Curated by Why Music's Nate Holder, this series of events brings talented musicians and music educators worldwide to explore overlooked and/or marginalised genres within music education.
Jazz with Cultural competency with Brandi Waller-Pace:
"To teach jazz in the music classroom it is necessary that educators understand it as an American music form rooted in blackness."
Brandi Waller-Pace will present and facilitate discussion on teaching students jazz with historical and cultural competency.
Bio:
Brandi Waller-Pace is a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, educator and based in Fort Worth, TX. Born and raised in Atlanta, GA, Brandi attended Howard University in Washington, DC, where she received a Bachelor's and Master of Music in Jazz Studies. At Howard she was a member of the critically-acclaimed vocal ensemble Afro Blue, sharing the stage with Geri Allen, Carmen Lundy, Andy Bey, Jimmy Cobb, Nnenna Freelon, and Bobby McFerrin. After college, she relocated to Fort Worth, TX, where she began teaching music in the Fort Worth Independent School District. She is an artist-in-residence at Arts Fifth Avenue, where she teaches and performs.
As a solo artist, some of Brandi's notable performances have been with the Affrolachian On-Time Festival, The Black Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fort Worth Django Reinhardt Festival, and the Shout & Shine Showcase, produced by The Bluegrass Situation and PineCone, which she curated and hosted. She is the organizer of and performed in the Fort Worth African American Roots Music Festival, and co-producer of Bluegrass Pride's 2021 event Juneteenth: A Rainbow Revival. As half of the duo Pace & Barber, she has performed at the Austin String Band Festival and the Austin Friends of Traditional Music Mid-Winter Festival.
Brandi is the Founder and Executive Director of Decolonizing the Music Room, a nonprofit that uses research, discourse, and training to centre BBIA (Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian) voices, knowledge, and experiences and challenge the historical dominance of white Western European and American music, narratives, and practices that have resulted in minimization and erasure throughout music education. She presents nationally and internationally on several topics ranging from decolonizing and antiracist philosophies in music education to jazz and the Black history of early American music, and how to incorporate them into the classroom.
This event takes place online (via Zoom).