In celebration of its 20th Anniversary, Yerba Buena Gardens Festival has engaged 20 Bay Area artists in a series of “mini-commissions” to delve into the process and creation of performing art around the themes of Endurance, Hope and Community. The 2020 Endurance, Hope and Community Commissions were collaboratively curated by YBG Festival Director of Programming Marcelo Avilés and arts consultants Cristina Ibarra and Preston Justice.
The 2020 artists and their projects descriptions are below.
Bio
Project: Untitled
“The work created and potentially showcased is a look into the many aspects of the Black woman. This woman is the culture keeper, the worker, the nurturer, hyper-sexualized, epitomized, the innovator, the community organizer, the mother-daughter-sister-friend, the storyteller, the source, and the backbone of humanity. The many realms in which a Black woman is made to exist within is hidden, as she walks through the world with determination, know-how, strength, and resilience. Through movement, music, and spoken word, witness hope, feel connected in community, acknowledge the endurance, and celebrate the magic that this woman possesses.”
Website
Project: Untitled
“After thinking about the theme of “Endurance, Hope, and Community” it inspired me to think about the very first rhythm I learned on conga drums; a West African rhythm from Ghana called Kpalongo. As a student at Southwestern College in San Diego, I learned from an African Master Dancer Akaaya Atule and percussionist professor Todd Caschetta whom showed me a “community” dance and rhythm. I don’t think there’s a better concept to think about, when thinking about the word ‘endurance’ and not think of the influences of rhythms from Africa. African rhythms have endured beyond geography, cultures, molded musical genres and transformed rhythms in our History forever; and continue to today. I’d like to revisit this rhythm and create a new composition for my band Cabanijazz Project. The lyrics would talk about hope, community, and endurance to say the least. The song would be danceable, I believe would unite many diverse cultures, ages, and languages since it would be in African languages, Spanish, and perhaps a little English as well.”
Bio
Project: Untitled
“For this Yerba Buena Gardens Festival mini-commission, I want to utilize the funds toward the completion of a currently untitled music project I am working on. This project will focus on me primarily as a pianist, composer, band leader, and lyricist. It will be centered around musical collaborations that feature a traditionally jazz piano trio format of acoustic piano, bass, and drums. There will be notable featured vocalist and other instrumentalists as well. The musical concept is to provide my unique expression and be an extension of the jazz piano trio concept as established by such greats I’ve studied and emulated as Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Oscar Peterson, Ahmad Jamal Mulgrew Miller, to contemporary pianist like Robert Glasper, Gerald Clayton, and Sullivan Fortner. As a rapper and modern hip hop influenced pianist, I feel I can add a distinctive voice to this format. My approach will be to combine elements of the golden era as well as modern Hip-Hop with other traditional Black music styles such as R&B, soul, Oakland funk, and jazz. The themes will be love, community roots, nostalgia of golden era black music, community connection, modern interpretations of popular music, and original compositions that honor home. Words that come to mind are roots, entrenched, remembrance, memoirs, and recollection.
The goal would be for this project to come out during the first quarter of 2021. The funds from this grant will go towards studio cost and musician fees. The rest of the project is currently being self-funded.”
Bio
Project: I Still HEART San Francisco
“I Still HEART San Francisco will be part exploration of queer love in San Francisco, part celebration of this city that has transformed so drastically over the years and how both have been forever changed by the COVID 19 Pandemic. My project will mix writing, visual art, comedy, and performance to present stories of how to love a city when it needs it the most, and whether I can stay connected to love during a terrifying virus and keep it sexy. I will illustrate the stories, each illustration will be projected onto a screen to perform the stories live at Yerba Buena Gardens, or virtually online if the pandemic lasts forever. The performance will be recorded and turned into an online video for the community to watch whenever they want. The illustrated stories will be printed in a small book or zine.”
Website
Project: Table Birds
“Mahjong is a tile-based game developed in China. It’s now a widely played game that requires equal amounts of attention and luck. Beyond the game skill, strategy, and a certain degree of chance, Mahjong has also become a tradition of gathering. Families and communities come together to bring life to spaces, with each Mahjong player bringing their own backstory to the table. In fact, Mahjong has developed as a medium of socialization mixed into strategies and outcomes often resembling the fortunes and misfortunes of our own life experiences. Through the exploration of this game, this project, in the form of a short film, will present a handful of interconnected stories centered around the swirling tiles of Mahjong. With the game’s required 4 players, 4 distinct characters will represent the various personalities surrounding my life growing up.”
Bio
Project: Untitled
“The YBGF 2020 Mini-Commissions project funds will be used to support the process of writing and presenting a new 3 song solo EP (Extended Play) to be shared with the Bay Area community and beyond. I will embrace the aspect of “Community” as I currently take online language classes that will expand my song-writing skills to incorporate the ancestral Lushootseed language of my Coast Salish peoples into each original song of the EP. The project will also be representative of “Endurance” as I, and many artists, continue to adjust to provide high-quality online performance in this time of gathering via Virtual event spaces. I will especially hold on to “Hope” with the opportunity and ability to keep creating new music while in quarantine and expanding on my knowledge of melody by both acquiring an Industry-Standard professional recording microphone and an 88 key (weighted) Digital Piano. This equipment along with the works created will be used to perform an in-progress and/or completed 3 song solo EP for YBGF audiences over Zoom . . .”
Bio
Project: If Hope Were A Dream
“I will use the Yerba Buena Garden Festival’s commission to create and record an original composition entitled If Hope Were A Dream. Using a combination of live spoken word, audio interview clips, piano, bass, drums, strings, and a small vocal ensemble, I will create a sonic texture that brings the listeners into a dream-like, meditative state. The composition will seek to create a juxtaposition between inner spaciousness and commentary on our present climate as we imagine our future – together. I will record my composition at the 25th St. Gallery in Oakland, CA.”
Website
Project: Untitled
“This project will create a multimedia video experience highlighting themes around resilience, adaptability and creativity. Using digital storytelling, members of Orchestra Gold will describe how we are adapting to the current changes to the arts and the economy that exists around those arts.The primary output of this project be a video that
will highlight not only the element of music-making (i.e., the song) but the entire ecosystem of skills,talents and perspectives (i.e., video editing, songwriting, recording, digital collaboration, promotion) that are now required to thrive as musicians in the new world. It will feature music for a new Orchestra Gold song, interviews with key band members, and a discussion of how we are responding to the current changes in the arts landscape. The impetus is to use video as a means to “storytell” not just how we are enduring. Most importantly, we want to highlight why we are more hopeful about the future now than ever. Ultimately, the project highlights the opportunity for growth, healing and evolution that the present moment provides for ALL of us.”
Project: Untitled
Mi inspiración en el primer álbum de Changui de “Sentimiento y Manana” a sido dedicado sobre todo a el lugar donde crecí y donde me forme hasta el hombre que soy hoy en día. En el CD tratamos de darle un mensaje claro y profundo sobre que es el Changui, especialmente en el Area de la Bahia. Ademas las canciones dentro de nuestra primera producción Changuisera, es que el publico bailador y oyente de la música folklórica, tradicional, y popular Cubana de nuestra area reconozcan e identifiquen el ritmo del Changui, Kiribá, y Nengon y otros ritmos de derecho publico. Totalmente basado en el Changui autóctono de la zona de Yateras en la provincia de Guantanamo Cuba, en el mismo hago mención a los viejos changuiseros de mi batey, y otros temas de situacion social de hoy en dia. Lo primario es conservar las tradiciones y Cultura de mi barrio el Central ” La Isabel” muy serca de Yateras en la provincia de Guantanamo Cuba.
“My inspiration in Changui first album of “Sentimiento y Manana” has been dedicated above all to the place where I grew up and where I was trained to become the man I am today. In the CD we try to give you a clear and deep message about what Changui is, especially in the Bay Area. In addition, the songs within our first Changuisera production, is that the public dancer and listener of Cuban folk music, traditional, and popular in our area recognize and identify the rhythm of the Changui, Kiribá, and Nengon and other rhythms of public rights. Totally based on the autochthonous Changui of the Yateras area in the province of Guantanamo Cuba, in it I mention the old changuiseros of my batey, and other issues of the social situation of today. The primary thing is to preserve the traditions and culture of my neighborhood El Central “La Isabel” very close to Yateras in the province of Guantanamo Cuba.”
Bio
Project: Untitled
“This commission would support the production/presentation of my untitled debut work – an EP of five songs that blends R&B and experimental acoustic/electronic elements. The EP focuses on a narrative around queer sexual identity and the political and personal journey one takes in breaking societal norms. The EP is currently a work-in-progress and financial support is needed to finish recording and mixing the project.”
Marcelo Javier and Rodney Earl Jackson Jr.
Website
Project: Love You (Like We’re 6 feet Apart)
“COVID-19 hit the world like a ton of bricks. A halt to our conditioned realities, in these hardest of times. Collectively we looked to our cultural healers: arts and expression. As BATCO co-founders, we turned to what we knew, our first love, music.
Combined with a desire to explain to our 3-year-old nieces while trying to reconcile our own hopes for the future, we wrote the song: Love You (Like We’re 6 feet Apart). The main theme is expressed in the chorus: I want to live in a world where people are free to love who they love and freely speak from the heart. All I wanna do is hold you close in my arms, but for now, I’m gonna love you like we’re 6 feet apart.
Our nieces didn’t really seem to grasp what was going on. They knew something was off, but couldn’t quite put their fingers on what it was. It was heartbreaking seeing their confusion, and frustrating that as a society we collectively weren’t taking it seriously. We asked ourselves, “what is the most compassionate thing someone can do right now?” and we landed on staying 6 feet apart from each other.
This partnership with YBGF has afforded us the opportunity to create a professional recording of the song. We are excited to collaborate with the YBGF to bring the song’s message to the Bay Area and beyond.”
Website
Project: Untitled
Director Marcus Shelby: “As Director of the Teen Jazz Orchestra, I am developing a musical suite about the Covid-19 and racial justice uprisings that unfolded in Spring and Summer 2020. The process involves working closely with the Teen Jazz Orchestra throughout the Covid 19 quarantine exclusively on line—both individually and collectively. The musical goal is to collect the various stories and experiences our young people are living through while we navigate through these uncertain times. Every story will be different and I imagine our young creators are learning about life through a lens that requires a lot of self-reflection. Some of the themes explored include silence, repetition, unresolved uncertainty, social distancing in relationship to suffocating isolation with family, fear, masking, breathing, dying, hoping, sudden changes, and reinventing one’s self and imagining a better world. There are also the “unknowns” of our current dilemma that are yet to come and will be included in our thematic material. Unknowns such as will there be several waves of this virus? Will a cure be found? Will we be affected personally by this virus? As the director, I engage the Teen Big Band weekly, encouraging an awareness of how music has historically intersected with key moments and how to channel the extraordinary into a musical diary. The importance of the music we perform hinges on the ingenuity and creative minds of our young people who will be better stewards of the planet than past generations. This is why I have chosen to work with these young creative artists specifically in guiding and inspiring me to write new music for this moment. The completion and performance of the piece will be linked to the resuming of in person rehearsals for Teen Jazz Orchestra.”
Bio
Project: All This
“All This is a multimedia piece through which I share the moments that brought me joy and hope during times of confinement and personal loss. The piece includes musical compositions and abstract film as well as collected audio clips from friends, family, and my surroundings and recorded conversations with my grandmother.”
Artist’s Social Media
Project: Untitled
“I am writing a semi-autobiographical TV pilot that is currently untitled. It is a coming of age dramedy centered on Rose Ali’i, a 30 something woman rebuilding a healthy life on her own terms. The series begins in London with Rose escaping a toxic relationship and ending an engagement to an Englishman. Rose returns to a heavily gentrified Bay Area homeless, jobless and forced reckon with strained relationships with friends, family, and most importantly, herself.
Catapulted back into her childhood home, Rose must grapple with her past and face her own toxic behaviors. Rose’s journey of self-discovery is fraught with internal conflict but her sister and best friend are there to catch her and call her out. The series explores themes of gentrification in a rapidly changing Bay Area, race, culture, trauma and recovery.”
Social Media
Music Video
Project: Chuparrosa
“I am currently working on creating a song to memorialize and document the work done around the murder of Sean Monterrosa by the Vallejo Police Department. The song is a son jarocho, an afro-indigenous style of music coming from Veracruz, Mexico. It necessitates the bicoastal collaboration between myself and Victor Murillo in New York. It will be accompanied by a visualizer documenting the actions and demonstrations done in the name Sean Monterrosa against police brutality and in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. I hope to garner as much attention with the roll out of this song as possible and field all energy and interviews to the Monterrosa sisters, Michelle and Ashley. This grant will help me carve out time to record the song, compensate my collaborator, hire a videographer and editor, and get the song mixed and mastered. It is important, now more than ever, that the music and art we from our diverse city of San Francisco reflect the radical struggles for racial and class justice we are engaged in. Thank you for your support!”
Bio
Project: UA EO KA PO I KE AO (Day has triumphed over night)
“Many Hawaiian chants and prayers were composed to welcome the new day. The rising of the sun indicated that day had triumphed over night.
“Sunrays touching everywhere, moving across the land. Bringing warmth. Bringing Light. Bringing life to us all.”
The ability to manifest change, growth, and release all begins with a new day. With each dawn comes the potential to create the life you want to live. With the recent presidential election, I feel a renewed sense of hope, that we as a nation, as communities, as individuals can activate this potential into reality. We begin this actualization by honoring the rise of the sun through ancestral commemoratives of prayer, chants and dance. These ceremonies will take place in several locations throughout San Francisco and Hawai’i involving over 100 practitioners. With the official start of the Makahiki upon us, we partake in this season of peace, feasting and rejuvenation by honoring the potential each new day brings. For my project, I plan to create a short film (5-8 minutes) of the experience.”
Social Media
Project: Untitled
“Through poetry and conversation, I would like to recreate the echoes of past codifications of struggle in San Francisco, as synthesized by talks with the revolutionary artist and Black Panther Party member, Emory Douglas, and my pedestrian observations of San Francisco in this period of (hopefully only the tail-end) of the abandonment of militant politics. I am interested in the dual resonance of places. Interested in how history pronounces itself when its contemporary incarnation is materially muted. When the cultural machinery has withered. I want to explore what cultural synthesis is actually in charge of the modern mass imagination.
It will be a simple process of taking my conversations with Emory and throwing them in the pot with my analysis of current San Francisco. Then seeing what poems make their way passed the lid. While I am familiar with many radical narratives. I am looking for both story and energy that can only be experienced through dialogue. Both the peeling back of decades as well as the returning of those layers back over those historical events, investigating the modern socioeconomic crust of sites of historical struggle should produce art that is hopefully is helpful for the pan-generational efforts of art and resistance.”
Bio
Project: Lakbai Diwa Spirit Dance
“Lakbai Diwa Spirit Dance is a cultural ceremony honoring our ancestral belief system of spirit boats as a vessel between the corporeal and the spiritual realm. It is a vehicle for communing with the spirit world and for traversing the transitory state between life and death, and life, again. The 10 participants carry offerings of rice, flowers, and herbs in hard-carved 2 ft. boats as they procession. With bamboo sticks, they honor the power of the oar to navigate the journey to the state of transcendence and the soul’s journey to its new becoming. A 14-spirit boat festooned with 101 prayer flags with written prayers, names of ancestors, intentions and requests is carried around the perimeter of the ceremonial space. It is an indigenous practice of the living honoring the spirit of the dead called by Christians as All Souls Day “
Bio
Project: Ghadar Geet: Blood and Ink
“Ghadar Geet: Blood and Ink is a Bhangra dance/spoken-word exploration of the Ghadar Party and intersections with contemporary acts of resistance. In the early 1900s, my great-grandfather lived in San Francisco and was the president of the Ghadar Party, a political party fighting for the independence of India from the British. Ghadar Geet: Blood and Ink overlaps the political action of the Ghadar Party with present-day activism, linking the party’s strategic diversity with today’s uniting of minority movements, as well as the centering of class and anti-capitalism. This work features spoken work and collaboratively-created music that is based on the writings of my great-grandfather.”
Bio
Project: The unpolished suite song #3: “pandemic awakenings”
“Concept: To record a few of my original songs first created on “The acappella app“ during the first 6 months of the 2020 pandemic for my Instagram followers. Every song was an improvisation that took less than five minutes to record and could only last up to 30 seconds. For this project I will re-listen to each song, select a few and arrange them to be recorded as full-length versions. The music speaks of love, hope, doubts, fear, the ever presence of the ancestors and the welcoming of the future through the lens of what I call The Five Keys: Love, Truth, Vision, Joy and the value of practicing Self Care.”
This program is supported in part by:
