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.

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.

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!

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!!!

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.

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. 

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

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…

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. 

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.