The Ocean Has Rhythm: Four Centuries of Musical Travels Across the Atlantic and the Circuit of Sound it Created

Department: History

Date and Time: May 19, 2021 | 12:00 PM-1:30 PM

Event Location: Zoom

Event Details

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John Collins, professor emeritus at the University of Ghana-Legon and a member of the Ghana Academy of Sciences, has been active in the Ghanaian/West African music scene since 1969 as a guitarist, band leader, music union activist, journalist, writer and archivist. He obtained his B.A. degree in sociology/archaeology from the University of Ghana in 1972 and his Ph.D in Ethnomusicology from SUNY Buffalo in 1994. Collins has given many radio and television broadcasts (including over 40 for the BBC) and has been a consultant for numerous films on African music. During the 1990’s Collins was Technical Director of the University of Ghana/Mainz Music Re-documentation Project, and for seven years was with the Ghana National Folklore Board of Trustees. Collins began teaching at the Music Department of the University of Ghana in 1995, obtained a Full Professorship there in 2002 and between 2003 and 2005 he was the head of Department. He naturalised as a Ghanaian in 2008. He is currently on post-retirement contract with the university and the manager of Bokoor Recording Studio, Chairman of the BAPMAF Highlife-Music Institute, a patron of the Ghana Musicians Union (MUSIGA) and co-founder of the Local Dimension highlife band.
http://www.ug.edu.gh/music/staff/prof-edmund-john-collins

Arturo O’Farrill is a pianist, composer, educator, and 7-time Grammy winner was born in Mexico and grew up in New York City. He received his formal musical education at the Manhattan School of Music and the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College. Arturo’s professional career began with the Carla Bley Band and continued as a solo performer with a wide spectrum of artists including Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Bowie, Wynton Marsalis, and Harry Belafonte. In 2007, O’Farrill founded the Afro Latin Jazz Alliance as a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the performance, education, and preservation of Afro Latin music. In December 2010 O’Farrill traveled with the original Chico O’Farrill Afro Cuban Jazz Orchestra to Cuba, returning his father’s musicians to his homeland.  He continues to travel to Cuba regularly as an informal cultural ambassador, working with Cuban musicians, dancers, and students, bringing local musicians from Cuba to the US and American musicians to Cuba.
https://schoolofmusic.ucla.edu/people/arturo-ofarrill/

Scot Brown is an associate professor of African American Studies at UCLA, and is the author of the book Fighting For Us: Maulana Karenga, The Us Organization and Black Cultural Nationalism and is the editor and contributing author of Discourse on Africana Studies: James Turner and Paradigms of Knowledge.  He has, furthermore, penned numerous articles on African American history, social/political movements, music and popular culture -- and has appeared as an expert commentator on Black social movements, African American music and popular culture for; National Public Radio, Sirius/XM Radio, PBS, BET/Centric, TV One, VH1, and HBO/Cinemax.   Brown is completing a book project examining funk bands of the 1970s -- and he is also a music producer and songwriter with songs available on iTunes, YouTube, Spotify, Pandora and most digital music platforms.
https://afam.ucla.edu/faculty/scot-brown/

S. Ama Wray has been performing, teaching and choreographing across 3 continents for over 30 years. With London Contemporary Dance Theater and Rambert Dance Company, she toured the UK, USA, and Europe. As Artistic Director of JazzXchange Music and Dance Company, she led creative residencies at The Royal Opera House and Southbank Center, and collaborations with Wynton Marsalis and Bobby McFerrin. As a National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts fellow (NESTA) — a UK version of the McArthur Awards — in 2003, she began her exploration into performance and technology and continues to explore digital terrains through the AI 4 Afrikainitiative, cofounded in 2020. Alongside artistic practice, her scholarly work has been recognized as leading edge, in 2018 she was awarded the CIES African Diaspora Emerging Scholar Award. Recent publications include essays in British Dance, Black Routes (2016) and The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation (2019). In this COVID-19 pandemic she has created Vim - Vitality in Movement class with the Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute, for the UCI community. Additionally, in 2017, she co-founded the Africana Institute for Creativity, Recognition and Elevation (AICRE) with Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Tiffany Willoughby Herard. Pivot: AICRE + Philosophy is their current project.
https://dance.arts.uci.edu/dr-s-ama-wray

Rasul Miller is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. His research interests include Black Muslim communities in the Atlantic World and the trans-Atlantic cultural exchanges they helped to facilitate. Rasul’s work examines the role of Black American engagement with West, North, and East African musical forms in amplifying notions of African Diasporic connectivity, and the overlap between religious seeking and cultural exploration.
https://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=6935

Mark LeVine is Professor of History and Director of the Global Middle East Studies program at UC Irvine. A 2020-21 Guggenheim Fellow and a professional music for over 30 years, he's worked extensively with artists across the spectrum of African and African diaspora musics, including Dr. John, Mick Jagger, Public enemy, KRS-One, Vernon Reid, Michael Franti, Johnny Copeland, Albert Collins, Hassan Hakmoun, Seun and Femi Kuti, Ebo Taylor, Songhoy Blues, and many other African artists, and arranged and performed on the Grammy-winning 2005 album Street Signs by Ozomatli, one of the first Latin alternative albums to bring in latin, Gnawa and Roma musicians to create a truly hybrid sound. Mark is also the author and editor of over a dozen books including Heavy Metal Islam and the forthocming Art Beyond the Edge: Creativity and Conflict in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, written with his UCI colleague Bryan Reynolds of the Dept. of Drama, and producer of the 2009 album Flowers from the Desert and 2013 award-winning film, Before the Spring, After the Fall.
https://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=5356