At Harlem School of the Arts:

J.D. Parran, winds, percussion, and Ewart handmade/invented instruments; Brian Smith, contrabass, Ewart handmade/invented instruments; Douglas R. Ewart, composer, winds, percussion, and Ewart handmade/invented instruments.

At the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa:

Ndikho Xaba, piano and percussion; Madala Kunene, guitar; Sazi Dlamini, strings, percussion.

Coordinators (New York): Daniel McVeigh (Teachers College, Columbia University, and MARCEL) and the team at Harlem School of the Arts: Oamien Agans-Oliha (Technology Manager); George Madarasz  (IT Coordinator, Programs); E. (Mesiyah) McGinnis (HSA Theatre Artistic Director); Imo Nse Imeh (Director, Visual Arts Department); with the coordination of Lydia Jerez, HSA Senior Director of Programs

Coordinators (South Africa):  Jasper A. Cecil, Director, Audio Visual Division, University of KwaZulu-Natal; Mahomed Sheik, Production Coordinator, Audio Visual Centre, University of KwaZulu-Natal.

About Sazi Dlamini Sazi Dlamini grew up on the rural south coast of KwaZulu-Natal where, as a child, he participated in an a cappella choir and learned to play (tin) guitar. After matriculation, he studied for a short while engineering, then medicine. After dropping out of both fields he began to study music formally at the age of twenty-seven. After obtaining a Diploma in Jazz Performance and a Bachelor of Music degree in Jazz Studies, he was awarded a Master of Music degree cum laude by the University of Natal in 1999, and since then has been reading towards a PhD on South African jazz in exile.

Dlamini is an ethnomusicologist, PhD student and part-time lecturer at the University of KwaZuluNatal. He has also taught at Rhodes University's Department of Music and studied Musicology at Cambridge's St John's College. Sazi Dlamini has a certificate from the UKZN African Music Project for teaching and performance in the genres of maskandi. gumboot, indlamu, and Nguni musical bows, and also studied in the genre of isicathamiya choral a-cappella under Professor Joseph Shabalala (of Ladysmith Black Mambazo). He builds and teaches various southern African instruments. 

Sazi Dlamini is the leader of the township jazz band Skokiana and has performed as guitarist with Hugh Masekela, Abdullah Ibrahim, the NU Jazz Connection, Zanusi, and many others. As a composer he has worked on the South African version of Sesame Street. Dlamini has composed music for the films Sky In Her Eyes (2003) and Ikhaya/Home (2004). Yinkosi Yeziziba, composed in collaboration with Prof Jiirgen Brauninger of UKZN, and performed at Stuttgart, has been chosen by the International Society for Contemporary Music for performance representing South Africa at the World New Music Days in Switzerland in November 2004. 

About Douglas Ewart For over 35 years, the multi-voiced artist Douglas R. Ewart has been active as composer, improvisor, sculptor and maker of masks and instruments. Born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1946, Ewart immigrated to Chicago in the United States in 1963. A member of the experimental music collective, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), since the late 1960s, Ewart now serves with flutist-composer Nicole Mitchell as the organization's chair. Ewart is known as a master builder and craftsman. His 1987 U.S.-Japan Creative Arts Fellowship enabled him to study both contemporary Japanese culture and the traditional Buddhist shakuhachi flute, as well as presenting public performances, notably with fellow shakuhachi master Akikazu Nakamura.  His cornucopia of handmade flutes, reeds, and percussion instruments are featured in many of his pieces, including one of his signature works, “Music from the Bamboo Forest." Ewart's sculptures, sound sculptures, and handcrafted masks have been exhibited at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Most recently, his collaborative work, "Rio Negro," using computer-controlled motorized chimes and rainsticks, was exhibited in 2007 at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston.

Ewart's well-known sonic and visual work,  “Crepuscule," is a celebration of sunset, bringing together diverse musical groups, dancers, artists and activists in a collective composition.  The work, which uses invented percussion instruments built by Ewart from everyday objects such as crutches, oars and skis, is performed annually in Chicago's Washington Park, as well an in other US cities. A special version created for the Banlieues Bleues Festival in Paris was aimed at uniting the city's diverse inner city youth communities.

Ewart has traveled, studied, and performed throughout the US, the Caribbean, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Latin America, with artists as diverse as Muhal Richard Abrams, Amina Claudine Myers, Rita Warford, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, Alvin Curran, Anthony Davis, Robert Dick, James Newton, and Henry Threadgill.  His mastery of woodwinds, flutes, and saxophones have also found expression in his work with his Clarinet Choir, and his diverse projects under the banner of Douglas R. Ewart and Inventions. He has twice received the Bush Artists Fellowship (1997 and 2007), as well as grants from the Minnesota Composers Forum/McKnight Foundation (2004 and 2007), and Jerome Foundation grants. He has been in residence at the Naropa Institute, and other important performances have taken place at the Contemporary Art Center (New Orleans), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Abraham Merkin Hall, the Public Theater, the Kitchen, and Carnegie Hall (New York). He has led workshops and lectured at Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, the Banff Center for the Arts, and the Smithsonian Institution. Since 1991, Ewart has served as Adjunct Full Professor, at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in the departments of Liberal Arts and Sound.

For more information on Douglas Ewart, please see http://www.bambooewart.net

About Madala Kunene

Known to many simply as Bafo, Madala Kunene has been making music since the age of 7.  Kunene's first guitar was made from a cooking oil tin, with fish gut for strings. Busking on the streets of Durban, he soon became a popular performer in the townships. As a player for the African Wanderers Football Club, the teenage Madala was torn between his love of football and music, playing guitar at home after matches.

Widely recognized as “King of the Zulu Guitar," Madala Kunene has recorded as a solo artist, as well as collaborating with many highly acclaimed musicians, such as Sipho Gumede, Robert Doc Mthalane, Moses Taiwa Molelekwa, Mandla Masuka, Baba Mokoena Serakoeng, Max Lasser, Syd Kitchen, Greg Georgiades, Ashish Joshi, Busi Mhlongo, and Mabi Thobejan.  He has performed throughout Europe and Scandinavia, and in 2003, he composed the score for the Oscar-nominated South African film “Yesterday” - the first ever full length feature film in the Zulu language.

For more information on Madala Kunene, please see http://www.melt2000.com

About Ndikho Xaba 

About Daniel McVeigh

Daniel McVeigh is a Ph.D candidate in Computing, Education and Cognitive Science at Columbia University's Teachers College, under the direction of Professor John Black.  Since 1987 Daniel P McVeigh has focused on providing aesthetic and computational/network support for people who are geographically separated and wish to communicate both formally and informally. His research has examined the role of the artist in a technological society, and his  exploration of Issues in human-computer interface design includes efforts to transcend language barriers through the use of “conversational props,” online painting, underwater and above-ground robotics installations, and network music festivals in telecollaboration with artists in Ireland, Denmark, France, Spain, Brazil, Japan, Canada and the US.  McVeigh has implemented projects such as the Ocean of Know, Twilight Studios' “Art In The Dark," the Electronic Café @The Kitchen, The Knitting Factory and Nuyorican poets Café in New York City, and an interactive telecommunications lab at Viacom. 

Most recently, McVeigh has developed "Young McDonalds Farm," a telerobotic farm built by teachers and students.  For this project, McVeigh designed and developed computer-based system simulations to teach concepts in mathematics and aquaculture science. These simulations have been the focus of several cognitive science studies in NYC's Bronx Public Schools, and leading to a major collaboration aimed at rethinking the way Aquaculture is taught in the US by land grant universities. Projects and research funding for his projects were provided by Bell Labs, Bellcore, Nynex/Verizon, Pac Bell, MCI, Motorola, MTV Networks, Nickelodeon, Viacom, and the New York Department of Education, among others.

For more information on Daniel McVeigh, please see http://www.oceanofk.org

About MARCEL
 

Daniel McVeigh is a member of MARCEL (Multimedia Art Research Centres and Electronic Laboratories), an international, non-profit consortium dedicated to maintaining a permanent broadband interactive network and web site dedicated to artistic, educational and cultural experimentation, exchange between art and science and collaboration between art and industry.  MARCEL's mission is:
   
* to promote artistic experimentation and collaboration in all forms of interactive art    
* to promote philosophical exchange between art and science    
* to develop the potential of the network as an educational tool    
* to study the network as a pedagogical subject    
* to develop co-operation between art and industry    
* to participate in the development of cultural expression on the network

Today's performance of Technodiaspora is a MARCEL project, which is defined as "an activity involving two or more members using the MARCEL Network to fulfill its aims.  Projects are based on artistic co-production in all artistic disciplines, technical projects working to make the network space function better for its members, art- or science-related projects such as archiving, authors' rights, research and education questions, or other kinds of programs.

For more information on MARCEL, please see http://www.mmmarcel.org/about.htm

Commentary on Technodiaspora

Critical race cybertheorist Alondra Nelson has observed that "racial identity, and blackness in particular, is the anti-avatar of digital life." Certainly, the life and work of Cheikh Anta Diop, the Senegalese radiologist and national hero whose radical historical interventions resonated fiercely across the Afrodiaspora and beyond, provided strong evidence that the technological is hardly incompatible with African histories. 

Another powerful counternarrative to both genre typing and technophobia was articulated in the 1960s by a group of cosmopolitan black musicians of the 1960s, including Charles Stepney with Minnie Riperton, Eddie Harris, and Muhal Richard Abrams. These musicians, despite a lack of institutional or foundation backing, were nonetheless early adopters of real-time electronic music technology to the extent that their resources allowed.  By 1966, saxophonist Harris became one of the first musicians in any field to seriously experiment, in concert and on records, with the new real-time music technologies. Working several years before his better-known colleague, Miles Davis (who recorded Harris's "Freedom Jazz Dance"), Harris forged a trenchant connection between advanced electronic music techniques, extended acoustic instrumental technique, and down-home funk, recording pieces with real-time electronic sound processors such as the Varitone, a so-called "octave divider" that synthesized parallel octaves above or below the pitch of a horn, and the Echoplex, an early tape-based delay line noted for its portability.

In 1967, Abrams, the co-founder of the African-American experimental music collective, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), documented the first example of his long engagement with electronics. Each of the three pieces on Abrams's first recording, Levels and Degrees of Light was awash in dense studio reverberation. In the same period, legendary Chicago producer Stepney drew on the work of Russian musician and polymath Joseph Schillinger and American composer Henry Cowell in his innovative articulation of a form of “black psychedelia” between 1967 and 1971 with the Rotary Connection and the brilliant singer Minnie Riperton; hear, for example, Stepney’s unusual and ironic version of Otis Redding’s “Respect.

Drawing in part upon historical scholarship such as Diop’s that asserts historical and cultural continuity between the technologically advanced civilizations of ancient Egypt and the contemporary black diaspora, today's Afrodiasporic artists reject the notion that electronics can be rigidly raced, and that any entry into the medium by African-Americans necessarily constitutes inferior imitation of white culture, economic opportunism, and/or general racial inauthenticity. As Alexander Weheliye has maintained of the post-1990s R&B generation, “even though numerous cultural discourses have done their best to authenticate and naturalize the soul of black popular music, the musical practices themselves frequently defy these authenticating mechanisms by embracing new technologies, hybridities, and self-consciousness about the performative aspects of soul.”

Thus, what we find in today's performance is a twinned practice of cultural mobility with self-determination that is designed to encourage the young people of Harlem School of the Arts to research these and other histories of black technology to enable them to draw from any source, to deny any limitation whatsoever.

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