This colloquium features a conversation between American poet, composer, and USC Thornton School of Music assistant professor of composition Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) and UCSC Assistant Professor of Music Composition James Gordon Williams.
As part of a collaborative project that also features a performance on Wednesday, March 6, Moor Mother and Williams explore sonic worldmaking in this collaborative performance. Their conversation will focus on sonic worldmaking practices on the outskirts of linear time constructs (Master Time Clock) as it relates to defying the ongoing project of temporal coloniality as a regulating force of lived experience and a Eurological organizing tool of aesthetic inculcators. They will also discuss spiritual and ontological aesthetic healing technologies of reorienting positionalities historically relegated to narratives of victimhood, collective trauma, and hegemonic notions of resistance strategies.
ADMISSION
Free and open to the public
PARKING
- Lot 126 is the closest parking lot to the event
- Parking is by UCSC permit or Park Mobile
- More visitor parking information here.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) is a national and international touring musician, poet, visual artist, and Professor of Composition at the USC Thornton School of Music. Her work speaks to many genres from electronic to free jazz and classical music. Camae's work has been featured at the Guggenheim Museum, The Met, Carnegie Mellon and Carnegie Hall, Documenta 15, the Berlin Jazz Festival, and the Glastonbury Festival. Through the lens and practice of Black Quantum Futurism the art she makes is a statement for the future, as well as a way to honor the present and its historic connections to a multitude of past realities and future outcomes. Camae is a Pew Fellow, a The Kitchen Inaugural Emerging Artist Awardee, a Leeway Transformation Award, a Blade of Grass Fellow as part of Black Quantum Futurism, and a Rad Girls Philly Artist of the Year. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at West Philadelphia Neighborhood TThis colloquium features a conversation between American poet, composer, and USC Thornton School of Music assistant professor of composition Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother) and UCSC Assistant Professor of Music Composition James Gordon Williams.
James Gordon Williams is a dynamic composer, pianist, and cultural theorist. He has worked with artists Crystal Z. Campbell, Maria Gaspar, Fred Moten, Cauleen Smith, Suné Woods. He has performed or recorded with Terri Lyne Carrington, pianist/composer Anthony Davis, bassist Mark Dresser, Joseph Jarman, Gregory Porter, George E. Lewis, Mark Dresser, Greg Osby, as well as other musical luminaries. He held the piano chair for several years in the late Charli Persips’ Supersound band. He has performed at Birdland, the former Lenox Lounge, Knitting Factory, Symphony Space, Village Vanguard, and music festivals around the world in France, Italy, and Malta. He has been commissioned by Syracuse Stage to write music for playwright Kyle Bass’s salt/city/blues. He is the author of Crossing Bar Lines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical Space (2021) published by University Press of Mississippi. His peer-reviewed articles have appeared in Ethnomusicology Review, Jazz & Culture, Jazz Research Journal, Journal of African American Studies, Liquid Blackness, and Music in American Life: An Encyclopedia of the Songs, Styles, Stars, and Stories That Shaped Our Culture.ime Exchange, WORM! Rotterdam residency, and the Creative Capital and CERN collide residency with Black Quantum Futurism.