Mixed Race Studies

Half-Japanese, half-Ghanaian brothers sing about prejudice they faced

The Mainichi: Japan’s National Daily Since 1922
2017-03-26

Hiromi Nagano, Los Angeles Bureau

The Yano Brothers, from left, eldest brother Michael, middle brother David, and youngest brother Sanshiro, are seen in Los Angeles, on Feb. 22, 2017. (Mainichi)

LOS ANGELES — Three half-Japanese, half-Ghanaian brothers who moved from Ghana to Japan as young children and grew up experiencing prejudice and feeling they were different have put their experiences into song.

Forming a musical unit called the Yano Brothers, the three men, born to a Japanese father and a Ghanaian mother, say they were discriminated against as “gaijin“ (foreigners) since they were young, due to their dark skin. Last month, the three spoke about these experiences and sang at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. Drawn in by their words and their heart-moving music, I could not bring myself to move from my spot for a while…

Read the entire article here.

EXCLUSIVE: Bruno Mars Opens Up About the Loss of His Mother

Latina
2017-01-30

Jesus Trivino

Photographs by John Russo

MR. EVERYTHING

Bruno Mars redefines what it means to be a Latino man.

BRUNO MARS DOESN’T WALK; HE GLIDES.

It’s as if he’s perpetually ready to perform a Motown-style choreography set in front of tens of millions watching the Super Bowl (which he has done twice in the past four years)—even easing his way into a suburban L.A. pizza parlor, where moments earlier, his sexy, chart-topping 2012 hit, “Locked Out of Heaven,” was on blast, as if anticipating his appearance. Mars just has that aura. His outfit is straight Fania-era salsa/blaxploitation swag—Gucci cap over his curls; sunglasses; an open shirt, floral and teal; tan shorts; dress shoes (no socks, to accentuate those smooth legs); and minimal gold jewelry. He orders a plain slice, which he sprinkles with garlic powder, and a root beer. It’s obviously a joint he frequents, since he knows all the fellas by name, and the workers aren’t taken aback by the superstar in their midst. He walks to an open booth, wolfs down his food, controlling his urge to eat six more slices, he jokes, and proceeds to be the smoothest cat to ever have lunch at an old-school checkered-tablecloth pizzeria.

Mars learned about charm, confidence, and estilo early in life. “My whole sense of rhythm is because my dad was teaching me bongos as a kid,” he says of his father, Pedro Hernandez. “He’s an old-school working musician, so that’s where the pinky rings come from, the patent-leather shoes, the suits, and the pompadour. It all stems from watching my father. I remember at the time, me and my sisters would be a little embarrassed when he would take us to school in his big-ass Cadillac. No one had

Cadillacs in Hawaii. But my dad would show up in some boat-looking Caddy wearing some silky shit, and we’d run out into the car as soon as possible. And here I am wearing the swap-meet gold, driving Cadillacs,” he says with a laugh…

…But before he was Bruno Muhfuckin’ Mars, he was E-Panda’s lil’ bro, Peter Hernandez, born and bred in Hawaii to a beautiful Filipina and Spanish mom and Puerto Rock and Jewish papi from Brooklyn. His childhood musical career is well-documented on YouTube— at 4, he was the cutest Elvis Presley impersonator ever, performing with his family for oohing-and-ahhing tourists in Waikiki. As the years passed and his skills developed, Mars found himself dealing with racial-identity issues in the multicultural 50th state. “Growing up in Hawaii, there are not too many Puerto Ricans there,” says Mars, “so because of my hair, they thought I was black and white.”

The idea of not being easily categorized is something Mars has dealt with his entire life. When he moved to Los Angeles at 18 to make a serious go in the music industry, record label executives asked, “What are you? Are you urban? Are you Latin?”

“There are a lot of people who have this mixed background that are in this gray zone,” he says, leaning forward to make his point. “A lot of people think, ‘This is awesome. You’re in this gray zone, so you can pass for whatever the hell you want.’ But it’s not like that at all. It’s actually the exact opposite. What we’re trying to do is educate people to know what that feels like so they ’ll never make someone feel like that ever again. Which is a hard thing to do. Because no one can see what we see and no one can grow up with what we grew up with. I hope people of color can look at me, and they know that everything they’re going through, I went through. I promise you.”…

Read the entire article here.

Chi-chi’s classic tale of real talent

The Independent
2016-11-14

Julia Molony

Irish-Nigerian double bass player Chi-chi Nwanoku has been breaking down barriers all her life. She tells our reporter about her remarkable childhood and career

The home of classical musician Chi-chi Nwanoku offers a glimpse into the mind of a person driven to the greatest heights of excellence in their field.

For one thing, it is immaculate. “I’m fastidious,” she admits, miming obsessive wiping of kitchen surfaces. She is also, “a very literal person. If someone says ‘play that staccato’, you won’t hear it played shorter.” Then, of course, there is her double bass in the front room – the oversized instrument, “a man’s instrument” as she was told when she started out, seeming cartoon-ish here, despite the tall ceilings of her elegant Victorian semi-detached house.

After you have taken in Nwanoku’s jaunty, jewel-coloured afro, and the surprise of her bright turquoise eyes, the most striking thing about her is her energy. She is, she says, only five feet tall. But she is a woman clearly driven by a relentless, indefatigable energy…

…She was born in Fulham, London, the eldest daughter of an Irish nurse and Nigerian medical student. Mixed race couples were an anomaly at the time and her parents faced enormous prejudice, both from society and closer to home, within their extended family. They were economic migrants to the capital of the British Empire at a time when landlords routinely posted signs reading “no blacks, no Irish, no dogs.” But her parents’ love flourished and endured for 50 years until they died. It was through witnessing her parents’ bond, that Chi-chi’s own iconoclasm was formed….

Read the entire article here.

Africa Utopia: Chi Chi Nwanoku discusses the Chineke! orchestra

The Evening Standard
London, United Kingdom
2016-09-02

The founder of Britain’s first BME orchestra sat down with [Features Writer] David Ellis to talk classical music, prejudice in the industry and the Southbank Festival

Watch the interview here.

Biracial composer seeks her ‘true name’ through piece for North Corner Chamber Orchestra

The Seattle Times
2017-02-16

Jason Victor Serinus, Special to The Seattle Times

Composer Hanna Benn

NOCCO’s Feb. 18-19 concerts will feature a work by local composer Hanna Benn; works by Davida Ingram, Alex Guy and Rick Benjamin, rooted in Scott Joplin’s opera, “Treemonisha”; and works by Alvin Singleton and George Walker.

It is the very subject of “Resonance,” North Corner Chamber Orchestra’s concert “Celebrating Black American Composers,” that left Seattle-based composer Hanna Benn, 29, in a bit of quandary. As much as she was delighted to work with one of the world’s few conductorless chamber orchestras, her commission to honor black American composers left her pondering the fact that she is biracial, and does not see herself as either black or white.

“For the last couple of years, I’ve been trying to understand where I come from, and my responsibility as a biracial person,” she explained by phone and email. “I want to completely embrace my blackness / my whiteness.”…

Read the entire article here.

Guest DJ Xenia Rubinos Spins Music From Solange To Ravel

alt.Latino: Latinx Arts and Culture
National Public Radio
2017-01-04

Felix Contreras, Host

Xenia Rubinos plays Guest DJ on this week’s episode of Alt.Latino. Courtesy of the artist

Vocalist Xenia Rubinos ended 2016 with a bang: Her album Black Terry Cat was singled out in best-of-the-year lists by NPR Music, The New York Times and Rolling Stone. That kind of recognition is a major deal for an independent artist with a one-of-a-kind artistic vision.

Alt.Latino first recognized that vision back in 2012, when we featured a track from Rubinos’ first self-released EP, Magic Trix. After we first heard Black Terry Cat earlier this year, we rushed her and her band into our office for a mesmerizing Tiny Desk concert that only hints at the magic of her live show…

Read the entire article and listen to the show here.

Call For Papers: Spaniards, Natives, Africans, and Gypsies: Transatlantic Malagueñas and Zapateados in Music, Song, and Dance

2016-10-16

K. Meira Goldberg, Visiting Research Scholar
Foundation for Iberian Music
The Graduate Center
The City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10016

Prof. Walter Clark, Director
The Center for Iberian and Latin American Music
Department of Music
University of California
900 University Avenue
Riverside, California 92521

Antoni Pizà, Director
Foundation for Iberian Music
The Graduate Center
The City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10016
apiza@gc.cuny.edu

The Center for Iberian and Latin American Music at the University of California at Riverside, and the Foundation for Iberian Music at The Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation at the CUNY Graduate Center will host a conference on the transatlantic circulation of malagueñas and zapateados at University of California, Riverside on April 6–7, 2017.

In the inaugural conference in this series, Spaniards, Indians, Africans, and Gypsies: The Global Reach of the Fandango in Music, Song, and Dance, we gathered in New York to explore the fandango as a mestizaje, a mélange of people, imagery, music and dance from America, Europe, and Africa, whose many faces reflect a diversity of exchange across what were once the Spanish and Portuguese Empires. At that conference, we considered the broadest possible array of the fandango across Europe and the Americas, asking how the fandango participated in the elaboration of various national identities, how the fandangos of the Enlightenment shed light on musical populism and folkloric nationalism as armaments in revolutionary struggles for independence of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and how contemporary fandangos function within the present-day politics of decolonialization and immigration. We asked whether and what shared formal features—musical, choreographic, or lyric—may be discerned in the diverse constituents of the fandango family in Spain and the Americas, and how our recognition of these features might enhance our understanding of historical connections between these places. We hoped with that pioneering effort to gather international, world-renowned scholars to open new horizons and lay the foundation for further research, conferences, and publications. We are immensely proud of that 2015 gathering, and of the two published editions of its proceedings: in bilingual form in the Spanish journal Música Oral del Sur (vol. 12, 2015) and in English (forthcoming 2016 from Cambridge Scholars Publishing).

But the inaugural conference merely set the first stone. All of the participants in the 2015 meeting agreed that conversations should continue, relationships should develop, and that many questions and avenues of research remain. We are therefore pleased to issue a call for papers for the upcoming conference on two nineteenth-century forms related to the fandango—at least in their standing as iconic representations of Spanishness: malagueñas and zapateados.

How do these forms comprise a “repertoire” in performance theorist Diana Taylor’s sense of the term as enacting “embodied memory” and “ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge,” allowing for “an alternative perspective on historical processes of transnational contact” and a “remapping of the Americas…following traditions of embodied practice”? The Center and the Foundation invite interested scholars, graduate students, and practitioners including musicians and dancers to propose presentations on all subjects related to malagueñas and zapateados. Although we are not limited to them, we expect to gain special insight into the following topics:

1. From their virtuoso elaborations in flamenco song, to the solo guitar rondeñas of “El Murciano,” from the 1898 La malagueña y el torero filmed by the Lumière brothers to Denishawn’s 1921 Malagueña, from Isaac Albéniz’s iconic pianistic malagueñas to the interpretation by Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona which, as Walter Clark observes, became a global pop tune, how do malagueñas address the aspirations of growing middle-class concert audiences on both sides of the Atlantic?
2. How do they reflect and crystalize prevailing yet contested notions of what is “Spanish”?
3. How, in the transgressive ruckus and subversive sonorities of Afro-Latin zapateados circulating through, as performance scholar Stephen Johnson says, the ports, waterways, and docks of the Black Atlantic may we describe the race mimicry inherent in nineteenth-century performance?
4. What is the relationship of zapateado with tap and other forms of percussive dance in American popular music?
5. And how in the roiled and complicated surfaces of these forms may we discern the archived rhythmic and dance ideas of African and Amerindian lineage that are magical, or even sacred?
6. How do zapateado rhythms express the tidal shift in accentuation of the African 6/8 from triple to duple meter described by Rolando Perez Fernandez?
7. How did the zapateados danced in drag, in bullrings and ballets, resist nineteenth-century gender codes?
8. What secrets are held in the zapateados performed on a tarima planted in the earth and tuned by ceramic jugs in Michoacán?
9. In light of compelling research by Andrés Reséndez and Benjamin Madley into the devastating history of enslavement and genocide of indigenous peoples of the Americas, what new considerations arise with regard to best practices for historiographically aware nomenclature? How should we view and use words like “Indian,” “Native,” “mestizo,” “criollo,” etc.?

Paper presentations will be 20 minutes, with 10 minutes of discussion. We also welcome workshop-style presentations incorporating dance, music, and song. Please send a title and a 150-200 word abstract to K. Meira Goldberg at fandangoconference.cuny@gmail.com. by December 31, 2016.

2 Tone legend Pauline Black to get honorary degree from Coventry University

The Coventry Telegraph
2016-11-21

Catherine Lillington

Pauline Black

“It’s really important women don’t reach the menopause and go away and knit”

Ska and 2 Tone legend Pauline Black is being honoured by Coventry University for her support of the city’s music scene.

The lead singer of The Selecter will get an honorary degree following a career that has seen her create platinum-selling albums and an award-winning autobiography.

She will be among 6,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students receiving their degrees, 45 years after she moved to Coventry to study at Lanchester Polytechnic…

Pauline Black performing at The Tic Toc Club in Coventry in July 1981

Read the entire article here.

Luck O’ the Irish: Black Artists from the Emerald Isle

SoulTrain.com
2016-03-17

Rhonda Nicole, Managing Editor

U2 graced us with one of the greatest songs in the history of music, “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” and spammed everyone’s Apple devices with an album many never asked for (2014’s Songs of Innocence). Sinéad O’Connor teased as she sang “I Want Your (Hands On Me),” teared up as she crooned “Nothing Compares 2 U,” and tore up a photo of the pope. The Cranberries begged to let it “Linger,” while Hozier pleaded “Take Me to Church” (interestingly, O’Connor did as well, although it was a completely different song). Scan any pop or rock radio station, and you’re bound to hear a tune or two from Irish musical acts. The Corrs, The Frames, Enya, and countless others have dominated the American musical landscape for decades, becoming as essential a part of popular music experience as your standard issue garage band-turned Grammy darling.

Whereas other European countries have gifted us with a rather diverse cadre of acts of color—British artists like Omar Lye-Fook, Corinne Bailey Rae, Lianne La Havas, Estelle, and Brand New Heavies; Ben l’Oncle Soul, Les Nubians, and Corneille from France; and Belgium’s Zap Mama, Jean-Louis Daulne, and Technotronic’s Ya Kid K (by way of the Democratic Republic of Congo), Ireland, not all that surprisingly, hasn’t produced nearly as many. According to the 2006 Irish census, just around 1% of the country’s population self-identified as black. Still, black actors, athletes, writers, and politicians have made an impact on Irish culture, be they Irish-born or immigrants from various parts of Africa and the Caribbean. And black Irish musicians, though perhaps not as readily recognizable here in the U.S., are equally as notable as their British and French counterparts…

Read the entire article here.

A Biography Of E. Azalia Smith Hackley (1867-1922), African-american Singer And Social Activist

Edwin Mellen Press
2001
436 pages
ISBN: 978-0-7734-7575-5

Lisa Pertillar Brevard, Core Faculty and Academic Coordinator of Humanities
Walden University

Madame E. Azalia Hackley was an African American classical singer, social worker, writer, philanthropist, and activist who championed the use of African-American spirituals among the African-American people as a tool for social change. Her efforts laid the groundwork for the use of spirituals as freedom songs during the Civil Rights Movement. This work used newspaper accounts and archive studies documenting Madame Hackley’s tours cross-country and abroad to raise funds for African-American classical musicians. It show Hackley’s intense devotion to her African-American roots, as she easily could have passed for white. Nevertheless, she traveled throughout the South in ‘Jim Crow’ railway cars by choice. This work also recovers several of her influential published works, including A Guide to Voice Culture (1909); The Colored Girl Beautiful (1916), an etiquette book for African-American women desiring professional jobs; and “Hints to Young Colored Artists”, a series of articles designed to help young African-American classical musicians succeed. Includes illustrations.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Richard A. Long
• Introduction
• Part I: Madame Emma Azalia Smith Hackley: The Lady and Her Legacy
  • 1. Azalia’s Early Years (1867-1894)
  • 2. Denver (1894-1900)
  • 3. Philadelphia and The Washington Conservatory of Music (1900-1915)
  • 4. Jim Crow Cars and Beyond – Paris, London, Tokyo (1916-1920)
  • 5. Madame Hackley’s Last Days (1920-1922)
• Part II: The Soul and Grit of a Colored Prima Donna: Madame E. Azalia Hackley as Journalist
  • “Hints to Young Colored Artists” (1914-15) by E. Azalia Hackley
• Part III: Lessons Before Dying: Madame Hackley’s The Colored Girl Beautiful
• Part IV: A Scrapbook of Madame E. Azalia Hackley
  • Photographs
  • “Report on Scholarship for 1908” by E. Azalia Hackley
  • Correspondence Between E. Azalia Hackley and James Weldon Johnson
  • Advertisements
  • The New York Age Salutes Madame Hackley (Obituary by Lucien H. White, 1922)
• Chronology
• Appendix: A Guide in Voice Culture (1909) by E. Azalia Hackley
• Sheet Music: “Carola, A Serenade” (1918) by E. Azalia Hackley
• Bibliography
• Index

Photograph by Julius Taylor