Collin Felter Unifies Conflicting Modes of Music

Medici Circle Scholar Collin Felter and Felterman’s Deli

By Gamy Cortes 

Before Collin Felter ’27 came to UC Irvine’s Ph.D. program in history and theory of music, and prior to breaking his wrist in a car accident back in 2021, Felter believed his future career was set for performance.

“But the looming threat of nerve damage, a permanent lack of use, made me initially pivot towards this Ph.D.,” said Felter. “Maybe I'm not the artist, but maybe I can be an educator and think about music in this analytical framework.”

Funding Music

Founded in 2004, the Medici Circle Scholarship supports academic growth and broadens the creative development of its recipients by awarding funding to each Medici Scholar for their specific projects. This unique scholarship program takes education beyond the classroom, allowing scholars to reach their creative and professional goals. Through this scholarship, Felter and his collaborator, Jacob Mann, and their project, Felterman’s Deli, were able to explore jazz and funk in the theoretical framework established in a paper Felter presented at a Society for Music Theory conference: A Big Band on a Small Grid: Rhythmic Techniques in Jacob Mann’s Big Band Compositions.

Having experienced the toils of making money through art and lacking creative inspiration, the Medici Scholarship not only freed up mental space, as there was no longer a financial risk, but also gave Felter a reason to create again.

“I think I would have sat there and spun my wheels for a couple of years and never actually gotten back in the creative seat if it weren’t for the Medici scholarship," said Felter. “Just having that tap on my shoulder from my Medici mentor and dissertation advisor, Amy Bauer, or my patrons, Jerry and Ronnie, helped grow the ecosystem I needed to create again.”

Following his car accident, Felterman’s Deli marked a personal turning point as it was his first artistic statement since his return to music. Through an analysis of the 1/16th note, Felter and Mann explored the confluence of individual style and collaboration, scholarship and creativity. Felter composed a melody atop Mann’s funky foundation, and later added a bridge. After months of iterations, they settled on a polished composition.

However, much like Felter’s sequential coming to in his compositional journey, from performance to scholarship, Felter, Mann, Corbin Jones and Ryan McDiarmid — two Los Angeles jazz and studio musicians — worked on the compositions in the studio on August 8th 2025, reworking what was thought to be a finished musical product.

“Over the course of about nine takes in the studio,” said Felter, “it felt less like finding a perfect recreation of a preconceived notion but rather more an unfolding of a hidden target in the room discovered through a gradual, communal unearthing.”

From Concept to Composition

Around the time Felter broke his wrist, he was in the midst of his 2022 album, Phases. Each track was encoded with a specific phase in his life, and rather than leaving meaning open-ended — like his previous album C F (2020) — Felter intentionally tried to add meaning into the music itself.

For instance, with the first track, “Bud Walk,” Felter tried to capture a toddler in a tumultuous family setting. The opening guitar line carries a classic Western riff, as Felter’s grandpa was a cowboy, and is meshed with an odd, lilting feel, resembling a toddler stumbling around through life. 

“Instead of starting with the sound and instead starting with the idea, the emotion and seeing if I can find sound through that changes a track completely,” said Felter. “It’s also a great example of how I've changed my perspective since academia and how I've dealt with these questions of what it means to mean in music.”

A Symbolic Visual

During the COVID quarantine, while Felter lived in Denver and worked at a coffee roastery, he grew a massive beard and long hair, which he saw as a fitting brand for Phases.

“I was mapping the time of my life onto my visual aesthetic," said Felter.

But Felter believed that Phases was only concerned with his past, not with his present. So as a symbolic and marketing gesture, Felter shaved off his beard when he released the album. That symbolic act of new beginnings coincided with his graduation from his master’s program and an impending move across the country to California.

“All of these things were very hard lines drawn in the sand,” said Felter.

Only later did the meaning of that transition crystallize. After moving west, life moved faster than reflection permitted. It took nearly two years before Felter could articulate what that phase had been, let alone what came next. Now, he describes himself as living in the present — playing regularly, releasing new music, collaborating with Los Angeles musicians, and committing fully to what he calls a “scholarly season.”

“I’m trying to carefully experience all the things that have been afforded to me,” said Felter. “I feel very lucky at this phase.”

Image: Collin Felter. Photo by Mary Puls.

In Between

Occupying the spaces between scholar and musician has not been seamless. Throughout Felter’s Ph.D. application process, Felter encountered dismissal of his performance background, particularly from theorists who viewed jazz as an unserious or incompatible medium within Western art traditions. Conversely, in performance spaces, particularly jazz scenes, his academic pursuits often prompted skepticism.

“If I say I’m doing a Ph.D., the expectation is I’m going to play really square,” said Felter.

This double bind — needing to prove himself as a scholar in academic spaces and his passion as a musician onstage — has shaped his commitment to collapsing the divide.

“The fields have just forced these arbitrary lines,” said Felter. “I’ll be on a gig and find myself playing things I never would’ve gotten to if I hadn’t spent time thinking about it on the scholarly side.”

Now, Felter increasingly approaches music as an ecosystem through which social relationships, cultural structures and collective behaviors can be examined.

“Look at how all of these instruments interact,” said Felter. “What does that say about the social network between them as players?”

What’s Next?

Felter anticipates that most of his time at UC Irvine will be dedicated to his dissertation, proving himself as a thinker outside a musical context.

In the spring quarter of 2026, Felter also looks forward to teaching jazz theory, eager to apply his own jazz experience and practice with pedagogical thought.

To learn more about Collin Felter’s work, visit his website at collinfelter.com. To learn more about the Medici Circle and ways to support or apply, visit here.