Shä-Key (Hanifah Walidah)

Musician, Filmmaker, Playwright, Teaching Artist, Entrepreneur

Shä-Key (Hanifah Walidah) has written and performed in several plays and musicals and produced multiple arts festivals and workshops. Her career began in the early 90’s as a pivotal figure in the then emerging spoken word scene in New York City. During that time, she also conceived and operated the first-ever online Hip Hop magazine called Guillotine. She is currently the lead singer of an electro soul group called St.Lo. Otherwise, she loves serving the creative and maker communities with her e-books, blog posts and social media marketing services.

Amazon

Steve Cannon

Writer, Founder, A Gathering of the Tribes

Steve Cannon (1935-2019) was a writer who shaped the literary history of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He was the founder and executive director of A Gathering of the Tribes, an East Village nonprofit and exhibition space, and the publisher of a magazine of the same name. Tribes, which operated from Cannon’s Alphabet City townhouse, functioned as a salon where artists and musicians such as David Hammons, Sun Ra, and Butch Morris could reliably be found among a cohort of younger poets emerging from the Nuyorican Poets Café scene. Born to a preacher in New Orleans, Cannon relocated to New York from England in 1962, where, alongside such luminaries as Amiri Baraka and Calvin C. Hernton, Cannon joined the Umbra Workshop, a cornerstone of the 1960s African American avant-garde poetry and publishing. In 1973 he, Ishmael Reed, and Joe Johnson cofounded the influential literary and audio/visual imprint Reed, Cannon, and Johnson. As a poet, playwright, and professor, Cannon mentored a generation of writers including Eileen Myles and Paul Beatty, and taught across the City University of New York system for more than three decades. [source: les presses du réel]

Steve Canon Wikipedia
A Gathering of the Tribes

Medeski Martin & Wood

The trio’s amalgam of jazz, funk, “avant-noise” and a million other musical currents and impulses is nearly impossible to classify, which is just how they like it. Medeski’s keyboard excursions, Chris Wood’s hard-charging bass lines and Billy Martin’s supple, danceable beats have come to resemble a single organism, moving gracefully between genre-defying compositions and expansive improvisation atop a relentless groove.

MedeskiMartinandWood.com