Yes, founder Idris Ackamoor is on the bill, playing alto saxophone with his avant-jazz group the Pyramids - as well as directing his new, quite different Music Is the Healing Force Community Orchestra. [...] there's also a documentary film preview - "Talk Back Out Loud," about the Medea Project's longtime work with incarcerated women - as well as harpist-vocalist Lyrika Holmes. Just Ackamoor has developed from an ambitious teenage jazz musician into a composer, tap dancer, actor, theater director and all-around producer, the company he founded 35 years ago continues to evolve. Born and raised as Bruce Baker on Chicago's South Side, Ackamoor says his mother's work in the Civil Rights Movement formed "some of my earliest memories." Though she was soon hired as one of the first black teachers in a nearby Wisconsin school district, "she never sent her kids back to public schools." Ackamoor went to the prestigious University of Chicago "lab school,""the same school," he notes, "that the Obama kids went to before they moved to D.C." By the time he graduated from Antioch, Ackamoor had formed his first band, the Collective, begun making his own instruments ("I still have some of those flutes") and played for a year with Cecil Taylor during the legendary pianist's residency at the school. The senior year abroad course of study he devised sent him and two other students to Europe to start their own band - the Pyramids - then travel through Africa, learning from indigenous musicians in Morocco, Senegal, Ghana and Kenya.
Reported by SFGate 3 hours ago.
↧