Kamau Daaood

Shopping Bag, Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections on Ritual Space explores nine Los Angeles based artists reflecting on ritual in their life and art. Artist David Hammons discusses the role of chance and improvisation in his work while working on sculpture on a waste site while N’Senga Nengudi talks about staging her performances in freeway underpasses. Spanning performance to spoken word, environmental sculpture to music each artist talks about how ritual and cultural traditions informs their work. This experimental essay intercuts interviews, documentation and photographs with the music of Don Cherry seeking to adjust the criteria and language used to talk about artists of colour.

An extraordinary group of artists and musicians, in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, creates an underground arts movement and transform a community.

Poet Kamau Daáood, “the word musician,” looks at survival as an oral poet in an electronic age, with interpretations of his work by musicians Billy Higgins, Nirankar Singh Khalsa, Dadisi Komolafe, Roberto Miranda, artist Gale Fulton Ross, martial artist Dadisi Sanyika and dancer Lula Washington.

This vibrant documentaty chronicles a multigenerational music project started in 2005 by Jesse Sharps, one of the bandleaders of Horace Tapscott's Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. The film features a stellar cast of players, including some of the hottest emerging talents from the area, and focuses on the Leimert Park district and progressive jazz scene of Los Angeles, covering the history of the music, and the long tradition of community elders guiding the young up-and-coming players on the scene. Featured are some extraordinary performances by local legends Azar Lawrence, Dwight Trible, Kamau Daáood, Michael Session, Ndugu Chancler, and Phil Ranelin, along with rising stars Brandon Coleman, Kamasi Washington, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, and Randal Fisher.