Ginger Brooks
Ginger Brooks Takahashi is a transdisciplinary artist and educator. Her performance, installation, and site responsive works examine our relationships to the mediums that connect us. These public projects are platforms for intimate interaction, an extension of feminist and queer praxis. She received her BA from Oberlin College, 1999; and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program, 2007.…
Mark Brooks
Bass
Mark Brooks is one of New Orleans’ premiere bassist. He is noted for his versatility vocally as well as instrumentally. Mark is a protégée of the late great Jazz Master, Alvin Batiste along with several of his close friends Branford Marsalis, Donald Harrison, and Henry Butler. Mark has toured and performed with an array of artists across genres such as Jazz, Blues, R&B, and Gospel.…
Jevon Brown
Jevon Brown is a multidisciplinary artist and designer. He received his BFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2023. Brown’s work explores black masculine kindred barbershops. Artifacts and cultural icons within my environments defy pattern, gravity, family roots, and personal history embedded within each fiber of his hair. He uses textiles to drape storytelling, connecting my Miami and Caribbean ancestry.…
Paul Brown
with Terri McMurray and Chester McMillian
North Carolina
fiddle, banjo, guitar
Paul Brown is an award–winning fiddler and banjoist who offers unique insights into evolving fiddle styles of southwest Virginia and northwest North Carolina
As a young man who’d learned his first songs from his mother’s Virginia repertoire, heimmersed himself in the old, nearly Celtic-sounding fiddle styles of Virginia artists Luther Davis, Parley Parsons and others, plus the stunningly rich Round Peak community tradition of players including Tommy Jarrell, Kyle Creed, Earnest East and Fred Cockerham.…
Lloyd Buchanan
Gospel Choir
Lloyd Buchanan is rooted in Gospel and the Blues. His connection to the Hammond organ began at a very early age in church accompanying his mother.
Elaine Buchignani
Lindy Hop
Elaine Buchignani is a full-time Lindy Hop & Jazz Dance instructor, organizer, choreographer, and program director. She is the co-founder of Swing Dance SCT, one of Seattle’s largest Lindy Hop & Jazz Dance schools, and the co-founder and organizer of Stormy Weather Jazz Dance Festival. She is also the founder and choreographer of Evergreen Rhythm performance team, a group focused on exploring the full range of jazz dance styles. …
Isa Burke
Isa Burke is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, and producer based in Durham, North Carolina (and sometimes in southern Maine). Using electric and acoustic guitars, fiddle, voice, and sometimes other instruments, she creates music that draws from traditional folk, modern indie-rock, and beyond.
Raised in a musical family in Maine, Isa came up through the Northeast’s thriving folk music scene.…
Charlie Burnham
Violin
Charlie Burnham is an American violinist and composer. He has a unique highly imaginative style that crosses genres, including bluegrass, delta punk, free jazz, blues, classical and chamber jazz. He often performs with a wah-wah pedal. He initially became renowned for his work on James “Blood” Ulmer’s Odyssey album. The musicians on that album later performed and recorded as Odyssey the Band, sometimes known as The Odyssey Band.…
George Cables
Faculty
Piano
When George Cables was going to school in New York City he used to walk the streets at night, taking in the cosmopolitan sights and sounds, mentally recording his encounters with “so many different kinds of people.” In his musical career as well, Cables has prowled side streets and main thoroughfares in relative anonymity, absorbing countless influences into his personal style.…
Etienne Cakpo
West African Dance
Etienne Cakpo (he/him) is an award-winning professional dancer, choreographer and musician from Benin, West Africa. He is specialized in instruction and performance of traditional African dance from Benin as well as contemporary African dance styles, and has been building his dance repertoire for nearly thirty years. He is director of Gansango Music & Dance, a dance company registered in Washington State.…