Media Contact: Bennetta Jules-Rosette, (858) 534-4790, or Jan Jennings, (858) 822-1684

A Blues-and-Border Music Workshop – capped off with a performance by Los Angeles-based blues musician and songwriter Maurice "Mighty Mo" Rodgers – will be presented Feb. 18 in the Price Center at the University of California, San Diego. Both events are free and open to the public.

Rodgers will present his lecture/performance, Metaphysical Blues: New Frontiers In Music Making at 7 p.m. in the Price Center Theatre. The workshop will be held that afternoon beginning at noon in the Price Center’s Galleries A and B.

The workshop, Rodgers’ performance and a special youth forum are sponsored by UCSD’s African and African-American Studies Research Project (AAASRP) in conjunction with Black History month. UCSD sociologist Bennetta Jules-Rosette is AAASRP coordinator.

Composer, lyricist and keyboardist Rodgers holds a master’s degree from California State University, Dominguez Hills, where he conducted research on the blues as metaphysical music. His CD, Blues Is My Wailin’ Wall, released last year by Blue Thumb Records and Universal Studios, contains a cross-section of classical blues and contemporary pieces with Rodgers’ original lyrics placing the blues in social, historical and cultural contexts.

"This is black music defined and distilled in all its passion and purity encompassing blues, soul and gospel," writes a Real Blues music critic of Rodgers’ CD. "This is intelligent, pure, authentic modern blues."

Rodgers’ earlier experience includes work as a music producer in the blues and soul music industries, working with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and the legendary Motown

Records. He has performed with blues legends such as Albert Collins, T-Bone Walker, Bobby Bland and Jimmy Reed. He also has worked extensively with youth groups and with the Los Angeles County Department of Education.

In addition to his lecture/performance, Rodgers, a UCSD Regents’ Lecturer, will serve as moderator for the Blues-and-Border Music Workshop and will conduct a youth forum, a community outreach program, for students from the Boys and Girls Clubs of San Diego (B&GCSD), the Sojourner Truth Academy of San Diego and the Preuss School at UCSD.

The Blues-and-Border Music Workshop will begin with welcoming remarks by Jules-Rosette and Rodgers’ presentation of the workshop agenda at noon, followed by a luncheon break from 1 to 2 p.m. From 2 to 5:30 p.m. workshop scholars will discuss the boundaries of genres, styles and forms; African retentions in African-American music; the cultural relationship between music and migration, and the role of music as a form of cultural transmission and preservation. They will examine how the constant interaction of musical forms across borders creates the cultural exchanges and blendings of people in migration and motion.

Participating workshop scholars and their individual topics include: Cynthia Schmidt, the University of Washington, The Language You Cry In: Music of the Middle Passage from Mende Chants to Gullah Songs; Steven Friedson, the University of North Texas, The Blues and the Body: The African Roots of African-American Music; Ian Condry, Union College, Nightclubs as Media Crossroads: An Ethnographic Approach to Japanese Hip Hop Music; Joann Ball, UCSD, Sounds of Blackness: Popular Music in Liverpool, England, and Jessie Mills, UCSD, Early Jazz in Los Angeles.

Workshop discussants include Peter Bloom, who holds a doctorate in film studies from UCLA and is an AAASRP Visiting Scholar teaching at UCSD this quarter, and Cristin McVey, UCSD. Participants in a roundtable discussion include UCSD’s Jules-Rosette, George Lipsitz, Nancy Guy, Jane Rhodes and the AAASRP Board.

The Language You Cry In, a film by Alvaro Toepke and Angel Serrano with ethnography by Cynthia Schmidt, will screen from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. in the Price Center’s Gallery B, followed

by Rodgers’ lecture/performance, Metaphysical Blues, at 7 p.m. in the Price Center Theatre.

Students from the B&GCSD, the Sojourner Truth Academy, and the Preuss School, who are participating in the youth forum, have been preparing and writing essays on blues, rap, hip hop, and other popular musical forms or essays which explore the roots of modern music, since November of last year under the direction of Anthony McKinzy of Play It Cool Records and Bobby Hearns of the African-American Writers and Artists of San Diego. Rodgers will review the essays, share his background as a musician and producer and perform for the students at two venues: the UCSD campus on Feb. 23 and the B&GCSD’s Encanto Branch in Southeast San Diego Feb. 24. The students also will attend activities Feb. 18 at UCSD including the screening of The Language You Cry In.

The goal of the youth forum, according to Sallie Bayless, AAASRP board member and community liaison, is to expose San Diego’s inner-city youth to the exciting possibilities of higher education and advanced research.

Rodgers’s Regents’ Lecturer-in-residence program during the month of February is co-sponsored by UCSD’s Department of Ethnic Studies and Department of Music.

The Blues-and-Border Music Workshop is organized by the Focused Research Group on Popular Art and Music of UCSD’s AAASRP. The AAASRP’s mission is to promote research and intellectual understanding of the issues that face African-Americans and the African disapora populations today from the perspectives of the humanities and the social sciences. The project sponsors public events that bring diverse groups of people together, both to foster a comparative and interdisciplinary environment and to share information and exchange scholarly ideas.

For further information on the Blues-and-Border Music Workshop or on Rodgers’ lecture/performance call Jules-Rosette at (858) 534-4790.