Gamelan Sekar Jaya 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 Gamelan Sekar Jaya:
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: Gamelan Sekar Jaya
- City: Berkeley, California
- Country: United States
My Life & Work
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Bio:
In October of 1979, when we first met in a borrowed Berkeley living room to begin a workshop in Balinese music, none of us were thinking of anything but the challenge at hand: learning gamelan. We had the idealism of beginners, a fresh love for Balinese music, and — overfilling the cramped space — a fine set of instruments just off the container ship from Bali. Among us was I Wayan Suweca (co-founder of the group with Rachel Cooper and Michael Tenzer), whose supreme skill and artistic fire made us putty in his hands. Soon, by some alchemy of culture contact and group experience, something marvelous began to grow.
Gamelan Sekar Jaya is seen in Indonesia not only as a flowering of traditional Balinese arts in a distant land, but also as a laboratory for the creation of new ideas, many of which have an impact on artistic development in Bali. Through our Master Artists in Residency program, GSJ serves as an incubator for the world’s top creative minds in both traditional and innovative Balinese arts.
In 2000, during Gamelan Sekar Jaya’s fifth tour to Bali, the Governor of Bali awarded GSJ the Dharma Kusuma, Bali’s highest award for artistic achievement, never before awarded to a foreign group. The name “Sekar Jaya” is now a household term in Bali.
Locally, GSJ is a thriving multi-generational community that provides invaluable cross-cultural benefits to its members, the larger Bay Area community, and beyond. Through performance, educational programming, and community outreach, the group introduces thousands of people each year to the beauty and complexity of Balinese arts and culture. GSJ’s community, and the spirit of cultural exchange at its core, is also of great importance to the Indonesian population of northern California.
Contact Information
- Email: info@gsj.org
- Telephone: 510-655-1227
- Address: 3023 Shattuck Ave. Berkeley, CA 94705
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Twitter: sekarjaya
- ▶ Instagram: gamelan.sekar.jaya
- ▶ Website: http://www.gsj.org
- ▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCm_sC-lxqvBSYtNyq-Qbk7w
- ▶ Vimeo Channel: http://vimeo.com/gsj
More
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Quotes, Notes & Etc.
“The success of this group has far exceeded its founders’ wildest dreams as the ensemble has become an honored participant in the evolution of Bali’s musical culture.”
- The Boston Globe
“Most of Bali’s population of 2.8 million has seen Sekar Jaya in live performance and television broadcasts, and the group continues to receive special coverage from the Indonesian electronic and printed media…their cross-cultural works not only have been accepted eagerly by American and Indonesian audiences; their innovative compositions have directly stimulated creativity on the part of Balinese musicians themselves.”
- Andy Toth, Ethnomusicologist and former US Consular Agent in Bali
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 from New Orleans to Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... through 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.
