Matatu Festival
645 West Grand Avenue Oakland

Robinson/Spirit/Trammell/Tacuma: DEMOCRATICS // Decolonizing the Imagination #MATATU15

For the first time in history, DEMOCRATICS comes to the stage in Oakland. Marshall Trammell, Black Spirituals percussionist and #MATATU15 Music Co-curator, invites the Bay Area to take part in the latest iteration from his Music Research Strategies platform, featuring the percussion quartet of Donald Robinson, Spirit, Tacuma King and Marshall R Trammell on traditional and contemporary drum sets.

DEMOCRATICS is an integrative, four-part communication system presented in a new language of groove, explosive energy and true creativity.

Donald Robinson is a long-time Free Jazz drummer with an extensive career spanning both coasts and international waters. He is renowned for his work with the Glenn Spearman Double Trio and extensive collaborations with saxophonists Biggie Vinkeloe and Larry Ochs, violinist India Cooke, and bassist Lisle Ellis (NYC). Donald is a master at creating silences and adept with his single-stroke technique. His his compositional approach to the drum set has been crystal clear for decades. We are overjoyed to offer him a seat in the “festival of stories.” We attribute the element of Water to the coolness that Mr ROBINSON brings.

The aptly named Spirit is a brilliant and unique percussionist and a long-time Bay Area Creative Musician. He is master of vibration and encoding the very air in a room with series of soulful waves. Spirit is attributed to the element to Air. For Spirit, the stage is also the location of the ritual, ceremony and mystery. He has tight connection to Bay Area arts such as Ijoema & Oleyumi Thomas, Josh Allen and Marco Eneidi (Vienna).

Rooted in tradition, Baba Tacuma King embodies the terrain of cultural evolution that links indigenous technologies with innovative methodologies. Baba Tacuma is a master percussionist & master teacher. He is one of the founding members of Bay Area Youth Arts, with William Ktanses and violinist Tarika Lewis, where he and Jessica Feliz created a free arts program providing inner-city youth with instruction in African drumming and dance addressing the need for positive cultural interventions in the lives our youth. Baba Tacuma embodies the element of Earth as he is the land bridge between indigenous technologies and surprising innovation.

Music Research Strategies is an action-oriented, cultural work platform built to sustain the ideas of Marhsall R Trammell. As a percussionist of folkloric and contemporary drum stylings, he's a “journeyman” drummer, just entering his third fifteen-year period of development from behind a set of traps. He believes, as the psychologist Jacque Lacan pointed out, that identity is determined by how we learn language. Marshall is the co-founder of the Merced Youth Drum Corps, serving low-income youth in the Central Valley& the Decolonizing the Imagination: Arts Practicum Series.
#MATATU15

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