Somehow, in our diverse and multicultural world, race persists – both as a way of understanding our historical and cultural identities, and as a provocation that throws accepted and acceptable notions of who we are into question. The feeling of belonging to a distinctive community that accompanies our racial, cultural and ethnic senses of self can often, still, be accompanied by uncomfortable feelings of exclusion, of difference, of alienation: of not necessarily, in fact, belonging in the ways we imagine ourselves doing. When saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk famously and notoriously called jazz "Black Classical Music," he not only evoked the music's proud African-American lineage, but also offered a provocation to listeners to reconsider how and where we draw cultural and social boundaries around the music we hear and make. Who decides and who legitimates our claims on history and identity? How does the rich and culturally-mixed heritage of jazz – a music renowned for assimilating, improvising and blurring its parts and sources – invite us to reconsider how we assume our various allegiances, solidarities and shared values? How can jazz, as a racially-inflected music even today, present both players and listeners with new ways of understanding our sense of community, of community in difference? This one-day colloquium will offer participants and members of the listening public an opportunity to address some of these challenges, and to think and talk collaboratively about what possibilities this music offers for the future.