Cultural Equity Town Hall

Our voices ring loud town hall meeting: Wednesday, March 1st at 6:00 pm.
The Clemente Soto Velez Cultural & Educational Center – 107 Suffolk St, New York, NY 10002
 
Loisaida & The NYC Cultural Plan – Our Voices Ring Loud Town Hall Meeting! Loisaida Inc. leads the local cultural planning project, in partnership with the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center and Teatro SEA that will ensure that Latino arts organizations, cultural workers, and residents in Lower Manhattan are heard and their recommendations included in the City’s 10 year cultural plan. Loisaida Inc. was chosen from a competitive pool of applicants as one of the winning proposals to conduct community engagement and feed-back activities around the City’s cultural planning process, which will wrap up in the late spring of 2017.
Be Heard! Participate!

This Loisaida-led Project to Help Inform New York City’s Cultural Plan is Funded by:

New York City Cultural Agenda Fund in The New York Community Trust.

Meet & Greet – Johnny Colón

Loisaida Inc. presents:

The Johnny Colón School of Music @ Loisaida Inc. Center

Eventbrite - Johnny Colon School of Music at Loisaida

Music theory lessons for the younger set by the boogaloo music legend Johnny Colon. Divided into three groups ages; 8-10, 11-14 & 15-18. Bilingual friendly (Spanish, English)

Latin music legend and renown music teacher Johnny Colón revives the tradition of his famous uptown music school, now downtown at the Loisaida Center. An dynamic hands-on weekly series of ongoing music classes focused on Latin rhythms and sounds directly under the instruction of vocalist, multi-instrumenatlist, arranger and musical director Johnny Colón.

About Johnny Colón

Johnny Colón, was born in New York City to parents of Puerto Rican heritage. He is the director of the Johnny Colon Orchestra, founder of the legendary East Harlem Music School and widely recognized as a major and legendary contributor to the popular boogaloo sound of the 1960s. 

Colón, a versatile vocalist, multi-instrumenatlist, arranger and musical director, became one of Latin music’s leading impresarios at the forefront of the new “Latin Boogaloo” sound when he formed the first Johnny Colon Orchestra in the mid 1960’s. He first found success in the world of salsa with his 1966 debut album”Boogaloo Blues” in 1966, which became a classic, selling over 3,000,000 copies worldwide, and which continues to be an anthem for this period on Latin music history. Colón’s hit “Boogaloo Blues” came out during a time of transition in the Latin music scene of New York years before there was such a thing as “salsa,” when the mambo craze was over and Puerto Ricans were coming of age in the city and the “Nuyorican” culture was emerging. As many of their peers went off to fight in Vietnam, some of New York’s younger Puerto Ricans were losing interest in Latin music and beginning to identify more with R&B hits in English than with the music of their roots. Johnny recorded several other notable tunes over the years, releasing five albums over the period 1967-72.

In 1968, with public funding and much of his own money, Colón founded the East Harlem Music School and offered free lessons to the community. His impact as a music instructor for more than three decades may be even greater than the effect of his recordings. Students like the singer Tito Nieves, percussionists Jimmy Delgado and Robin Loeb, bass player Rubén Rodríguez, and singer Marc Anthony would all go on to become stars in salsa and contemporary Latin music. By the mid-1990s, Colón was struggling to secure funding to maintain the school open. In 2004, unable to keep a permanent space for his school, Colón was given the opportunity to bring his brand of music education to New York City public schools. Today, as well as teaching in schools around the city, Colón has begun giving music classes to patients at drug treatment centers. He’s found a new location for his school at The Loisaida Inc. Center.

– Meet and Greet on Saturday, April 19 at Loisaida Inc. 710 East Ninth Street, New York, NY 10009

Stay tuned!

 

2016, Education, Events, Latin America, Music, New York History, Partners, Past, Storytelling, Workshops, X-Change Express, Youth

Meet and Greet – Johnny Colón

Posted on by Alejandro

Loisaida Inc. presents:

The Johnny Colón School of Music @ Loisaida Inc. Center

Eventbrite - Johnny Colon School of Music at Loisaida

Music theory lessons for the younger set by the boogaloo music legend Johnny Colon. Divided into three groups ages; 8-10, 11-14 & 15-18. Bilingual friendly (Spanish, English)

Latin music legend and renown music teacher Johnny Colón revives the tradition of his famous uptown music school, now downtown at the Loisaida Center. An dynamic hands-on weekly series of ongoing music classes focused on Latin rhythms and sounds directly under the instruction of vocalist, multi-instrumenatlist, arranger and musical director Johnny Colón.

About Johnny Colón

Johnny Colón, was born in New York City to parents of Puerto Rican heritage. He is the director of the Johnny Colon Orchestra, founder of the legendary East Harlem Music School and widely recognized as a major and legendary contributor to the popular boogaloo sound of the 1960s. 

Colón, a versatile vocalist, multi-instrumenatlist, arranger and musical director, became one of Latin music’s leading impresarios at the forefront of the new “Latin Boogaloo” sound when he formed the first Johnny Colon Orchestra in the mid 1960’s. He first found success in the world of salsa with his 1966 debut album”Boogaloo Blues” in 1966, which became a classic, selling over 3,000,000 copies worldwide, and which continues to be an anthem for this period on Latin music history. Colón’s hit “Boogaloo Blues” came out during a time of transition in the Latin music scene of New York years before there was such a thing as “salsa,” when the mambo craze was over and Puerto Ricans were coming of age in the city and the “Nuyorican” culture was emerging. As many of their peers went off to fight in Vietnam, some of New York’s younger Puerto Ricans were losing interest in Latin music and beginning to identify more with R&B hits in English than with the music of their roots. Johnny recorded several other notable tunes over the years, releasing five albums over the period 1967-72.

In 1968, with public funding and much of his own money, Colón founded the East Harlem Music School and offered free lessons to the community. His impact as a music instructor for more than three decades may be even greater than the effect of his recordings. Students like the singer Tito Nieves, percussionists Jimmy Delgado and Robin Loeb, bass player Rubén Rodríguez, and singer Marc Anthony would all go on to become stars in salsa and contemporary Latin music. By the mid-1990s, Colón was struggling to secure funding to maintain the school open. In 2004, unable to keep a permanent space for his school, Colón was given the opportunity to bring his brand of music education to New York City public schools. Today, as well as teaching in schools around the city, Colón has begun giving music classes to patients at drug treatment centers. He’s found a new location for his school at The Loisaida Inc. Center.

– Meet and Greet on Saturday, March 19 at Loisaida Inc. 710 East Ninth Street, New York, NY 10009

Stay tuned!

 

2014, Bilingual, Caribbean, Central America, Education, Latin America, Performance, Poetry, Politics

Ferguson/Ayotzinapa: CantoMundo Poets Read and Respond

Posted on by Alejandro

The Loisaida Center

Monday, December 15, 6-8pm

Ferguson/Ayotzinapa: CantoMundo Poets Read and Respond

featuring: Yesenia Montilla, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Rosebud Ben-Oni, and Urayoán Noel

This event brings together New York-based current and former fellows of the national Latina/o poets workshop CantoMundo (cantomundo.org/) to read from their work in solidarity with ongoing protests and mobilizations in and around Ferguson, Missouri, and the College of Ayotzinapa in Iguala, Mexico.Many of the poets reading are also participating in #CantoMundoLongestNight, a social-media offering of poems in honor of the countless black and brown bodies slain by state-sanctioned violence.

Darrel Alejandro Holnes is from Panama City and the former Canal Zone of Panamá. His poetry has been published in Poetry Magazine, The Best American Experimental Writing, Callaloo, The Caribbean Writer, The Potomac, MEADE, Lambda Literary, Assaracus, Weave Magazine, The Feminist Wire, The Paris American, Kweli, featured on The Best American Poetry blog, and elsewhere in print and online. He is the co-author of PRIME: Poetry & Conversations (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014). He is a proud CantoMundo and Cave Canem fellow. darrelholnes.com

Yesenia Montilla is a New York City poet with Afro-Caribbean roots & CantoMundo Fellow. Her poetry has appeared in the literary journals: 5 AM, Adanna, Wideshore and others. She received her MFA from Drew University in Poetry and Poetry in Translation. Her first collection of poetry The Pink Box is forthcoming from Willow Books in Fall 2015.

Born to a Mexican mother and Jewish father, Rosebud Ben-Oni is a CantoMundo Fellow and the author of SOLECISM (Virtual Artists Collective, 2013). Her work is forthcoming or appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, Bayou, Puerto del Sol, among others. Rosebud is an Editorial Advisor for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts (vidaweb.org). Find out more at 7TrainLove.org

CantoMundo fellow Urayoán Noel is the author of the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa, 2014) and several books of poetry in English and Spanish, including EnUncIAdOr (Editora Emergente, 2014) and the forthcoming Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico (University of Arizona). Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, he lives in the Bronx and teaches at NYU.

 

*The views and opinions expressed on this event are soley those of the participating poets, scholars and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of Loisaida Inc., Acacia Network and staff, and/or any/all contributors to this event.