Afro Yaqui Music Collective

Part of this performance will include brand new material titled A Reading Erased: a poetic imagining on the life of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, by Magdalena Gomez.

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, was a historian, writer, and activist. Schomburg was a Puerto Rican of African and German descent who moved to the United States and researched and raised awareness of the great contributions that Afro-Latin Americans and Afro-Americans have made to society

The Afro Yaqui Music Collective is a postcolonial big band which imagines a world where many worlds fit. The band is part of the legacy of the asian-american composer-activist Fred Ho, and their music draws from mainstream jazz, the avant-garde, and traditional forms from both Africa, East Asia, and American Indigenous nations. At times aggressive and caustic, it is deeply engaged in ongoing struggles for social justice and revolution. The Afro Yaqui Music Collective has been acknowledged by the New York Times as “furthering the musical legacy,” and the band has been presented at an eclectic set of venues over the country, including through Lincoln Center and Red Rooster in Harlem, the Free Library of Philadelphia, Vibrato Jazz Club in Los Angeles, and universities around the Americas from Pittsburgh to Vermont, to Mexico and Cuba. The collective is a site of several intercultural and transnational collaborations, working with musicians, poets and dramaturgs from Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, Chicago, Brooklyn, Wisconsin, and Pittsburgh.