Recalling his early childhood experiences with music, Emmett Price III described sitting on his father’s lap in front of the piano while his father played.  “When he was away, I would always get caught poking around on the piano, so at the age of four I started taking lessons, and began learning the classical repertoire.”  At age eleven, he was hired to play at his Baptist church.  “I guess that’s where I place the beginning of my professional career,” he said.

From this exposure to gospel music through all of his experiences, up to the present, with jazz, Price has consistently maintained a performance career; but even before his undergraduate days he knew he also wanted to study the history of music.  In his senior year of high school, he did an independent study that surveyed the history of  gospel music; its final presentation was a gospel concert, which Price both directed and performed piano in, music ranging from early slave utterances, songs marking the development of blues, to more recent works. “It was from that experience that I knew I wanted to study music seriously in college,” he said, “not just performance, but African American music history.”

He received his B.A. in Music from the University of California at Berkeley in 1996; throughout this phase of his education he performed in UC Jazz, a student ensemble, and then during his sophomore year began to play jazz professionally: “I got my first real jazz gig playing with a Chicago guitarist, John Taylor Jr., and through that began playing other gigs on the scene out there.  I became acclimated to straight-ahead jazz, fusion jazz, smooth jazz, doing some blues things.”  These professional experiences did not, however, interfere with his schooling, but rather informed the direction his research would take.  His senior thesis was entitled “The Development of John Coltrane’s Concept of Spirituality and Its Expression in Music.” 

Price’s interest in Coltrane’s music specifically, and in the era of free jazz more generally, continued to develop in the work he did while pursuing a Ph. D. in Ethnomusicology at the University of Pittsburgh.   He found dominant academic writings on free jazz–mostly produced by German scholars–lacking sensitivity to black culture, and said many neglect to consider artists’ collective and individual lives, the connections between aesthetic production and its socio-political, philosophical, and cultural underpinnings.  Price has addressed such issues in his dissertation, “Free Jazz and the Black Arts Movement, 1958-1967.”  He plans to continue revising this research into manuscript form, while also beginning another book, one on the history of black gospel radio during his post-doctoral fellowship at Washington University-St. Louis for the 2000-01 academic year.

In reflecting upon his time at IU this summer, Price said he tremendously enjoyed his students in A393, “The History of Jazz,” the faculty and staff in Afro-American Studies, as well as those affiliated with MFFP.  His time in Bloomington was too brief to establish a strong rapport with the town’s professional musicians.  Regardless,  he said, “I can see the traces of a great artistic community here.”