Wednesday, October 4, 2023, 6-8:30pm will continue our music series held at El Cerrito Natural Grocery Company Prepared Food Annex (The Annex) – “The Annex Sessions”
Jim Santi Owen & Friends
Jim Santi Owen is an American percussionist, educator, producer, performer, grant writer and funder based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Drumming since the age of eight, Owen began an intensive training in the North Indian percussion instrument tabla in 1991, studying under Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri at the Ali Akbar College of Music, the California Institute of the Arts, and in India. In 1995, Owen began studying South Indian percussion instruments including mridangam, ghatam, kanjiraand morsing with master percussionist T.H. Subash Chandran, and the temple drum, thavil, with K. Sekar. At CalArts, Owen studied Jazz with Charlie Haden, James Newton, and Tootie Heath and African drumming and dance from the Ladzekpo Brothers. He studied North Indian music and tabla accompaniment from Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and the art of accompaniment for the North Indian dance known as Kathak from Pandit Chitresh Das. Owen holds a Bachelor’s of Humanities from New College of California and a Master’s degree in World Music from California Institute of the Arts. He served as the Music Director for the San Francisco World Music Festival from 2009 to 2014 and is on faculty at Dominican University, The California Jazz Conservatory, LINES Ballet School, the California Institute of the Arts, and the Ali Akbar College of Music. Owen served a 3-year term as a panelist on the Zellerbach Family Fund’s Community Arts Panel, sits on arts panels for the San Francisco Arts Commission, and is Co-Chair of Development for the Swapan Chaudhuri Foundation. He served for six years as Chair of the Funding Advisory Committee for the Cultural Affairs Division of the City of Oakland and was recently appointed as a Cultural Affairs Commissioner by the Mayor of Oakland.
Owen’s work as a composer/producer is featured on Meta’s (Facebook’s) Sound Collection which has released over 150 of his original and traditional world music tracks highlighting the classical music of North and South India, folk musics of Rajasthan and Bengal, traditional music of Ghana, and classical traditions of Iran and the Middle East. As CEO of Jim Santi Owen Music, Inc., he managed a six hundred-thousand-dollar budget from Facebook to produce these tracks. His music has been used on Facebook and Instagram for over 16 million reels and other user generated content.
Jim Santi Owen has performed extensively with world-class musicians from a myriad of cultural and musical backgrounds. These include his gurus, Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri, Subash Chandran, and K. Sekar with whom he performed both in India and the U.S. Other internationally renowned artists with whom Owen has performed include: Jazz legend Pharoah Sanders, Nubian musician Hamza el Din, Double violin virtuoso Shenkar (L. Shankar) guitar innovator Stanley Jordan, Kathak dance master Pandit Chitresh Das, sitar maestro Kartik Seshadri, renowned Persian vocalist Sharam Nazeri, drum set virtuosoSteve Smith, minimalist composer Terry Riley, Jazz saxophonist Joseph Jarman (Art Ensemble of Chicago), Israeli oud player Yair Dalal, young sarode maestro Alam Khan, tabla virtuoso Bikram Ghosh, kanjira exponent Ganesh Kumar, Indo-Jazz fusion artist George Brooks, didgeridoo master Stephen Kent, devotional singer Jai Uttal, avant-garde pianist Myra Melford, Italian percussionist Alessandra Belloni, Tibetan artist Techung, Gamelan Sekar Jaya, Burmese pot-waing player Kyaw Kyaw Naing,Rova Saxophone Quartet, Cuban pianist Omar Sosa and bansuri flute exponent Steve Gorn. Owen has also appeared on numerous recordings in America and has recorded in India with ghatam maestro T.H. Vikku Vinayakram and kanjira wizard Selva Ganesh.
The Natural Grocery Company is proud to present this series in partnership with SunJams and Javier Navarrette Music Productions.
SunJams is committed to funding children’s music education in underserved public elementary schools. Your donation will help support this ongoing program.
All of the proceeds will go directly to our network of local musicians, each of whom have been severely impacted by the lack of events during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Whether you donate $10, $100, or $1000 – any amount helps and will allow us to keep bringing music to our community! As always, your donation to SunJams 501(c)3 may qualify as tax exempt.
Javier Navarrette Music Productions continues to bring live music to several venues around the Bay Area. Javier has been a professional musician and music educator in the Oakland Unified School District for the past 20 years. Over the past few years Navarrette has produced outdoors events that have proven instrumental in enabling musicians to deal with some of the fallout of the pandemic and shutdown that followed.
COVID RELATED SAFETY MEASURES
Please be safe. Feel free to wear a mask if you prefer.
TICKETS
Tickets are NOT required for this venue, you can simply come in, order food and beverages at the Annex counter and pay at the registers.