Category Archives: Artist

Bio and photos of the artist

Stan Strickland

Stan Strickland
Stan Strickland in Tabula Rasa’s Sol Sandwich, 2015

Strickland has performed internationally; been featured on recordings of Bob Moses, Marty Erlich, Webster Lewis and Brute Force; performed with notable jazz musicians Yusef Lateef, Pharoah Sanders, Herbie Mann, Danilo Perez, Shirley Scott and Marlena Shaw; and has opened for Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins. He had leading roles in Boston Art Group, Northeastern University productions, and Vineyard Playhouse Productions, has performed and collaborated with choreographers including Alvin Ailey, José Limón and Bill T. Jones.

He was profiled/featured along with Blair Underwood and Lamar Burton in the documentary film Black Man Up, performed at the Sundance Film Festival, at three fashion/fragrance events for fashion designer Donna Karan and at Solstice Sing For Peace.

Strickland has a M.A. degree in Expressive Arts Therapy from Lesley College, where he is an adjunct professor, and also teaches at Berklee College of Music, Tufts University, and Longy School of Music. He is co-executive Director of “Express Yourself”, working in partnership with adolescents in public mental health residential facilities to produce multimedia performances.

Awards

Stan received the Martin Luther King Music Achievement Award from the city of Boston in 1991, The Cambridge Favorite Musician Award in 1994, and an award for Exemplary Service to the mentally ill from the Massachusetts State House in 1996.[1]

Discography

Stan’s jazz vocal CD released by Hawkline Records in 2005, Love & Beauty, features new arrangements of jazz classics as well as original material. He has also been featured on three tracks as a saxophonist and vocalist on Laszlo Gardony‘s 2011 CD, “Signature Time” (Sunnyside) as well as on Laszlo Gardony‘s 2015 CD, “Life In Real Time” (Sunnyside) as saxophonist and bass clarinetist.

 

Bob Toabe – Solo piano and percussion

 

“You should be playing concerts everywhere.” MCCOY TYNER

“Wow, it really transported me…like floating in space. I loved it.” AL FOSTER

“When can we play together?” ANAT COHEN

“Yeah man, I really liked it.” ERIC JACKSON, WGBH

 

BIOGRAPHY – As a young boy Bobby played along the rocky New England seacoast. It was as though the salt air and ocean waves filled him with music, imbuing his creativity with a natural song and rhythm. Even as a child, his prodigious musical improvisation, rich in emotional content, brought recognition and praise from music teachers and concert audiences alike.

 

In adolescence, he ventured from the piano to the study of wind, voice, strings, and a wide assortment of percussion instruments. It was in the theatre however where, as the youngest member of the Boston-based Performing Arts Repertory Company that he developed a poised and potently creative stage, music, and performance style. By high school the ever-industrious teenager found himself forming a variety of eclectic improvisation groups. His sound was influence by a broad range of contemporary jazz, classical, and international music.

 

He listened to Keith Jarrett, Chic Corea, Miles, and Coltrane. However, more than anything else it was his early personal meetings (at age 15) with McCoy Tyner and Pharaoh Sanders that moved and inspired the direction of his music.

 

Today his original and fluid improvisational piano style captures concert audiences with a sound that is rich, sweet, and hypnotic.

 

“What I want most (in my music) is deep and free-flowing emotional content. I want my audience to move with me over the keyboard…letting the music flow through us like a soft sweet breeze, like an ocean wave…seeking expression of our deepest needs, our essential selves.”

 

 

CURRENT TOUR – Bobby is available for touring throughout the 2016 and into the 2018 season.

 

CURRENT RELEASE – IMPROV 1 with Arni Cheatham on sax, HOPE & COMFORT on the Fisheye label.

 

UPCOMING CD’s: INNER VOICE & INSIDE recorded live in concert.

 

DOWNLOADS on CD Baby, iTunes, Amazon, etc.

 

Catherine Musinsky

Catherine Musinsky is a life long dance performer, director and improvisor. She founded and directs Tabula Rasa Multidisciplinary Experiment, and teaches yoga at beinunion.com and private Pilates.

Catherine was featured in a short film about healing through dance and a henna breast tattoo, called UNCHASTENED, directed by Brynmore Williams, that won numerous film festival awards in 2011. Catherine also researches mammals in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.

See Catherine’s art work at katemuse.com and science work at catemuse.com.

 

Jordan Jamil Ahmed

Jordan Jamil Ahmed is a dance and performance artist, writer, and educator from Marion, Ohio living in Cambridge, MA. After graduating from Ohio Wesleyan University under the mentorship of Marin Leggat, he performed with Tim Miller in residence at the New Museum in NYC and co-founded Equal Footing with Kathleen Dalton. More recently he has been creating new work that has been shown at the Dance Complex, the Arts at the Armory, Mobius, and Third Life Studio. Jordan also dances for Peter DiMuro/Public Displays of Motion and Michael Figueroa/Ruckus Dance in addition to collaborating with his dance partner Claire Johannes.

Yedidyah Syd Smart

Yedidyah Syd Smart World Community Through the Language of Music Syd Smart’s life has been a path of using music to create community. He began studies in music appreciation as a child in Cleveland from his mother’s vast record collection. Percussion training came from his father and older brother. Other major teachers include: Chief Bey, Milford Graves, Makanda Ken McIntyre, Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon, Babatunde Olatunji, Steve Barrios, Ibrahima Camara, Jose Luis Quintana/”Changuito”, Angel Sanchez/”Cepillo” and Deraldo Ferreira. Syd majored in Music Education at Central State University and in 1973, received a Black Music Fellowship to teach and study at Bennington College in Vermont, where he completed his B. A. Degree. He was the founder of “Friends of Great Black Music”, a Boston based organization established in the early 1970’s to support local artists involved in the music in the African and African-American Diasporas. Syd is co-founder of Boston’s annual John Coltrane Memorial Concert, now in its thirty-fourth year and the world’s oldest living tribute to this master. Syd has extensive experience composing for dance and with Joan Green, he co-founded the “Children’s Dance Project” which eventually expanded to become the “Cambridge Performance Project”. a city wide performing arts program. Syd was awarded a “Dance Belt Award” by the Mayor of the City of Cambridge for constant and long standing support of the movement arts community. With Stan Strickland, Syd annually co-conducted “Sound and Movement in Nature”, a workshop offered by the Expressive Therapies Division of Lesley University. In 1992, Syd was a resident performing Artist at the World Exposition, “Expo 92”, in Seville, Spain. While there, he also began curriculum development of an Integrated Thematic Unit on Andalusian culture for third and fourth graders in the Cambridge Public Schools. He was part of a team of curriculum developers for a soon to be published curriculum that integrates African Drumming with mathematic concepts. Syd holds a Masters Degree in Education from Lesley University and has taught instrumental music in the Cambridge Public Schools. He was the Education Manager and Learning Center Director for Mars Music, a a national retail chain and largest provider of private music instruction in America. Syd’s performance experience includes: Karamu House, Art of Black Dance and Music, Rod Rodgers Dance Co., Boston Art Ensemble, Sam Rivers, Bill Dixon, Jimmy Lyons, in Spain With Juan Oliva, Angel de Jesus, and in Africa with the “Kampala Jazz Allstars. Syd is most recently known for his work with Stan Strickland and “Express Yourself”, New Language Collaborative, Samba Viva, Ann Silverman Band, The Teffilah Band of Beth El Temple Center, and action painter, Nancy Ostrovsky.