Felipe Salles Receives Creative Residency Grant from Jazz Road
Content
Felipe Salles, professor of jazz saxophone in the UMass Amherst Department of Music and Dance, has been awarded a Creative Residency grant by Jazz Road, a national initiative of South Arts, a non-profit arts organization based in Atlanta, Georgia.
Supported by a consortium of public and private funders including the NEA and nine state arts agencies, South Arts provides grants, fellowships, and a variety of programs designed to “advance Southern vitality in the arts” according to their mission statement. Through its Jazz Road Creative Residency program, South Arts has this year provided grants of up to $40,000 to 52 artists in order to foster their artistic and professional growth while allowing them to engage in a wide range of artistic and community projects throughout the US.
This residency grant will allow Salles and his Interconnections Ensemble to collaborate with eight guest artists, including Paquito D'Rivera, Yosvanny Terry and Melissa Aldana, to record new works exploring immigration. A native of São Paulo, Brazil, Salles has returned to this theme throughout his career as a composer, most recently in his 2018 CD, The Lullaby Project, and his 2020 follow-up recording, The New Immigrant Experience, created through the support of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
In this new project, Salles seeks to merge the topic of immigration with music inspired by the experiences of his eight guest artists, all of whom are immigrants themselves. Making the difficult decision to emigrate is a concept that is reflected in each artist’s work and in the cross-cultural connections they share within the jazz community. Salles will interview each artist and then compose a separate passage of the larger work based on those experiences, with the featured artist as soloist in that section. In this fashion, these immigrants are both the artist and the subject of the art. The new work is targeted for completion by mid-2022; the eight artist interviews will be published later as part of an accompanying book, creating a documentation of contemporary immigration history within the jazz community.
Jazz Road, a national program funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation with additional support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is led by South Arts in partnership with the five other U.S. Regional Arts Organizations (Arts Midwest, Mid-America Arts Alliance, Mid Atlantic Arts, New England Foundation for the Arts, and Western Arts Alliance/WESTAF).