Juan David Rubio Restrepo, PhD
Interdisciplinary Scholar
Juan David Rubio Restrepo is an interdisciplinary scholar and performer of popular and experimental music practices. At UTEP, Dr. Rubio Restrepo holds a joint appointment and teaches at the Music Department and the Chicano Studies program. He earned his PhD in Music with a focus on Integrative Studies from the University of California San Diego, holds a MFA in Integrated Composition Improvisation and Technology (ICIT) from the University of California Irvine, and a BM in Jazz Studies and Drum Kit Performance from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá, Colombia). His scholarship dialogues with theories of the human, decolonial theory, media studies, cultural and ethnic studies, critical theory, studies of music and sound, ethno/musicology, and Latin American, Chicanx, Caribbean, and African-American thought to explore issues of aurality, alterity, and resistance using a transnational and comparative lens.
His current book project focuses on the music and figure of Ecuadorian singer Julio Jaramillo to examine how difference and/in sameness coalesce in Jaramillo’s practice and media persona in the Americas of the second half of the twentieth century. Using multi-sited archival research, auto/ethnography, and navigating through a wide array of academic, non-academic, and aural documents, the book puts in dialogue Jaramillo with the música popular concept (popular music in its literal translation), considering them disputed acoustemic loci where overlapping narratives of race, nation, masculinity, and media capitalism were mobilized. The mestizaje discourse, that simultaneously constructs and subsumes difference, was at the core of these conflicting dynamics. A second line of research focuses on different cumbia practices across the American continent with a particular focus on their transnational circulation, racial formations, sound technologies, and percussive lexicon. His writing can be found in Twentieth-Century Music (Cambridge University Press), Leonardo Music Journal (MIT Press), Cambridge Companion to the Drum Kit, and Scattered Musics (University Press of Mississippi).
An active drummer/percussionist, composer, conductor, and music technologist, Rubio Restrepo’s creative practice encompasses traditional, non-traditional, and multi-sited telematic settings. In Colombia, he has performed with 1280 Almas, Asdrubal, Pacho Dávila, Antonio Arnedo, and Etcétera, among others, and is the co-founder and co-director of the Bogotá Orquesta de Improvisadores (BOI). Salient collaborations in the U.S. include Nicole Mitchell, Mark Dresser, and Michael Dessen. He has released albums and DVDs, both in digital and physical formats, with several of these projects. Major venues include the Angel City Jazz Festival (Los Angeles, U.S.), Festival Internacional de la Imagen (Manizales, Colombia), Festival Altavoz (Medellín, Colombia), and the Rock al Parque and Jazz al Parque festivals (Bogotá, Colombia). For the past decade, he has also been involved in telematic performance as performer, composer, programmer, producer, researcher, and educator and has developed projects with peers in Colombia, the U.S., Brazil, South Korea, and Canada. Rubio Restrepo views networked spaces as fertile multi- and inter-disciplinary spaces were artistic, scholarly, technological, and pedagogical interests can forward constructive dialogues between geographically distributed communities.
Contact Info
Department of Music
Email: jrubiorest@utep.edu
