HISTORY | ART | TECHNOLOGY

 

 

NOW IS THE TIME FOR ACTIVISM.

 

Transcendence seeks to enable a potentially self-sufficient community to use history, art and technology to inspire and advance culture.

 

Transcendence represents humanity through all time periods. We seek to highlight the ways people around the world have used creativity, ingenuity and available technology to create new models [of music, culture and education] for their community.

 

Transcendence is a mosaic of history, art, and technology.

Transcendence is cultural resistance; a struggle against hegemony and a response to contemporary systems of oppression.

 

Transcendence is about the ways in which people can overcome. 

 

Transcendence is art, community, and a movement. 

 

Transcendence is a breathing art form; it looks both forwards and back simultaneously; it weaves the present through the past and to the future. 

Transcendence should feel confrontational and comforting, gut wrenching and peaceful, invoking dance and stillness, always spiritual. 

 

Jazz has an indelible history of protest, and in a time of conflict and trouble, transcendence is recognition of the musician's role as philosopher, and the potential of art to ask questions, build ideas and contribute to meaningful social change.

If you want to know what is important to a people – listen to their music....

 

 

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History
An album of love and fire, Transcendence brings focus to the ways in which the contemporary moment reflects - and indeed is a continuation of – a historical struggle.
As a New York based African American artist, Jaimeo speaks particularly to the #blacklivesmatter movement, but is also committed to the global reciprocity of social justice. 

 

Afrofuturism
Transcendence reflects radical themes in it's production as well as it's message: the album is a patchwork of contributions from musicians; most recorded remotely and then woven together in the studio. In this way, transcendence speaks to the non-geographically bounded digital age; a diaspora physically dispersed but united by a shared empathy and aesthetic.

 

Quilting
The process is rooted in the sampling techniques of hiphop – a music which, at its heart, emerged as a radical voice of and for the people. Transcendence's interpretation of the process is one that looks to the future of  both technology and ideology; linking the two with a belief that the democratization of communication that a digital age can provide is something that will contribute to a critical shift.

 

Community
Transcendence finds space for each musician's voice, recognizing the importance of multiplicity in any vision for change, the value of dissonance within a shared space, and the imperative of balancing individual identity and commonality.

 

Labor
worksongs are complex: borne of oppression and sung in conditions of hardship, but inherently uplifting – driving forward and onward. Through them, workers transcend their immediate suffering and celebrate their strength and mutual support. In this, the album speaks to the contemporary condition of isolation fostered by modern working practices in contrast to the communality of traditional labor. 

 

Live 
Jaimeo Brown leads Transcendence – and as an artist, activist and academic he presents an album that is a call to explore these challenges, with the possibility for hosting and framing debates, conferences, talks and workshops that respond to the imperative for critical analysis and activism, using the music as a point of inspiration and unity.