Professor David Pier is an ethnomusicologist who researches music in Africa and the United States. His book, Ugandan Music in the Marketing Era: The Branded Arena is a ethnographic study of the commercialization of folk music and dance heritage in Uganda. He is currently working on a book on a Ugandan guitar genre known as kadongo kamu. Having started out as a jazz pianist, he is keenly interested in both the processes and underlying ideas of musical experimentalism, especially in global Black historical contexts.