Three Rivers Jenbe Ensemble at the Cafe

Posted by admin on Feb 16, 2012 in Frontline, News & Events, TRJE Blog | 0 comments

TRJE comes home to Acoustic Cafe

The three Rivers Jenbe Ensem­ble will per­form live at the Acoustic Spo­ken­Word Cafe on Feb­ru­ary 25, 2012. The evening will begin at 7PM and close out at 10PM. TRJE, as the ensem­ble is pop­u­larly known, per­forms an inter­pre­ta­tion of the tra­di­tional dunun and jenbe drum ensem­ble of the Mande-speaking peo­ple of Guinea, West Afrika.

This group of stu­dents has been play­ing together the last three years, tak­ing over from the grad­u­at­ing ensem­ble mem­bers who pre­ceded and trained them. It has long been an artis­tic prac­tice of the Three Rivers Jenbe Ensem­ble to have the qual­i­fied stu­dents teach their peers. The mem­bers have from six to ten years expe­ri­ence with the ensemble.

The ensem­ble has recently per­formed at Wash­ing­ton Cen­ter Ele­men­tary School and the Friendly Fox Cof­fee­house.This per­for­mance marks the first time the ensem­ble has per­formed in its own space for more than a year.

The Acoustic Spo­ken­Word Cafe is hosted at TRIAAC, 501 E. Brack­en­ridge Street. The cost of admis­sion is $5.00. For more infor­ma­tion call TRIAAC at 260 96909442.

Fabulous Jenbe kids on new drums

Posted by admin on Jan 21, 2012 in Blog, News & Events, TRJE Blog | 0 comments

TRJE blend Ibo Ekwe with Guinean Krin drums

Three Rivers Jenbe Ensem­ble bring new flavors

The Three Rivers Jenbe Ensem­ble Sat­ur­day night reprised its ini­tial per­for­mance at the Friendly Fox Cof­fee­house on Fort Wayne’s South Side with a rous­ing per­for­mance that warmed patrons despite the intem­per­ate weather that blan­keted the region with a few inches of heavy snow. Bring­ing their reg­u­lar tra­di­tional Guinean dunun and jenbe drums inter­pre­ta­tions of the music of the Mande-speaking peo­ple of West Afrika, the ensem­ble for­ti­fied their instru­men­tal range with the addi­tion of the Niger­ian Ekwe and Guinean Krin drums.

The ensem­ble is recrut­ing stu­dents inter­ested in learn­ing about the Afrikan her­itage in Amer­i­can music. For more infor­ma­tion call TRIAAC at 260 969‑9442 or hit the but­ton and fill out the audi­tion appli­ca­tion and email to triaacexad@comcast.net.

Nellems Trio and Linda Bess on tap at the SpokenWord Cafe

Posted by admin on Jan 20, 2012 in Blog, News & Events | 0 comments

Good music meets thought­ful words

Jazz, Soul & Spo­ken­Word at the Acoustic Cafe

The Bryan Nellems Trio will open the show at the Acoustic Spo­ken­Word Cafe on Jan­u­ary 28, 2012. The recently formed ensem­ble fea­tures Bryan Nellems on drums, Phil Shurger on lead gui­tar and Marco Franco on bass. The trio will be doing jazz and soul cov­ers as well as debut­ing some orig­i­nal work by Nellems and Franco.  This up and com­ing trio is mak­ing its mark in the world of music and doesn’t appear to be slow­ing down any time soon; so keep your eyes and ears open for what’s next to come for the Bryan Nellems Trio. 

Poet Linda Bess will read new and res­ur­rected work that explores iden­tity, reflec­tion, addic­tion, love, hate, and life. She finds her way through poetry that explores her iden­tity of being female, Asian-Caucasian, and Amer­i­can. She turns to her past to find answers through explor­ing pho­tographs, quo­ta­tions, and artis­tic work of oth­ers to cre­ate poetry, as well. Her expe­ri­ence of being a recov­er­ing alco­holic, hav­ing chronic pain, and being bipo­lar leads her on a path from mak­ing grave mis­takes to find­ing new life in sobri­ety and health. By explor­ing the par­a­digms of love and hate in every­day life, her work begs for answers that all of us seek – why too often through suf­fer­ing we must fight to find light.

For infor­ma­tion about the Acoustic Spo­ken­Word Cafe, call 260 969‑9442 or email aswc_triaac@comcast.net. See you there!

SpokenWord Cafe featuring AfroDisiacs

Posted by admin on Jan 2, 2012 in News & Events, SpokenWord Blog | 0 comments

2012 Cafe opens with AfroD sound

Hot con­gas and vocal gui­tar are thrilling

If you lis­ten to WBOI’s music roundup you’re bound to hear that the Afro­Disi­acs is play­ing some­where in the region. One

Afro­Disi­acs bring­ing the funk

of the Fort Wayne’s most sought after duos, the Afro­Disi­acs fea­tures William Brown on con­gas, and Mike Rogers on gui­tar; the part­ners bring seduc­tive vocals to their orig­i­nal mte­r­ial and covers.

The Fort Wayne, Indi­ana based group has an inter­est­ing story… What started out as a two-piece acoustic show, evolved into a group per­form­ing shows as a four-piece AND a two-piece. Quite fre­quently at that. The two-piece fea­tures a world/soul/acoustic sound, includ­ing orig­i­nal songs, as well as ren­di­tions of cov­ers, giv­ing that fresh Afro-D sound. The four-piece, on the other hand, fea­tures a more jazz/funk/fusion feel, involv­ing mostly all originals!

The two-piece will be on tap Sat­ur­day, Jan­u­ary 14, from 7-10PM. Admis­sion is $5.00. Afro­Disi­acs hopes to share their love of music with every­one, and begin an out of town tour, com­ing soon!!!

Opening 2012 at the SpokenWord Cafe

Posted by admin on Jan 2, 2012 in News & Events, SpokenWord Blog | 0 comments

2012 Pow­er­house Duo opens Cafe

Fatima Wash­ing­ton at the Acoustic Spo­ken­Word Cafe

Sat­ur­day, Jan­u­ary 14 the Acoustic Spo­ken­Word Cafe opens the sea­son with two incred­i­ble Fort Wayne tal­ents: the allur­ing Fatima Wash­ing­ton, and the dynamic Afrodisiacs.

Fatima opens Spo­ken­Word Cafe

“Before fame, pho­tographs, and tabloids, there is tal­ent.  And Wash­ing­ton has it — the kid of voice the ear fol­lows through wind­ing scales…It’s both soft and pow­er­ful filled with the echoes of R&B and soul pio­neers such as Aretha Franklin and Patti LaBelle.” –Emma Downs, The Jour­nal Gazette

She’s a reg­u­lar at Blu Tomato. She’s opened for nation­ally known acts. Now, the allur­ing ly soul­ful Fatima Wash­ing­ton is bring­ing her voice and charisma to the Acoustic Spo­ken­Word Cafe, in down­town Fort Wayne.

After tak­ing off four years to attend col­lege, Fatima made up her mind to pur­sue music full time.  At home in Fort Wayne, Indi­ana, Fatima started singing back­ground vocals on var­i­ous stu­dio record­ings for Sweet­wa­ter Sound.  Most recently, Fatima has opened for Bobby Valentino, the SOS Band, Adina Howard, The Whis­pers, Paul Anka, Ty Causey, and sung along­side Tony Award win­ner Heather Headley.  Addi­tion­ally, Fatima has toured New York, Cal­i­for­nia, Chicago, Atlanta, and var­i­ous parts of Europe, includ­ing Paris, leav­ing indeli­ble marks at every event.

 Fatima recently released the first sin­gle, Fool for Love, off of her yet to be titled debut CD.  Fatima has a strong hand in the evo­lu­tion of her CD work­ing with pro­duc­ers such as Michael John­son, DJ Polaris, and Eclipse. 

 In a short time, Fatima has gone from just another young per­former to hav­ing her own night at The Blu Tomato every Sat­ur­day, Fri­days at The Legion Post 148, local recog­ni­tion, and this is only the begin­ning.  “Fatima Wash­ing­ton was once shy.  You’d never know it to see her on stage now… to hear her these days is to real­ize that the wall­flower has most cer­tainly bloomed.”  (Sean Smith, Fort Wayne Reader).    With the tal­ent that she pos­sesses this singer/songwriter is well on her way to suc­cess in the music indus­try.  She’s just wait­ing to be in the right place at the right time doing the right thing in front of the right people.

TRIAAC New Year Schedule

Posted by admin on Dec 31, 2011 in Frontline, News & Events | 0 comments

Open­ing the way

New sched­ule opens more learn­ing opportunities

“A peo­ple los­ing sight of ori­gins are dead. A peo­ple deaf to pur­poses are lost.”–Ayi Kweh Armah..

It is wise to return to ori­gins to retrieve what has been lost

“Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi”–Akan Proverb

Trans­la­tion: “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten.”

In his intro­duc­tion to two thou­sand sea­sons Armah tells us that hav­ing lost our way it would be most appro­pri­ate for us to go back to our ori­gins to redis­cover what went awry along our path to the present so that we might use our intel­li­gence and insight today to cor­rect it. The Akan of Ghana refer to this process as Sankofa, retrac­ing one’s foot­steps along life’s path to see what has been lost or for­got­ten that would be of use today. Of course, the human path is one that walks back­wards recall­ing the expe­ri­ence of our ancestors.

And so as we enter 2012, TRIAAC is retrac­ing its course to deter­mine what has been lost that might be regained through ret­ro­spec­tion and applied to today’s envi­ron­ment and expe­ri­ences. We began with the con­scious prac­tice of re-membering our Afrikan past for our­selves and chil­dren, and apply­ing the energy of that quest to mak­ing music and incit­ing move­ment, both phys­i­cal and intellectual.

At the cen­ter of the prac­tice is the Malinke dunun and jenbe ensem­ble that is a fam­ily of tones and rhythms that com­bine to make a sin­gu­larly dis­tinct music rep­re­sent­ing the strength of Mande cul­ture and famil­ial tra­di­tion. The sym­bolic, social, polit­i­cal and spir­i­tual val­ues of that cul­ture as it has been extended through its many mas­ter­ful prac­ti­tion­ers since the 1960s, has been rooted in Fort Wayne for more than a decade now. 

In launch­ing our pro­grams for the third quar­ter, TRIAAC has sought to make this har­monic and rhyth­mic prac­tice avail­able to more chil­dren and adults. Hit the “Sched­ule” but­ton to down­load a .pdf file of our third quar­ter schedule.  

Sched­ule And con­tact us with any ques­tions you may have by click­ing the con­tact link. 

For Love of The Arts

Posted by admin on Dec 30, 2011 in News & Events | 1 comment

Cel­e­braing Women in Word & Song

A cel­e­bra­tion of women in word & song

TRIAAC pro­gram ops fundraiser set for March 3

Artist Judy Chicago said it well: “I believe that it is cru­cial for women artists to sit­u­ate our­selves in the con­text of our own gen­der, class and eth­nic his­to­ries and strug­gles rather than in rela­tion­ship to male histories.”

No doubt! Art is soul expres­sion iden­ti­fy­ing the life force of the human being through whom it is trans­mit­ted. That’s why in bring­ing the city city of Fort Wayne a Women’s His­tory Month cel­e­bra­tion we’ve asked three phe­nom­e­nal women to rep­re­sent their gen­der, class and eth­nic his­to­ries. On March 3rd, from 7:00 to 11:00PM, Carol Lock­ridge, Indiana’s Blues Woman of 2010, Sunny Tay­lor, Fort Wayne’s amaz­ing folk and Amer­i­cana singer-songwriter, and the insight­fully soul­ful Erika Mar­tinez, a West Coast poet and essay­ist will light up the C2G Music Hall, on Baker Street. Down­town Fort Wayne is going to rock!  

Amer­i­cans didn’t pub­licly cel­e­brate women’s his­tory until 1978. It began as a weekly cel­e­bra­tion in Sonoma County Cal­i­for­nia, encom­pass­ing Inter­na­tional Women’s Day on March 8. In 1981, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Rep. Bar­bara Mikul­ski (D-Md.) co-sponsored a joint Con­gres­sional res­o­lu­tion pro­claim­ing a national Women’s His­tory Week, and in 1987, Con­gress expanded the cel­e­bra­tion to a month-long recog­ni­tion of women’s his­tor­i­cal role in the the country’s development.

Women’s role in the arts also was over­looked.  Even with the harsh oppres­sion of slav­ery days Afrikan women managed–sometimes at their own peril–to pre­serve the cul­ture of their ances­try and artic­u­late both their strug­gles and hopes in their own words and images. In cel­e­brat­ing women’s con­tri­bu­tion to our cul­tural iden­tity, we cel­e­brate the best in ourselves.

Join us on March 3rd. Click the but­ton for ticket infor­ma­tion.Tick­ets

Taking drumming to the bank

Posted by admin on Dec 26, 2011 in Blog, Frontline, News & Events | 0 comments

Drum­ming in the New Year

Re-membering what strength­ens our souls

You can­not relive a moment that has passed but you can recall its vital­ity and bank its emo­tive strength as both inspi­ra­tion and reference.

Drum­ming is an act of re-creation that is both inspired and ref­er­en­tial. We came into the world as liv­ing souls with the drum­ming heart­beat of our moth­ers resound­ing in our preter­nat­ural ears and res­onat­ing in our cells as our bod­ies formed in the womb. When we began drum­ming with Three Rivers Jenbe Ensem­ble in 1999, it was a way of cen­ter­ing and fix­ing iden­tity that was based on strength­en­ing fam­i­lies and grow­ing chil­dren with the under­stand­ing that they were beau­ti­ful, cre­ative, and meant to be free. The jenbe and dunun were sym­bols of that free­dom and instru­ments for their cre­ativ­ity. Now, of course, TRJE has grown into TRIAAC but iden­tity and fam­ily exten­sion remain at the institute’s core, and the pri­mary sym­bol and instru­ment for lib­er­at­ing cul­tural expres­sion here at TRIAAC remains the drum.

When Afrikans were brought to the Amer­i­cas our lan­guage, musi­cal instru­men­ta­tion, sense of time, rhythm and move­ment came with us. In these new places in the Amer­i­cas we fash­ioned the drums we had left behind, and soon our cap­tors grew wise to our com­mu­ni­ca­tion. In many places through­out Amer­i­cas slaveoc­racy they out­lawed our play­ing of the drum, and in some instances even made its play­ing a legal pro­hi­bi­tion. Play­ing the drum was both a form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and a marker of resis­tance to oppression.

We play the drum today with the echo of the past resound­ing in our beings, under­stand­ing that in our hands is an instru­ment for revi­tal­iz­ing the human spirit, and call­ing a peo­ple men­tally van­quished back to them­selves. This is a time for recall­ing peo­ple back to them­selves from the clutches of the plutarchy who have seized our national vitality.

Drum­ming is a com­mu­nity action that opens pos­si­bil­i­ties of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and action. Join us…

Drum Line, Circle Up

Posted by admin on Dec 20, 2011 in Blog, Frontline, News & Events | 2 comments

Iden­tity Counts drum­ming connection

There is a ses­sion right just for you

To para­phrase Kool Moe Dee, self knowl­edge is king. Clearly, no infor­ma­tion is as impor­tant as know­ing who you are . Cul­tural under­stand­ing teaches that the drum (heart­beat) is at the core of any cul­ture. So we’re work­ing to learn more about our­selves through the prac­tice of Mande drum­ming in com­mu­nity circle.

Fam­ily is the matrix of Afrikan social struc­ture, and fam­ily isn’t nuclear but extended. From this exten­sion comes a strength of iden­tity that informs us who we are in rela­tion, and what our respon­si­bil­i­ties are to fam­ily and com­mu­nity. We extrap­o­late this social order to the drum cir­cle. We posi­tion our­selves in a cir­cle so that each indi­vid­ual has a clear view of those with whom she sits the cir­cle. There is both a secu­rity and an account­abil­ity in this for­ma­tion that is lib­er­at­ing — once the indi­vid­ual is able to relax and let go of their crit­i­cal self judgement.

Through our decades of work with young peo­ple and adults, they have taught us how to facil­i­tate their learn­ing. Effec­tive instruc­tion is cul­ture spe­cific and indi­vid­ual, yet, at its core, is the col­lec­tive. While we are teach­ing the cul­tural music tra­di­tion of another peo­ple, we are learn­ing through the lens of Amer­i­can cul­tural per­cep­tion. The facilitator/learner assumes the respon­si­bil­ity for com­mu­ni­cat­ing clearly (though not nec­es­sar­ily ver­bally). They must manip­u­late and wit­ness the expe­ri­ence of the moment to the ben­e­fit of the stu­dent. It is the facil­i­ta­tors respon­si­bil­ity to see and hear each stu­dents com­fort level and effect ways of assist­ing them to inte­grate their momen­tary expe­ri­ence. The result is a height­ened aware­ness and under­stand­ing that iden­tity counts.

TRIAAC will offer Iden­tity Counts drum­ming for learn­ers at all lev­els begin­ning in Jan­u­ary, from pre-school to adults of all ages. Why? We have expe­ri­enced the ben­e­fi­cial effects of com­mu­nity drum­ming first-hand, and wit­nessed its impact on the youth and adults with whom we have worked. The tra­di­tional Afrikan drum­ming prac­tice that’s hap­pen­ing at TRIAAC is a com­mu­nity build­ing expe­ri­ence. Drum­ming within a cir­cle of learn­ers strength­ens self-confidence, opens doors to becom­ing a bet­ter lis­tener, and facil­i­tates left-right brain synchronization. The ben­e­fi­cial effects of drum­ming, rhythm and sound have been val­i­dated by health care pro­fes­sion­als around the world as stress reduc­ing and won­der­fully revi­tal­iz­ing for mind, body and soul.

In our own prac­tice we have found that Mande drumming:

• Pro­motes active listening
• Devel­ops team spirit and ensem­ble skills
  
• Builds self-confidence
• Improves tol­er­ance and respect
• Fos­ters height­ened feel­ings of well-being
• Increases phys­i­cal strength through aer­o­bic exercise
  
• It improves musi­cal abil­ity, tim­ing and hand-ear coordination
  
• Enhances cul­tural aware­ness 

Come drum with us on Wednes­day evening, from 6:00 to 7:30PM. Not to worry if you don’t have a drum, we have authen­tic hand-carved Guinean jenbes that you can use. We’re located at the cor­ner of Brack­en­ridge and Clay streets, In Fort Wayne, IN.

Hit the “Iden­tity” but­ton to learn more. 

Acoustic SpokenWord Cafe & Open House

Posted by admin on Dec 5, 2011 in Blog, News & Events | 0 comments

Hol­i­day gathering

Greet­ing com­mu­nity with joy

Date:   Sat­ur­day, Decem­ber 10, 2011

Open-House: 4-7pm

Acoustic Spo­ken­Word Cafe: 7-10pm

Loca­tion:   TRIAAC, 501 E. Brack­en­ridge Street, Fort Wayne, IN

The Three Rivers Insti­tute of Afrikan Art & Cul­ture will host an Open-­house with din­ners avail­able for $5.00. Come and enjoy deli­cious food, mini-workshops, demon­stra­tions, arts, crafts, and more! The Open-house will be fol­lowed by the Decem­ber Acoustic Spo­ken­Word Café fea­tur­ing dynamic singer-­songwriter Megan King and a Drum Cir­cle led by Ketu Oladuwa. Round­ing out the evening will be a Poet’s Open Mic. Spread the word!

Come for the food and fun, stay for the soul stir­ring enter­tain­ment!

For more info visit triaac.org.