John-Carlos Perea and AKU-MATU to Perform at Columbia on Sept. 22 (Native Sounds North and South)

The Center for Ethnomusicology's "Native Sounds North&South" Series presents concert of Jazz and Hip-Hop by Native American/Native Alaskan recording artists:

JOHN-CARLOS PEREA
and Elliot Humberto Kavee

and

AKU-MATU

Saturday September 22, 2012
Davis Auditorium, Schapiro Center (click for map)
Columbia University Morningside Campus
7PM-10PM
Free and Open to the Public
(see below for associated class and symposium)

FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE (let us know you're coming!)
CONCERT PROGRAM (PDF)
JOHN-CARLOS PEREA and
ELLIOT HUMBERTO KAVEE

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PHOTO CREDIT: Stephen Butler, Canyon Records, 2011

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AKU-MATU (Allison Warden)
Iñupiaq performance artist.


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About the artists:

John-Carlos Perea (Mescalero Apache, Irish, German, Chicano) has maintained an active career as a performer and recording artist in San Francisco’s Jazz and World music scenes since 1997. First Dance, his debut recording as a leader, featured John-Carlos’ original musical compositions and performances on electric bass, cedar flute, and pow-wow singing. 

John-Carlos has recorded on over a dozen albums as a sideman and, in 2007, he won a GRAMMY® (Best New Age Album [Vocal or Instrumental]) as a member of the Paul Winter Consort for pow-wow and cedar flute songs contributed to "Crestone" (http://tinyurl.com/7dn58vj). His most recent release is "Waking from the Roots" by Coyote Jump, a new collaborative ensemble featuring John-Carlos on cedar flute with composer Colin Farish, available from Canyon Records (http://tinyurl.com/7u2rntk).

John-Carlos is also Assistant Professor in the Department of American Indian Studies, College of Ethnic Studies, at San Francisco State University. He received his BA (2000) in Music from San Francisco State University and his MA and Ph.D. (2005/2009) in Music from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include contemporary urban American Indian musical cultures, pow-wow music and dance, New Age music, and the music of saxophonist Jim Pepper. John-Carlos is presently authoring “Intertribal Native American Music in the United States,” a textbook and CD package under contract to Oxford University Press.

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Allison Warden (AKU-MATU) is an Iñupiaq Eskimo Inter-Disciplinary Artist with a passion for the self-determination of Indigenous Peoples.  She raps under the name AKU-MATU and loves working with young people, empowering them through the use of theatre and music. She creates her own beats for her rhymes, sampling traditional sounds and inserting her Iñupiaq language into her songs.  She lives in Anchorage, Alaska and has close ties to her home community of Kaktovik, Alaska. 

Her one-woman show, “Ode to the Polar Bear” has toured extensively across Alaska and the lower-48 and has been re-worked into a completely new and longer piece, titled “Calling All Polar Bears” which debuted at Intermedia Arts with Pangea Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota in November 2011.  She acted in Andrew MacLean’s film, “On the Ice” that premiered at Sundance in 2011.  In 2009, she was part of the “virtual subsistence” exhibition at MTS Gallery and coordinated over 25 people to participate in a performance which focused on the incident with the Point Hope caribou and land use issues.   Allison was the MC for the Elders and Youth Convention at the Alaska Federation of Natives Conference in October of 2010 and 2011 and was active in presenting about language revitalization. 

Allison is an engaged community member, passionate about awakening Indigenous youth to their potential and voice.  She is most excited about working on her AKU-MATU album and about expressing herself through writing more poetry, plays and a screenplay.  She can be reached through her website, www.aku-matu.com

RELATED EVENTS:
Thursday Sept. 20
Dodge  Hall 622
Jessica Bissett Perea, John-Carlos Perea, Allison Warden, and Lauren Amsterdam visit "Music in Contemporary Native America," 6:10-7:25
This is open to non-members of the class, but please RSVP to aaf19@columbia.edu for permission to attend, by Wed. Sept. 18.

Friday Sept. 21
701C Dodge Hall  (Center for Ethnomusicology)
2-4:30PM

Symposium: Indigenous Music Today
Jessica Bissett-Perea, PhD
(Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow, Dept. of Music, Univ. of California, Berkeley)
Jessica Bissett Perea
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“Sounding Traditions of Inuit Cosmopolitanism in ‘Flying Wild Alaska’”
This paper explores circuits of Inuit cosmopolitanism as represented through the soundscapes and imagery of the Discovery Channel’s documentary-style reality television series “Flying Wild Alaska,” (2011-2012). When compared to its counterparts (e.g. “Deadliest Catch,” “Ice Road Truckers,” and “Gold Rush: Alaska”), “Flying Wild Alaska” is notable for portraying the diversity and mobility of Alaska Native and Inuit cultures, in part through the show’s use of contemporary Inuit music as a backdrop to portrayals of modern life in the arctic. From professionalized traditional drumsongs to funk- and jazz-influenced “Inuit World Music,” my musicocultural analysis will illuminate the longer history of Inuit cosmopolitanism throughout the circumpolar region and make audible the literal and figurative histories of Native migration between rural and urban spaces.

Lauren J. Amsterdam
(MA, African-American Studies, Columbia University)
"All the Eagles and the Ravens in the House Say Yeah! (Ab)Original Hip Hop Artists and Styles of Heritage" 

Young people across Native North America and the First Nations are making beats, spitting rhymes, telling stories, and taking direct action to build the future now. Hip hop artists are reppin’ a radicalized (ab)original heritage that is “everywhere,” but most of all, in hip hop, challenging the limitations of poverty, invisibility, and social dislocation. Confronting the symptoms of invasion—racism, poverty, police violence, inter-generational trauma, and “haters”—artists profoundly demonstrate that the materiality of hip hop is a way of not dying, and of moving past the necessity of surviving to a fuller, thriving political and cultural life. While artists are indeed inheriting loss, they choose to move with loss, not past it, being playful and political with real and imagined memories. Rather than mourn who they would or could have been if the past was different, artists orient themselves towards the potentiality of the future through self-love and communal care, shedding the settler nation's inculcation of shame and alienation.
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Discussants: AKU-MATU (Allison Warden), Prof. John-Carlos Perea

COMING UP OCT. 13: MASTER OF HAWAI'IAN SLACK KEY GUITAR CYRIL PAHINUI, 7PM IN DAVIS AUDITORIUM, SAT 10/13/12