ken tianyuan Ge

ken tianyuan Ge (he/him) is a scholar-performer of popular music whose research focuses on issues of feeling, labor, migration, race, and coloniality in the tourism and leisure industries. His current book project, Unmoored: Musical Labor and Affective Infrastructure in the Global Cruise Industry, draws on a fifteen-year career as a seafaring musician and broker of live music for the mass-market cruise ship sector. Blending multi-sited fieldwork with tools and discourses from economic anthropology, affect theory, postcolonialism, and critical tourism studies, his scholarship frames a worldwide network of contingent musical labor that spans the Caribbean all-inclusive resort economy, the U.S. retirement industry, South Asian overseas care work, and the post-Soviet diaspora. As both a member and ethnographer of the cruise industry’s transnational community of music workers, Dr. Ge uses research to illuminate the structural barriers that his interlocutors face while making a living at sea, amplifying global Southern perspectives on western popular music and advocating for material reforms to labor conditions and wage inequality.

As a double and electric bassist, Dr. Ge has performed with artists in the idioms of contemporary jazz (Cyrille Aimée, Victor Goines, Wycliffe Gordon, Lauren Henderson, Vitali Imereli, Stanley Jordan, Veronica Swift), big band (The Harry James Orchestra), free and improvised music (Matt Piet), Latin jazz (Michael Spiro), musical theater and cabaret (Jayne Curry, Roz Ryan, Rahn Coleman), crossover and pops (The Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra, Jeff Tyzik), and experimental mixed media (Carrie Mae Weems). His recording credits include ashes/dreamspeak (2016), an album of improvised piano-bass duets on the Chicago label Amalgam, and Thought and Memory (2012) with the Keith Karns Big Band. Dr. Ge currently plays double bass for The Amarkalam Project, a Carnatic-jazz fusion quartet led by fellow ethnomusicologist Varshini Narayanan.