Arendt Jazz Hour (Solo)

Arendt Jazz Hour is perhaps my most niche musical project. It consists of two parts: the first part features songs that all revolve around the political thinker Hannah Arendt, including revolution, the council movement, Bertolt Brecht, totalitarianism, freedom, and Little Rock. The second part involves audience participation: audience members are expected to write a topic on a slip of paper and place it in a vase; I will then select some of those topics and improvise on them. Arendtians may choose Arendt-related topics (I have been given topics like “plurality,” “the in-between,” and “the nation state”); those not steeped in Arendt may write any topic they like, and I’ll try to portray it to the best of my ability.

I have performed Arendt Jazz Hour at the Arendt Conference at the University of Leiden in 2024, the Arendt Circle in Verona in 2025, the Inter-University Center in Dubrovnik, and at the Arendt 50 conference in Ljubljana.

PS 1: I didn’t invent that thing with the vase and slips of paper; Italian poetry improvisers did it in the nineteenth century.

PS 2: The phrase “Arendt Jazz Hour” was coined by Matthew Longo.