LIVE OAK SOUND SERIES
Thursdays in June 2021
Curated by the Long Road Society
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ABOUT THE ARTISTS
DIANA GAMEROS is a singer, songwriter, music instructor, and social justice activist based in San Francisco. She was born and raised in Ciudad Juárez, México, and immigrated to the United States as a teenager. Over the last decade in the Bay Area she has released two albums of original songs written in Spanish and English, and Mexican classic songs. Diana has been highlighted often by NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series and a documentary film about her was released by KQED earlier this year. Her music often tells stories of family, migration, identity, and home, and has led her to perform with prominent performers such as Joan Baez, Natalia Lafourcade, and the San Francisco Symphony. Diana’s voice and music have appeared in numerous films, documentaries, and most recently, on the television series “Mayans MC.” Her songs and story have been featured in Billboard, Mother Jones, NPR’s “Weekend Edition,” and PRI’s “The World,” to name a few.
Social Media:
www.facebook.com/dianagamerosmusic
@dianagameros
SALAMI ROSE JOE LOUIS is a multi-instrumentalist female producer from California and a signee to Flying Lotus’s independent label Brainfeeder. Drawing influences from jazz, soul, hip-hop, Shuggie Otis, Captain Beefheart, Stereolab, and R. Stevie Moore, she creates a blend of experimental dreamy sounds with jazz-influenced vocals and piano. She released her debut album Zdenka 2080, a conceptual sci-fi record that has been described as a “stunning interdimensional travel-themed new album,” on Brainfeeder. Zdenka 2080 was nominated for Giles Peterson’s Worldwide Awards for best album of 2020. She also had the honor of joining Flying Lotus’s Flamagra Tour, as well as Cinematic Orchestra’s European tour and Toro y Moi’s “Outer Peace Tour.” After a couple years of touring as a singer/instrumentalist with other bands and collaborating with groups such as Bizarre Ride (Pharcyde), DJ Numark, and Starro, a bandmate gave her an MV8800, catalyzing a deep dive into world of production, where she self recorded and mixed her albums “Son of a Sauce,” “Zlaty Sauce Nephew,” “Zdenka 2080,” and “Chapters of Zdenka.” Drawing from her studies in planetary sciences, she creates a celestial experience filled with space-inspired sounds and galaxy chords.
Social Media:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl7VlI3eUs4
www.facebook.com/salamirosejoelouis
@salamirosejoelouis
MANIK KHAN has been steeped in the ancient melodies of North Indian classical music since birth. The youngest son of the legendary maestro, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, he grew up listening to his father performing countless concerts and attending his classes at the esteemed Ali Akbar College of Music. He initially studied Tabla under the guidance of Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri, but the greater call to follow in the footsteps of his family brought Manik at the age of 13 to formally train in the Sarod with his father. He spent his formative years accompanying his father on stage, touring for the last decade of his father’s extensive and iconic performance career.
Manik’s own solo concert career has brought him to India on tour and to perform throughout the Bay Area and the United States. Today, Manik collaborates with musicians and various ensembles to present his father’s lineage of Hindustani classical music in ways that honor both its remarkable history and makes it accessible to new audiences. This includes partnering with schools to bring Indian Classical Music to youth orchestras, collaborating with conductor Michael Morgan and the Fremont Symphony Orchestra, recording music, and delving into livestreams. Manik continues to broaden and develop his range as a musician by studying with his brother, Alam Khan, the current director of instrumental music at the Ali Akbar College of Music.
Social Media:
@manikthe8th
NILAN CHAUDHURI was initiated into the tradition of Tabla playing by his father, Pt. Swapan Chaudhuri at the age of five. For the last two decades he has performed as a soloist and accompanist. As a teenager, Nilan was inspired by the jazz-fusion band ‘Oregon,’ a group spearheaded by his cousin, multi-percussionist Collin Walcott. The band’s music influenced Nilan to broaden his rhythmic studies, and in 2003 he began learning the drumset with Sly Randolph.
Since his debut performance in concert with his father in Queens, NY, in 2005, Nilan has had the privilege of sharing the stage with some of Hindustani Classical Music’s most celebrated artists at venues such as Carnegie Hall, the Fillmore, the Monterey Pop Festival, the Fox Theater, and the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House. In addition to maintaining a busy performing schedule, Nilan teaches Tabla throughout the Bay Area as a faculty member at the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael and as the Director of Percussion at Chitresh Das Institute in San Mateo. It’s his lifelong mission to maintain, preserve, and share the art of Indian Classical percussion with the world.
Social Media:
@nilantabla
PHANTOM TIDES is a musical project created and performed by the artist Gracia. Based in Oakland, Gracia laces together a soulful experience of her life to date — a journey through love and loss, strength and spirit, and the way one can be left to twist in the wind. With a voice like a singing saw, she tells stories of herself and those around her with tender honesty.
Social Media:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hZTy5FfL2c
www.facebook.com/themusicofgracia
@phantomtides
MARÍA JOSÉ MONTIJO is a Boricua bruja, casting spells with a luminous voice and powerful lyrics, whose songs invoke full-spectrum healing and celebrate the magic of the ordinary. MaJo’s life changed in 2009, on a beach in Borikén, Puerto Rico, when a friend gifted her a folk harp. Since then, the Huichin, Oakland-based acupuncturist and musician makes music to decolonize the heart. Singing professionally since age five, and with twenty years of experience in traditional medicine, MaJo blends bomba, folk harp and electronics, with lyrics that are feminist, alchemical, and affirming of deep ecology. Songs that are prayers to our ancestors and for our co-liberation. MaJo is a California licensed acupuncturist, herbalist, biodynamic cranio-sacral therapist, and sound healer.
Social Media:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Iiyicb0n6w
www.facebook.com/esotericatropical
@esotericatropical
KAREN LESS is a hip hop artist with a lean towards classic beats and self-affirming rhymes. Born and raised in Oakland, she’s been a student of music & culture since she can remember, and has built her unique style upon the foundational sound of hip hop’s golden era. She’s as comfortable with a microphone in her hand as she is with her little girl on her hip, and if you’re lucky, sometimes you’ll catch her balancing both at once.
Social Media:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGqYuKmrUjE
www.facebook.com/karenlessmusic
@karenlesshiphop
The Brothers Amor: @kit_center_music @crombuttns
DAWN RIDING While songwriter Sarah Rose Janko was growing up waiting tables and watching blues and rock & roll bands in her dad’s West Coast bar, Jasmyn Wong was learning to drum to riot grrrl records and dancing her way through the underground SF goth scene, and Hall McCann was in the Northeast practicing harmonies to old country classics and sneaking out of the house. They each went on to live in different cities, find friends and temporary homes, travel long distances for love, learn about heartbreak, and eventually land in Oakland, where the tough, lonesome sound of Dawn Riding was born.
Though they grew up in separate realities, the ladies of Dawn Riding were all raised by the unapologetic, inclusive, gritty culture of the underground. It’s one of the only ways to explain how they’re a tough-as-nails country-folk trio who are indisputably more punk rock than Americana, and more southern gothic than country. Together they invoke the dark honesty of Lucinda Williams, the close harmonies of the Everly Brothers, and the hypnotic, dreamy overtones of Mazzy Star – a formidable soundtrack to long nights of slow dancing, and true stories of unknown legends. They make music for their friends, their lovers, and the unyielding spirit of the underdog.
Social Media:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxc46afw5II
www.facebook.com/BlueDawnRiding
@dawnriding
ZERO CHARISMA is a force of nature, like water, with flowing cadences, graceful peaks and sacred valleys, her music is formed from the lava of volcanoes, silk of a spider’s web, glisten of rainbow behind waterfalls, and snail trails after the rain.
Social Media:
@z.e.r.o.c.h.a.r.i.s.m.a
