Faculty

Nate Sloan is a musicologist and performer who researches jazz and popular music. At USC, Nate teaches classes on music history and leads Forum, in which he brings luminary guests to campus each week to share their insights with students.

Since 2013, he has hosted the podcast Switched on Pop with songwriter Charlie Harding. Produced by Vulture and Vox Media and streaming on Netflix, Switched on Pop has been cited as a standout music podcast by The New Yorker, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and The Guardian, and has won two Signal Awards and a Webby Award for best music podcast.

Nate is the co-author of Switched on Pop: How Popular Music Works and Why it Matters, and sole author of the forthcoming book Harlemania: Performing Race and Place at the Cotton Club. Nate’s articles have been published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Musical Quarterly, Contemporary Music Review, and the Journal of Musicology. His work also appears in the Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory and the Cambridge Companion to George Gershwin. He is the co-editor of a special issue of the journal Jazz and Culture, “Jazz in the Present Tense.” 

Sloan contributes music commentary to CNN, PBS, MSNBC, NPR, The Economist, NPR, The Atlantic, and many other media outlets. He has written op-eds for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books,

Nate’s vaudeville duo, The Gideon and Hubcap Show, has played at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and London’s Soho Theatre. He also composes for theatre and film, including the score for the short documentary Slomo, and performs in the Dave Harrington Group. 

Nate has extensive professional experience as a musicological expert in copyright litigation and music clearance, including informal consultation, formal reports, and legal depositions.

Publications:

• “Stormy Relations: The Cotton Club, Broadway Spirituals, and Harlem Encounters in the Music of Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler” (Musical Quarterly, 2019)
• Switched on Pop: How Popular Music Works, and Why it Matters, co-authored with Charlie Harding (Oxford University Press, 2020)
• “Constructing Cab Calloway: Race, Publicity, and Performance in 1930s Harlem Jazz” (Journal of Musicology, 2019)
• “George Gershwin and Instrumental Jazz” in The Cambridge Companion to George Gershwin (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
• “Taylor Swift and the Work of Songwriting” (Contemporary Music Review, 2021)