AUGUST 2014
On July 12 Sticking UP For Children combined with Make Music NOLA for a Music & Arts Day in New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward.
We gathered at Collins and Sheila Phillips house "on the River side" of St. Claude Avenue, deep in the southeast corner of the Lower 9. Students from the more than 60 who practice and perform with Make Music NOLA, their parents, and Sticking Up For Children's great complement of supporting drummers got busy underneath an awning that shaded us from the heat.
Students with paint-pens produced more of brilliant drumsticks-as-art.
Drummers were inspired and inspiring.
String-sections of the Make Music NOLA orchestra performed.
Alfred "Uganda" Roberts, the great percussionist, now 71, again taught children drumming.
Sticking Up For Children also visited the Kuumba Institute's Summer program of arts-classes at the Ashe' Cultural Arts Center in New Orleans' Central City. Our videographer, Aristide Phillips, 2013 Editor-in-Chief of Southern University's print and online newspapers, again recorded vivid images of the multiple, instructional activities that Kuumba has going on.
Segenon Kone' of Africa's Ivory Coast teaches drumming along the sidewalk outside Ashe'.
Ben Kahn, graduate of the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA) the Brooklyn, New York New School's Jazz program, teaches film.
Frederick "Hollywood" Delahoussaye, a poet and organizer who's shared stages with the Roots, D'Angelo, and Amiri Baraka, guides Kuumba's program in creative writing.
the Kuumba instructor who's created his own ' ' synthesis of martial arts, teaches self-defense.
Keysha McKey, the Kuumba institute's program- director, and Kaitlin Johnson, have both been with Kuumba since it began classes in 2009.
Here are some of July 2014's 'Beautiful Drumsticks'!
