Reporter Volume 25, No.11 November 11, 1993

By MARK WALLACE
Reporter Staff

"I'm presenting African American musics--gospel, blues and jazz--what
their roots are, and where they come from," says Dr. Michael Woods,
describing the seminar series that he is giving at UB's Educational
Opportunity Center and other locations in the Buffalo area this fall.
"I want to help students build a link back to these musics, to let
them go back and hear those sounds, from a period before European
oppression. I want to help them feel those connections, with enough
background to know what they're sensing."
	Woods developed the seminars, which are being sponsored by EOP
and the Arts In Education Institute (AEI) of Western New York at the
State University College at Buffalo, through a Minority Arts
Administration Fellowship he received from Arts Midwest. Woods has
written all the music resource manuals that the teachers and artists
use at the seminars.
	The seminars, which began Oct. 22, consist of lectures by
Woods on African American culture, as well as musical performances by
Woods and others, and will feature a special performance at EOC on
Nov. 18 and 19 by Samite Mulongo, a musician from Uganda who plays
flute, thumb piano, xylophone, and other percussion instruments.
	"By the time Samite plays, the students will be able to hear
where African American music comes from," Wood says.
	Woods will also host a jazz workshop, which will feature a
five-piece jazz group, for teachers of elementary and secondary school
students on Nov. 17 at BOCES Institute for Effective Educational
Change (Erie#1), 1050 Maryvale Drive in Cheektowaga, from 9 a.m. to 4
p.m.
	The program of seminars is the second of two programs that
Woods has been involved with at AEI. An AEI Summer Teacher Training
Session focused on multiple works of African and African American art,
and included an African Antiquities art exhibit and a storytelling
performance by Lorna Hill. The week-long session also featured
performances by a West African dance and music troupe from the Ivory
Coast, Les Guirivoires, a local African American gospel group, The
Union, a local African American dance troupe headed by Janet Reed, and
Samite Mulongo.
	According to Woods, all AEI programs are designed to get
people to learn about the arts by participating in them, not merely
studying them, in order to become a more active learner. "When you do,
you'll have greater respect for the work," he says.
	"African people were taken away from their homeland, but with
the old sounds still inside them," Woods says. "African American
musicians were not classically trained, or even necessarily able to
read music. They played with sounds already inside them, and that they
were completely confident with, but on unfamiliar instruments. They
were not as well trained in technique, but once they knew some basics,
they would attack it with abandon, which makes their music different
from other musical forms."
	For more information about the times and places of the
seminars, contact the EOC, or the Arts in Education Institute at
881-6057.