Roland Arlington Wiggins (1932–2019) was a prodigious theorist and pedagogue. His influence on jazz and improvised music in the second half of the twentieth century is immense, yet he remains largely unknown by many contemporary jazz musicians and music theorists. Barry Harris, the legendary jazz pianist, pedagogue, and theorist from Detroit, called Wiggins “the greatest theorist we got in this country,” and other musicians such as Yusef Lateef, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Quincy Jones, and Dizzy Gillespie knew Wiggins as the person to call to discuss music theory.
This talk explores Wiggins’s original logic-based meta-theory, pedagogical philosophies and practices, and work in institutional and communal settings. I draw on archival documents at the Library of Congress, conversations with Wiggins’s family and former students, student notes from his time teaching in the Five-College Consortium, and extant video and audio documentation. This examination suggests why Wiggins was such a highly regarded music theorist, pointing to forms of music theory beyond the academy and grounded in Black American music. As such, it revises our understanding of American music theory to delineate a broader set of actors, concerns, and communities than is usually included in academic settings.