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AMRC gears up for a packed semester of American music

No-No Boy
The AMRC gears up for a full semester of events, with offerings from a wide-range of American musics.

No-No Boy's Julian Saporiti (pictured left) and Emilia Halvorson will be on campus in residency, culminating with their widely-anticipated concert on Friday, October 11. Saporiti and Halvorson have combined their doctoral research at Brown University to present an immersive, multimedia concert about World War II Japanese internment camp survivors and other Asian American experiences. 

NPR describes No-No Boy as "An act of revisionist subversion," NY Music Daily writes that "Saporiti鈥檚 tunesmithing ranks with any of the real visionaries of this era," and  claims, "No-No Boy鈥檚 work might best be described as an audiovisual soundtrack of the Asian American experience.  This multi-media project of music and archival images takes us on a journey to the stories of our parents, our ancestors and ourselves in ways that we haven鈥檛 yet experienced...armed with scholarship and creativity, to carry forward the discussion around loss, resilience, and identity.

Saporiti will present, "Transforming Scholarship into Song" on October 7.  His presentation will examine how his "No-No Boy Project," which examines musical cultures of transpacific and Asian refugee communities, has turned into a multimedia work incorporating film, photography, museum curation and songwriting.

Dom Flemons
Later in the semester, on November 5, the Center will welcome Dr. Dwandalyn R. Reece from the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.  Dr. Reece will kick-off "African American Music - At the Crossroads" with her presentation about the growing interest in music鈥檚 material culture, the tangible objects that are the material evidence of its existence, and how objects deepen our understanding of music.  

Directly after Reece's presentation that day, and in conjunction with the , is the Black Banjo & Beyond Roundtable, a discussion with Dr. Dwandalyn R. Reece,  ("The American Songster," Grammy Award winner, founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops and pictured right), Johnny Baier (Executive Director of the ), and  (Roots Music Visionary and founder of the Trance Blues Jam Festival in Boulder, now in its 9th year).

Don't miss Cuban Music with Luis Barber铆a on November 6!  Barber铆a is one of the founding members of the legendary Cuban collective  and is a Cuban national music award winner for his albulm, A Full.

To top things off, the AMRC will host "Phantom Carriage" on Sunday, November 17 with the  to celebrate of the recent  gift by Rodney Sauer.  This 1921 silent film tells the story of the driver of a ghostly carriage on New Year's Eve who forces a drunken man to look back at his wasted life and features live music by the  (directed by Rodney Sauer.)

We hope you will join us for as many of these events possible!