Felipe Salles to Premiere Newest Work on Immigration

On Sunday, April 24 at 3 p.m., Felipe Salles, professor in the Department of Music and Dance at UMass Amherst, will debut his newest multi-media work, “Home is Here” at the Bombyx Center for Arts & Equity in Florence, Massachusetts. The piece, which was written for his Interconnections large jazz ensemble, is his third work that examines the themes of immigration to the United States of America, this time with a focus on issues of naturalization, cultural exchange, identity and globalization within the international jazz community. Salles’ previous work on the topic, “The New Immigrant Experience,” was created through the support of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and had its world premiere at the UMass Old Chapel in 2019.

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 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 interviewed each artist and then composed a separate piece 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.

“Home is Here” is scheduled to be recorded for release in 2023; 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.

The April 24 premiere performance will include guest artists led by saxophonist Jacques Schwarz-Bart, who has been at the center of numerous emerging musical genres like neo soul and new jazz and is widely viewed as the originator of Gwoka jazz and Voodoo jazz, which reunite jazz music with its Afro-Caribbean and spiritual origins.

For tickets and information, visit https://bombyx.live.