Sean Peterson is a double bassist and composer based in Eugene, Oregon. He specializes in jazz, and also performs classical, salsa, folk, and other genres. He appears regularly with Halie Loren, The Emerald City Jazz Kings, Laura Kemp, Girl Circus, and Sean Peterson’s Ess-tet. He has performed with art music groups including Michael Anderson’s Microphilharmonic, Oregon Bach Collegium, Cascadia Chamber Opera, and Central Chamber Orchestra. Previously he performed regularly with Tony Glausi, Eleven Eyes, Taarka, Torrey Newhart, Carl Woideck, the Shedd Theatricals orchestra, the Oregon Composers’ Big Band, Beta Collide, John Shipe, the Oregon Jazz Ensemble, Azuquita, and Paul Biondi. In 2015 he released his first album as a leader, Let It Show, which he composed, arranged, recorded, and mixed.

 

Sean holds an MMus in jazz studies and a PhD in musicology from the University of Oregon. In his dissertation (2018), entitled "Something Real: Rap, Resistance, and the Music of the Soulquarians,” he reads the work of a loose collective of hip hop and R&B producers known as The Soulquarians as a musical discourse of opposition to dominant trends in commercial rap of the late 1990s and early 2000s. He has presented papers on singer and composer Erykah Badu, hip hop producer J Dilla, and hip hop band The Roots at regional and national academic conferences. His other projects involve research on intersections and influence between jazz and hip hop music, dynamics of live instrumentation and music technology, rhetorical analyses of jazz performances, and hip hop in musical theater. Sean teaches university classes on The Beatles, Jazz History, Blues History, Rock History, and Hip Hop History, and is the founder and coach of the University of Oregon Hip Hop Ensemble, a for-credit band which composes, arranges, and performs hip hop music.