Michele Rosewoman is a New York based performer and composer originally from Oakland. She is a pioneering pianist who has expanded the horizons of jazz while remaining firmly rooted in Afro-Cuban tradition with a career spanning more than four decades.
Never an artist to stay idle, Rosewoman has continued to be inspired and active even as live gigs have been cancelled this year. In August, she took part virtually in the Festival Timbalaye 2020 in Cuba. She also received a commission from Jazz Coalition in New York to create new work on her musical reflections of the times, as well as pay tribute to the race equity movement. Rosewoman’s new music, “Something Holy Hovers” is composed around two poems Rosewoman wrote. The music is being written on solo piano with vocals and spoken word, which is a departure from her typical repertoire which is usually presented in trio, quintet, and in her New Yor-Uba Ensemble made up of 12 musicians. As she says about the recents developments in her artistic career, “So much has changed and is changing in the world right now. Sometimes some very interesting creative things come from the fact that you broke your cycles and your patterns.”
Rosewoman’s MusicLab workshop hosted by CMC on Thursday, November 12 will take participants through a process of unlocking the secrets of improvisation and creative expression through looking at rhythmic concepts rooted in Afro-Cuban music. Her workshop will give participants a chance to develop their own musical ideas, with Rosewoman’s guidance and expertise. Part demonstration as well, the workshop will take participants into Rosewoman’s artistic process where she demonstrates how her immersion in Cuban folkloric musical traditions has informed her inventive and pioneering compositions. She’ll also demonstrate some of the rhythmic concepts that great jazz players like Lee Morgan and Thelonius Monk used and connect those ideas to Latin jazz.
The workshop will have something for all levels of players, offering beginners inspiration about the possibilities for improvisation and intermediate and advanced players techniques to unlock their creative and compositional possibilities.
MusicLab Workshop: Expression with Afro-Cuban Music with Michele Rosewoman
Thursday, November 12, 5:30–7:00pm
$10 CMC students, seniors, & faculty
$15 general admission