Digital APAP and globalFEST 2021: Silver Linings and Nimble Pivots

For the performing arts in America, two key annual events last month, the Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP) Conference APAPNYC.org and globalFEST’s Festival combined with their Wavelengths Conference excelled in leadership for the coming year. Their digital format achievements were praiseworthy and inspirational.

Their combined operative words in these uncertain times are resilience, adaptability, and equity.  Despite the Covid-19 pandemic that has forced the cancellation of almost all live concerts and related conferences worldwide for the foreseeable future, both organizations took full advantage of advanced internet communications: for greater, expanded outreach opportunities in live or pre-recorded formats.  Both organizations conducted their events for the first time in their histories as virtual internet events.

APAP’s new President and CEO Lisa Richards Toney addressed attendees: 

This time together has been invigorating, it has been igniting. This is not the end. We are not returning to business as usual….This is the beginning to engaging more equitably, to advancing the field as the richly diverse ecosystem that we are, to building forward with anti-racism as our lens, to addressing the climate crisis, to centering the voices of Black, Indigenous, and all people of color, to better visa and immigration policies, to outdoor programming, to resilience and mental health, to recovering in an altered touring landscape, to public health and re-opening, and to the art of going virtual….We’ve got work to do. But we have imagination to uncover and promises to uphold. We are just getting started. We are stronger together, and we are worth it.

APAP’s 64^th annual global performing arts gathering brought together thousands of arts professionals from 49 U.S. states and 30 countries. The conference featured more than 1,000 live streamed performance showcases, a virtual EXPO Hall, professional mentoring, and a multitude of networking meetings.

Continuing APAP’s tradition of collaborative discussions with groundbreaking scientists, educators, and performers, the opening and closing plenary sessions were outstanding.  They gave much-needed hope and greater anticipation for the coming months with their practical and philosophical advice and observations.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Chief Medical Advisor to President Joe Biden, addressed attendees on Saturday, January 9, in a dialogue on “Public Health and Re-Opening the Live Performing Arts” with Maurine Knighton, Program Director for the Arts of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, in which he provided practical solutions for the performing arts to re-open—from using venues as vaccination sites to enlisting performers in public campaigns to studying venue air flow. (Video highlights of Dr. Fauci’s remarks can be viewed here.)

What the performing arts needs to do is what the Germans in studies of virus spread within performance spaces] are doing,” Dr. Fauci explained, “They have these HEPA filters on planes. It’s not a big deal to make investments on industrial-sized HEPA filters for theaters. I think you could do a test that it is quite safe.” His advice to the industry: “Don’t give up. Help is on the way in the form of a vaccine. Continue to implement the public health measures that work, and we will get out of this. It will get back to normal. We’ll be back in the theaters; performers will be performing; audiences will be enjoying it. It will happen.

On Tuesday, January 12, 2021, APAP featured a conversation with the visionary artist and humanitarian Yo-Yo Ma, classical cellist and founder of the Silk Road Ensemble. The 18-time Grammy award-winning cellist and UN Messenger of Peace summarized his views for the role of the arts in the COVID crisis.

Today, as you wrap up your sessions, I’m thinking of all of you as helpers. Because helpers respond to need. Helpers give hope…. In whatever way that we can, all of us can help in one way or another. For me, since I play an instrument, I was really trying to Zoom into hospital rooms when possible, go on a flat-bed truck with my buddy Emmanuel Ax, and playing for delivery people and school children and elementary schools. It’s whatever one can do.

One of the things I’ve discovered is there is community beyond what I know is my community. Suddenly, you see another version of friendship and relationship. In fact, maybe deeper than the ones we enjoyed prior to COVID…. For the [performing arts] presenting organizations, you are scouts for society. You can scout around and find who is saying something that is maybe important. Who can see over the ledge and actually see the dangers ahead? Or the beautiful things ahead? It’s that role of arts organizations…that’s really, really important in order for everybody else to stay resilient.

An Artist’s Digital POV: Mark de Clive-Lowe

 I was wondering what artists were thinking about growing internet performance options.  The electronic jazz pioneer and acoustic pianist Mark de Clive-Lowe held an online masterclass on January 12th — “Breaking It Down” — billed as “A free workshop covering setup/equipment, workflow, and creativity insights.”  I watched the action. There were flurries of comments by loyal DJ mates and fans from all over the world who tuned in to his technically-oriented session, spliced with his musical interlude flights.

He later commented: 

Plenty of people complain that a live stream “just isn’t the same as a live show”. My point is that yes, it isn’t the same, and that’s a positive. A live stream is a different experience to an in-person live show and one could draw parallels to theater vs television or the gramophone vs a concert stage. Each progressive technology related to entertainment has offered something different, and none of them take away from whatever already existed before them. In a post-pandemic world, there’ll still be live streams and zoom meetings, and the technology powering it all will only get better and better. In an industry with many already challenged by the costs of touring pre-covid, and the environmental impact for those considering that, live streaming offers so many options. It isn’t there to replace the in-person live experience, it’s a whole other medium that personally, I’m excited about.

globalFEST Opens Up Newer International Vistas

globalFEST represents a form of cultural resistance in America — a discourse deeply cognizant of and sensitive to the world’s diverse voices.  And, far too often ignored by mainstream media’s limited focus. There is an abundance of the world’s great expressions of creative humanity. globalFEST discovers them all. 

Usually held during the APAP conference, globalFEST’s two annual events, their festival showcase and Wavelengths conference, gained flexible online time frames extending to the end of January. Well-planned and curated with “pivots” (that buzz-word all over the net now) from the live to the digital, this year’s editions were enjoyably upbeat, easily accessible, innovative and inspirational. Above all, there was a virtual up-close immediacy, not afforded in crowded hotel conference rooms or packed club spaces.

globalFEST’s festival attracts a few thousand attendees each year.  But this year  brought unexpected digital audience reach well beyond a single festival night in a New York City club environment over 3 floors. By collaborating with NPR’s Tiny Desk, the organizers presented 4 one hour long evenings with pre-recorded sets by 16 international artists,  and hosted by the ebullient African superstar, Angelique Kidjo, January 11-14. 

There was an explosive growth of online viewers, averaging at last count close to 50,000 viewers each night. One of the co-founding producers, Bill Bragin, noted: “What started as a contingency alternative plan turns out to actually be an improvement….One of the great outcomes of online is that it’s by definition an international and not local event now.”  

globalFEST has always promoted equity in their broad curatorial choices — racial, ethnic, gender, and balanced geographic styles/genres.  They encompass traditional and folk, popular and experimental.  This year was no exception.  

There was the contrast between two wonderful artists with North American Indigenous heritage:

Always a joy to experience, Appalachia’s Martha Redbone, is the brilliant Native American and African American singer, composer, story-teller and educator. She uplifted with her soulful vocals punctuated by her rhythmic percussion and accompanied by Aaron Whitby on keys and guitarist Marvin Sewell. She spoke and sang of the urgent need now for peace and prayer with beguiling grace.

Montreal-based Nunavik Elisapie, a fierce advocate for the First Nations of Canada, held a suspenseful continuum with her band’s burning rock undertow, a growling jazz sax, and incessant drum beats.  She surprised and exhilarated at once with her quietly understated, yet riveting stage presence .

Over the past few years, Mali’s ever elegant and impassioned Rokia Traore has been delving into the centuries old Mande tradition sung by some of Africa’s formidable jelimusow (women griots renowned for their powerful, declamatory style).  Accompanied by the ancient West African balafon and ngoni instruments mixed with guitar, bass, and drums — in gentle repetitive ostinato phrasings —  her vocal work soared and shimmered as she sang classic praise songs. They laud historic leaders of great courage, strength, and moral integrity.

Tunisian Emel Mathlouthi, known for her anthemic songs in defense of human rights dating back to the Tunisian Revolution (December 2010 – January 2011), sang two introspective ballads, despairing over the injustices against the oppressed.  Her set harked back to the righteousness of 60s folk stars Dylan and Baez.  She was accompanied by second guitar Karim Attoumane, the French producer and arranger.

The most startling and novel group, Japan’s Minyo Crusaders, are on a mission to revive an old Japanese folk (min’yo) tradition — a “people’s music” originally sung by fishermen, coal miners, and sumo wrestlers.  Min’yo is a full band of two vocalists, Freddy Tsukumoto and Meg, along with guitar, keys, bass, bongos and drum machine, timbales, congas, sax and trumpet. Their music often co-opts Latin, African, and Caribbean rhythmic styles, adding dash and exhilaration to the Japanese pentatonic scale and tonalities.  Their 3 song set moved from Afrobeat to a moody, yearning bolero, and finally a bouncing cumbia.

Almost half of the globalFEST lineup gave focus to U.S. based groups. America’s vast diversities.  Due to increasing and prohibitively costly artistic visa restrictions as well as looming Covid travel hurdles for potential buyer-presenters here, it made sense to highlight local talent resources.   

Brooklyn-based Sofia Rei, the delightful Argentine vocalist and songwriter, sparked South American folk songs with her mercurial ability to mix in jazz and electronic pop textures to her set.  Her band’s guitar, bass, keyboard, and electronic programming amplified and enhanced the traditional instruments, charango, cuatro, and rattles.  It’s hard to sit still, watching her dance and groove along to her music.

Living in Los Angeles, the Aditya Prakash Ensemble, has created a most unusual and joyous sound. Mr. Prakash, trained in classical Carnatic music, skats and sings his melodies in collaboration with his long-time jazz musician friends —  piano, upright bass, guitar, trombone and drums.  His last song transformed a devotional bhajan into a celebratory mood, worthy of a modern Bollywood hit song.

The Dedicated Men of Zion, North Carolina’s rousing family gospel band, fronted by a gruff but sweet four man harmony, recorded their presentation in their backyard, as a Southern barbecue oven smoked away in the air. Their punchy blend of sacred and Memphis R&B soul is thrilling and infectious. The musicians are all excellent: the wailing organ-keyboard player with bass and lead guitars, drums, grip the music with fevered energies.  They will make you want to get up and jump. 

Nora Brown, a poised 10 grader from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and an impressive banjo player, seems to have an intense fascination with Appalachian banjo history — East Kentucky and Tennessee.  She’s been ‘bitten by the banjo spirits’ as West African ngoni players (the banjo’s ancestor) might say, and it’s a treat to watch her play. It will be interesting to see how she develops as an artist.  Whether she continues to reinterpret her mentors and legends of the past. Or carves out her own “voice” and compositions.

There were a plethora of even more artists from Algeria, Peru, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Ukraine, Italy, and Guinea.  Watch all the nights and pick your favorites.  That’s part of the globalFEST serious fun.  In about 15 minutes per set, you have a carefully juxtaposed and condensed view of just what each artist is about.

Explore or rewatch all four nights of “Tiny Desk Meets globalFEST” at these links:

Night One Here | Night Two Here | Night Three Here | Night Four Here

Wavelengths: Inspiration, Fortitude, Culture

One of globalFEST’s many contributions in service to North American world music professionals is their annual Wavelengths: Global Music Conference. It took place over Zoom on Friday, January 29  and Saturday, January 30.  At the link you will be able to view all the panel discussions and conversations on current and timely issues facing the international music ecosystem. A great part of this year’s Wavelengths’ organizational and production success was due to the collaboration with THE OFFICE performing arts + film, headed by its founding director Rachel Chanoff and her dedicated team.

There were many stimulating conversations and panels by leaders, supporters, and community members.  Here are just two of them: 

Emil Kang delivered the opening keynote address.  As  the Program Director of Arts and Culture at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, he leads their grant making program that seeks to nurture exceptional creative accomplishment, scholarship, and conservation practices, while promoting a diverse and sustainable ecosystem for the arts. 

The following are excerpts from his talk, although listening to his full delivery at the Wavelengths link above summarizes his long and richly informed experience as a leading arts administrator in America.

We must… assess, recognize and address the inequities of our practices, thinking deeply about who has access to philanthropic resources, who has a seat at the table. And what equities are inherent in our proposal processes.

Moreover, we must work across the ecosystem of our field to support equitable practices for artists, managers and agents of color, creative producers, presenters, staff and board members of color, so that we can support communities with the entire ecosystem in mind. We must consider the players that influence our ecosystem, including elected officials, regulators, even community development financial institutions.

As I mentioned, we at Mellon announced our new strategic framework centering equity and justice this past June. As part of our framework… we must understand and address the limitations of the traditional funder grantee model, as well as the nonprofit model.  We are exploring ways to support individual artists collectives, mutual aid societies, and even for profit entities, if we are to truly address the issues of equity as a funder….

We seek a proliferation of experiments and programmatic and business models in the arts that aim to be more equitable and inclusive, working at the intersection of arts and community.

We seek a world in which artists have greater agency to act as the vital social conscience… And perhaps most importantly, we seek to foster an artist-centered society, one that we know will drive us toward a more just and equitable world. Artists will be the ones to lead us there…. I mean centering artists as human beings with a great deal to contribute to our world. It’s not just artistic output that propels us forward… Seeing the world through their practice, artists exemplify and teach us the importance of curiosity, empathy, and righteousness….

This is our way forward.  And we are seeing the impact already, globalFEST 2021 being just one example. While the past year has been devastating, we have seen tremendous innovation in the making and programming of art, development of new business models, partnerships, and even contractual agreements.

Another highlight was the  virtual globalFEST 2021 Awards Ceremony, the celebration and recognition of outstanding individuals in the global music field. Get to know about them all at the Wavelengths link above.  The winners this year are: 

• globalFEST Artist’s Award – Meklit
• globalFEST Impact Award – Serdar Ilhan and Mehmet Dede
• globalFEST Trouble Worldwide Award – Alison Loerke
• globalFEST Pioneer Award: Ismael Ahmed

Rarely bestowed, the Pioneer Award goes to a member of the world music community of performing arts professionals considered a pioneer, whose work has had a significant, far-ranging impact.  No one is more worthy than “Ish” Ahmed.  

When you watch and listen to his Wavelengths recognition ceremony, you will be in awe about his career and major achievements in Michigan and beyond.  He’s a true cultural activist, unfailingly kind, courageous, wise, and brilliant.  Among his many career milestones, he’s known for his co-founding work with the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS); creation of America’s first and only Arab-American National Museum in Dearborn; and establishment of Detroit’s massively popular Concert of Colors.  

And, tune in to one of the hippest radio music programs in America, Ish’s “This Island Earth” on Saturday evenings. His playlists are ultra cool, bitingly intense — spliced with his modest sense of restrained humor. He has the gift of jumping continents and styles as a DJ, making it all coherent, joyful.  Extraordinary.

Here are excerpts from his stirring comments:

You know, what are the things that you can learn? I learned early on. I learned three lessons. The first of them is, you don’t do anything by yourself.  You know, you get the credit for what you do, all of us do. But it takes hundreds of people, thousands of people, to change this world and to make it better.  And it takes hundreds of us to put on the Concert of Colors or to do a radio show like This Island Earth that I do with Detroit Public Radio. It took tens of thousands of people to start the Arab Community Center for Economics and Social Services. It took thousands of people to walk off the line when we challenged racism in auto plants. And all of you know that the truth is that all of the festivals we do, the bookings we do, the performances we do, don’t just come out of our heads, but it comes from us working together.

When I was a young man, I lived in a neighborhood where 42 languages were spoken in two and a half square miles.  It was an immigrant community that fed a plant that had 90,000 workers. It was the biggest industrial complex in the world. And I used to sit on the porches of those older workers who had nothing except their little houses or their pensions. And they would tell me about organizing the steel plants; they would tell me about organizing United Auto Workers.

The thing that I learned from them is that every meaningful reform that’s ever taken place in this country, whether it’s social security or unemployment, or Medicaid — and I can go down the list — happened because it came from the bottom up.  Thousands of people coming together to make change. Yes, we have leaders.  Leaders are important, but without the people the regular folks were nothing.  And so, I honor them. The thousands of working people that feed us and make things happen. And in our industry, the people who do the sound and the tech and take the tickets and… set up the road trips.  And so, so many other things.

The other thing that I learned was that there is a place for all kinds of music in the world. My father moved to Detroit from Brooklyn, New York. Yeah, I’m from Brooklyn. I once tried to cross the Canadian border, and they said to me, “Where do you come from?” I told them, “Brooklyn”.  (They meant, what country do I come from?)  And so, we moved to Detroit when I was five years old to open up an Egyptian record store because he loved Egyptian music. We lived across the street from a confectionery.  You could cross the street and hear rock and roll [there]. There were kids with pointed shoes and ducktails and bobby socks, dancing… At my dad’s store, it wafted Oum Kalthoum and Arabic music…  And you could go to the middle of the street and hear both coming together.  I would stand there sometimes and say, “I want to be that.”  I meant both things at the same time. To be able to grow up and be with a community of people who have fought for a place, for the whole world to be our environment, to be our world.  And more importantly for the whole world to be in it with us is amazing.

And so, I really want to thank Bill, Shanta, and Isabel, because I know they made the decision for this award. But more importantly, for all the work that they have done in the field. You truly are the leaders of this work.  And I want to thank my wife again —  Margaret, come up. Margaret’s a musician, percussionist and singer.  She’s been in umpteen bands and helps out with the Concert of Colors, but more importantly, “together”.  

The last thing that I want to talk about, the last lesson for all of us, is that we’re interdependent.  We depend on each other for everything. Tonight, I’ve heard the word “community” used over and over again here.  That interdependence not only means that we rely on each other and support each other, but together it creates a fabric that can be unbreakable.

This is a pivotal period in the life of America, in our world.  It’s being decided today. What forces will win. We all saw what happened at the White House. But it’s only a small projection of something much more sinister out there, and it’s not a single man that’s responsible for racism and hatred and classes, but it’s a whole system of that.  As I watched globalFEST today, you can see that there is a transformation going on.  All of us have been working in the field around these questions, but you can see it starting to culminate in something that will truly make a difference.  

I really really look forward to working with you, my brothers and sisters.  To use the most powerful weapon of culture. To change this world. Finally, I want to leave you with this: Let’s work together for peace, love, and most of all justice. We’re all brothers and sisters.  Let’s take care of each other.

The conference finale Fireside Chat led by Chicago-based music journalist and Beat Latino radio host, Catalina Maria Johnson, with NPR’s Bob Boilen (NPR’s All Songs Considered and Tiny Desk series) and Felix Contreras (NPR’s co-creator and host of NPR’s Alt.Latino) was a fitting end to globalFEST’s Wavelengths 2021. They explore their curatorial choices and moments of musical wonder and discovery.  Watch it with its sense of memorable longevity — as we look forward to the coming months’ unfoldings.