Wait, isn’t the harp a classical instrument? How does that fit into the history and practice of jazz?
Harpist Destiny Muhammad looks forward to telling you all about it in her workshop on Saturday, September 18. Destiny has been inspired by her musical “mothers” Alice Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby to forge her unique identity as a jazz musician and creative artist.
Destiny will share her passion for the fundamentals of jazz embodied in the “standards” repertoire that was her musical springboard, launching her creative journey from performing with her jazz trio to curating programs for the San Francisco Symphony. She recently received a prestigious digital residency grant from Chamber Music America, and the journey continues!
Get a preview of our workshop as Destiny talks with AMN Founder Lolly Lewis about her influences and what she hopes people will take away from the experience.
We know you have all heard the terribly sad news about Oakland Symphony music director Michael Morgan, who died on August 20 from complications of a kidney transplant. Our music community has lost a great musician and tireless advocate. AMN founder Lolly Lewis counts herself very fortunate to have had the chance to work with Michael over the years in various capacities and had come to know – and be profoundly influenced by – how deeply committed he was to making music that not only upheld the highest artistic standards, but that included and energized the local community through his programming. Oakland Symphony’s concerts at the Paramount brought out people from all walks of life. It was thrilling to see how powerfully Michael and the Symphony built those deep connections, resulting in a sense of excitement and shared musical joy through symphonic music.
Michael Morgan was an inspiration and we will all miss the powerful impact of his presence in our music world.
This wonderful profile of a young Michael Morgan was broadcast on ABC’s 20/20 in 1986.
Amos is a San Francisco musician to the bone! Born and raised in San Francisco, he and his violinist brother Perrin were child stars in the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s prep department. Amos has a long affiliation with the San Francisco Symphony, too: He was in the SFS Youth Orchestra when it was first formed, has been a regular member of the Symphony since 2006, and currently holds the position of assistant principal cello. He’s a dedicated chamber musician as well as a passionate educator, and he balances all these musical paths with an avid enthusiasm for sports and the outdoors.
In our two-session workshop on July 10 and 17, Amos will talk about how following an intense program of physical training has made him a better musician.
Get to know Amos in these videos and join us this month to tune up your own musical athleticism!
Amos and Lolly preview the workshop.
Amos talks about growing up in San Francisco, his Chinese heritage, and how music can bring us together and help heal what divides us. Then he and Symphony colleague Charles Chandler perform an excerpt from Bariolage, a work commissioned for them by composer Shinji Eshima.
“Multifaceted” is an understated—and inadequate—word to describe our June 19 online workshop mentor, Candace Johnson. An acclaimed lyric coloratura who has sung the lead roles in “Le Nozze di Figaro,” “Suor Angelica,” and other works, she also teaches applied voice and musicology at UC Berkeley; wrote and performed a one-woman show, “VOX in a BOX,” that fuses her classical training with her Black musical heritage; and created “CJ’s FitnesSing!”, which combines vocal exercises with physical training. In our workshop, Candace will share her deep knowledge of Negro spirituals and invite us to sing them together. The timing is auspicious: June is African American Music Appreciation Month, and June 19 is Juneteenth—the holiday that celebrates the June 19, 1865, announcement in Galveston, Texas, of the end of slavery, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. We reached Candace at her Bay Area home to learn more about her many musical interests and projects.
When did you become interested in music? Did your family encourage you?
I grew up in Jackson, Tennessee, the youngest of six children. Everyone in my family sang well—my mother had a sweet, bright voice, and my father had a nice baritone. I began taking piano lessons in third grade, which was late compared to my peers. My friends had this regimen, and I wanted to be part of it! I started playing classically, but my mother felt it was important to also have the experience of learning to play by ear, which is part of the Black musical tradition. My first teacher taught me some common church improvisations—how to look at a piece of music and play block chords with a ragtime bass. That skill has greatly served me as a singer and a teacher. If you understand a piece’s harmonic underpinnings, it enhances your understanding of how the vocal line is married to that harmonic flow.
My second piano teacher had both classical and Black church experience. He taught me to take a Rachmaninoff arpeggio and stick it in a piece of church music. It was phenomenal training, and I stress it to my students now. They need to know that all forms of music are valid—that the things they’ve been hearing all their lives, whether it’s country or gospel or classical Indian music, are just as valid as what the academy calls “legitimate.”
When did singing enter the picture?
I began singing in our church choir when I was about 7, and very quickly started doing solos. I traveled around the state, singing in churches and participating in telethons and singing competitions, including ACT-SO [Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological, and Scientific Olympics], a national competition sponsored by the NAACP. Through that experience, I had the opportunity to work with Dr. William Garcia, a former voice teacher at Lane College, a historically Black college in my hometown. He exposed me to bel canto and the Western European tradition, and he’s the reason I was able to be admitted to an excellent collegiate music program. My parents came from blue-collar backgrounds and hadn’t gone to college, nor had many others in my extended family. I had my sights set on Vanderbilt University, but a guidance counselor—an African American woman!—told me I wouldn’t get in. Dr. Garcia prepared me for the audition, and I got in.
What led you to start FitnesSing! in 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic?
I’d had the idea for several years: Why not combine my two passions, fitness and singing? I’d taken dance lessons in junior high and high school, and after I graduated from college I became Miss Black Tennessee and did a lot of weight training and conditioning. It fueled something in me, but then I got married, had two children, and gained weight. It was when we moved to New York for a sabbatical and I started taking a class at 24 Hour Fitness in Midtown that I reconnected with movement. When we returned to California I immediately found a gym. It all started to come back!
FitnesSing! became a reality through Stephanie Weisman, the artistic director at The Marsh, which has performance spaces in San Francisco and Berkeley. We’d met in 2019, when I did “VOX in a BOX,” my one-woman show at The Marsh. When the pandemic began, I told her I was frustrated—I had all these ideas but nowhere to put them. Stephanie had just started Marsh Stream, an online platform, and she invited me to bring FitnesSing! there. It’s been wonderful—I have people who’ve been with me since we started. They come for the singing, for tidbits about building a healthy voice, for movement, and for community.
Could you give us a little background about spirituals, to prepare us for the workshop?
From the standpoint of musical structure, the spiritual is a folk music. The melodies are very singable, and the form is strophic: an A part and a B part, very hymnlike in structure. But just because it’s accessible doesn’t mean the spiritual isn’t complex.
The spiritual was born out of enslaved Africans’ experience: acquiring some English language, living under treacherous conditions, using vocal calling as a way of expressing emotions. This is therapy. But spirituals also have a functional value: Look at the coded language in “Wade in the Water” and “Follow the Drinking Gourd.” The only way we’re going to get to the Underground Railroad is to go in the river so the bloodhounds won’t catch us. To follow the Big Dipper in the sky.
There are healing properties in the melody and in the communal singing—especially for me, as an African American singer and a person who specializes in spirituals, but also for all of us.
Any post-pandemic plans you’d like to share?
This Amateur Music Network workshop is the genesis of something I’d like to roll out this summer and fall. I call it the American Restoration Mass Choir, and it would include singers of all races and backgrounds. My vision is to have local chapters throughout the country. The repertoire would center Negro spirituals, and rehearsals would encourage safe cross-cultural dialogue. Once a year we get together for a concert, and we center the spirituals. We’d be doing racial reparations through music.
Are you ready for some rhythm? Our June 12 online workshop, Samba Syncopation, features guitarist Edinho Gerber and percussionist Ami Molinelli, who’ll share their insights into Brazilian music’s complex, infectious beats. We asked Ami—a respected educator as well as a performer—to give us a preview of what is sure to be an exciting hour.
You’re a San Francisco Bay Area native. What drew you to Brazilian percussion?
I grew up in Burlingame in a not-especially-musical family. My father played the accordion—he was semi-forced to, being of Italian descent—and that’s my earliest musical memory. My mother rented a piano for all of us to play, and it stuck with me. I took piano lessons until high school, when I quit. At UC Berkeley, I took a steel-drum ensemble class and an African drumming class, and that’s when I fell in love with percussion.
For workshop participants who may be new to Brazilian music, how would you describe samba? How does it differ from other Brazilian musical styles such as bossa nova or choro?
Brazil’s earliest music is choro. Urban samba, which is both a dance and a musical style, evolved in Rio de Janeiro in parallel with choro in the early 20th century. It derived from samba de roda—roda means “circle” in Portuguese—which originated in Bahia, in the northeast, and ultimately from West Africa.
Brazilian samba is written in 2/4 time signature. The constant 16th-note motion that you hear in a shaker with the big bass drum, the surdo, emphasizes beat 2: It’s the heartbeat of a basic samba. The melodies are a mix of African, Indigenous, and European, often in call-and-response form. The widely known bossa nova is a variation of samba.
The original melody of “Girl from Ipanema,” by Tom Jobim, is very syncopated. One of my teachers, Jovino Santos Neto, once said in a lecture that the Portuguese lyrics to “Girl from Ipanema” have that syncopation while the English lyrics are all eighth notes and don’t reference the melody of the song!
In non-pandemic years, the last weekend of May is when San Francisco holds its Carnaval. How did you mark the occasion this year?
We had a very successful virtual Carnaval! Musicians from all over—the Bay Area, Santa Barbara, Chicago, Brazil—got together to present “Raizes do Choro e Samba” (Roots of Choro and Samba). It was a free online event in partnership with Red Poppy Art House, a small art gallery and music venue in San Francisco’s Mission District.
What else have you been doing, musically, during the last 15 months of pandemic restrictions?
I was very fortunate to receive a San Francisco Arts Commission grant to produce a live performance, Historia do Choro, which I’ve turned into a virtual presentation. I’m also promoting the Historia do Choro album. I’ve been recording from my home studio, and I did a couple of livestreams. Just last month I did my first few in-person gigs—at Rocky’s Market in Oakland, as part of their weekly music series, and at the Healdsburg Hotel. It’s been really lovely to be out again!
