Dee Spencer via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Dee Spencer:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Dee Spencer
- City: San Francisco
- Country: United States
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Dee Spencer is a Professor of Jazz and Musical Theater in the School of Theater & Dance at San Francisco State University (SFSU).
She received her B.S. from Florida A&M; M.M. at Washington University in St. Louis; and EdD., University of San Francisco. Dee founded the Jazz Studies degree program in the School of Music at SFSU and served as director for five years.
Dee Spencer’s musical director/sound designer credits include “Androcles and the Lion”, “Raisin” award-winning Theatreworks production with legendary directors Danny Duncan and Tony Haney, “Purlie Victorious”, “The Me Nobody Knows”, “No Place To Be Somebody”, “Ain’t Misbehavin’”, “Sassy Divas”, “One Mo Time”, “Twelfth Night”, “Spring Awakening”, “Lysistrata”, “Chicago”, “Hair” and "Dreamgirls in Concert".
She has performed/recorded/toured/judged with Wynton Marsalis for Jazz at Lincoln Center; GRAMMY Award winning vocalist “Ledisi”, TOWER OF POWER’s Lenny Williams and legends John Handy, Jimmy Scott, Louis Bellson, Clark Terry, Regina Carter, Jeff “Tain” Watts, Bernard Purdie and X-Factor star Jason Brock and the legendary GLIDE ensemble. Her latest recording “Tranquility” was released in 2018. She is an Annual Screener for the GRAMMYs Music Awards.
Her former students include recording artists/producers, Braxton Brothers, BEYONCE’S music director, saxophonist Tia Fuller, and LAUREN HILL’S music director, saxophonist Howard Wiley.
As an active contributor to the San Francisco community, she founded the San Francisco Jazz Organization (SFJAZZ) education program and performed for a US Senator Kamala Harris’ fundraiser at the African American Cultural Center formerly headed by San Francisco Mayor London Breed. She also served as program director for the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts.
She has served on the following boards: International Association of Jazz Educators (IAJE), National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), San Francisco Jazz Organization (SFJAZZ), Stanford Jazz Workshop, Community Music Center and the Women’s Audio Mission. Dee is currently serving on the People in Plaza and The Amateur Musicians Network boards.
Contact Information
- Email: deejazz@me.com
- Telephone: 415-269-4699
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Instagram: deejazz1
- ▶ Website: http://www.deespencer.com
- ▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UC_s7Kdcd0LVvqB0ksHieZmA
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/26ELIEiHlaDytd9lRqlXCI
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging through New Orleans and Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... and Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
