, and Andrew Mellon awardee, he has collaborated with artists in Ghana, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Indonesia, and his music has been performed by the Pittsburgh Jazz Orchestra, Cleveland Chamber Symphony, Kent State Orchestra, Quartetto di Venezia, Adepa Ensemble, and Afro Yaqui Music Collective.
As a researcher, Samuel examines the continuous and mutual influences between Africa and the African Diaspora in order to challenge colonial narratives that place Africa only in the past of jazz and Black music. His 2022 documentary film Accra Jazz Dialogues captures this Afrodiasporic relationship by bringing attention to the untold stories of contemporary jazz artists in Ghana’s capital city of Accra.
With the support of the Heinz Endowment for the Arts, Boateng wrote and composed Sunsum is Spirit in 2021—an original musical about myth, migration, and collaboration in the African diaspora.
