John Calloway & the Afro-Filipino Project – Filipino American Heritage Month Celebration

John Calloway & the Afro-Filipino Project is a Bay Area-based ensemble comprised of African American, Filipino American and Afro-Filipino musicians, dancers, and spoken word artists who are dedicated to exploring the artistic and cultural ties and commonalities among them. In celebration of Filipino American Heritage Month, the ensemble will perform an array of original arrangements and compositions that fuse jazz, traditional Filipino music, and the indigenous kulintang music of the southern Philippines.  Much of the repertoire performed will be from the “Buffalo Soldier in the Philippines: A Crisis of Conscience” project conceived by Calloway in 2023. The ensemble will feature:

Ron Belcher – bass
Eric Peralta – piano
Deszon Claiborne – drums
Sam Brown – violin
Conrad Benedicto – kulintang instruments and spoken word
Manuel Dragon – kulintang instruments
Ting Jose Alvarez-Maquinta: reader, spoken word, dancer
John Calloway – flutes, kulintang instruments

Dr. John Calloway is a nationally recognized multi-instrumentalist/composer who for 40 years had a dual career in education. He has performed with internationally-known musicians, such as Israel “Cachao” Lopez, Omar Sosa and Max Roach, and in the Bay Area with John Santos, Mark Levine, and Marcus Shelby. Calloway has written for several GRAMMY-nominated recordings with John Santos and Ritmo y Candela, was awarded an Emmy for his composition “No Hay Nada Mas SF,” and arranged music for the HBO movie “Hemingway & Gelhorn.” Calloway holds a master’s degree in music education from San Francisco State University and a Doctorate in Multicultural Education from the University of San Francisco, and has taught in San Francisco public schools for over 30 years.

John Calloway Website
(Ticket Includes 5% City of Santa Cruz Admission Tax)