Anna Lomax Wood is President of the Board of Directors of the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE), a center established by her father, the legendary musicologist Alan Lomax, to explore and preserve the world's expressive traditions. In addition to overseeing the preservation of her father's recordings, films, photographs, manuscripts and research (the originals of which now reside at the Library of Congress), Anna curates projects which reintroduce the public to his work and what it stands for: cultural equity - a fundamentally democratic approach to culture and the arts, based on the principle that every culture has the fundamental right to express and develop its distinctive heritage. Staff - AdministrativeDon Fleming is Executive Director of ACE and Director of the Alan Lomax Archive. He has been with ACE since 2001 and oversees ACE dissemination and repatriation projects and coordinates with the American Folklife Center, The Library of Congress, to provide support in public programming, cataloging media, artist and collaborator research and notification, and additional preservation. Don initiated, developed and participated in an international outreach project for Black History Month, in partnership with U.S. State Department and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, which toured nine European countries in 2005. Don has represented the Alan Lomax Archive at the Lead Belly Conference organized by Case Western Reserve University and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, at the New York State Folk Arts Roundtable, and at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Music Conference. He responds to inquiries regarding uses and rights to the materials contained within the Lomax Collection, and has licensed many of the Lomax Collection's songs, films, photographs and print material Kiki Smith-Archiapatti is ACE Project and Finance Director. She joined ACE in October, 2010. Kiki oversees the status and budgets of ACE projects. She has developed a financial system to track ACE projects and to provide statements and royalty payments to the estates of artists and collaborators that Alan Lomax recorded and worked with. Geoffrey Clarfield is the Director of Research and Development for ACE. He is a musicologist, development anthropologist, and ethnographer specializing in East Africa. Trained as a classical singer at the Royal Conservatory, he formerly appeared on the Canadian stage and on radio and television as a member of the National Opera; he still performs on oud and saz. He studied ethnomusicology with Sterling Beckwith and Charles Boiles and applied the methodologies of Cantometrics in his research among the Sinai Bedouin. From 1985 through 2005 Clarfield worked in as an international development consultant and project manager for the Jane Goodall Institute, the National Museums of Kenya, the United Nations Environmental Program, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Swiss Development Corporation in Kenya and Tanzania, and as a Lecturer at Bar Ilan University in Israel. Most recently he was Co-Director of Ve'ahavta, a development NGO in Toronto.
Staff - ArchivalNathan Salsburg is ACE Research Center Editor, and editor of the Alan Lomax Collection audio, photo and video collections. He has been with the Alan Lomax Archive since 2000. He is also production manager for the album releases on Global Jukebox. He is a producer, guitarist and writer based in Louisville, Kentucky, with expertise in pre-war blues, hillbilly and early country music, Southern Appalachian balladry, and the music of the British folk revival. A five-LP set commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Lomax's "Southern Journey" field recording trip, edited and annotated by Salsburg, was released on the Mississippi label and Global Jukebox in 2010. Since 2006, he has produced and hosted Root Hog Or Die, an internet radio program devoted to vernacular/traditional music from around the world, and is curator of the Twos & Fews in collaboration with Chicago's Drag City label. Salsburg also maintains an index of online traditional/folk international music resources at his blog, roothogordie.wordpress.com. Bertram Lyons is Archive Collections and Dissemination Manager at ACE, where he has worked since 2000. He is completing a Masters Degree in Museum Studies/American Studies at the University of Kansas, specializing in digital media collections and has been an archival intern at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress. Previously he worked as an events coordinator in New Orleans and taught in elementary schools in Memphis. At ACE Lyons has budgeted and supervised the organization and preservation of the archive's audio holdings, and assembled catalogs of all the Lomax Archive's audio and Performance Style Research logs and metadata, and he coordinated the transfer of the archive's original materials to the Library of Congress in 2004. He has been charge of organizing and coordinating special archival projects including digitizing and cataloging the Cantometrics dataset and sound files, oversees ACE's effort to establish contact with contributors to Lomax's audio and film collections, and he coordinates ACE's Dissemination Program. Sophie Abramowitz joined ACE in 2011 to manage the updating of audio and media assets in the Alan Lomax Collection. She is a graduate of Barnard College, Columbia University. She has worked at the Dust-to-Digital Record label in Atlanta, Georgia, on cataloging and digitization of archival collections. Sophie was a DJ at Columbia University Radio, WKCR 89.9 FM-NY, and worked on the stations' archival reel-to-reel restoration projects.
Staff - Research/WritingEllen Harold has an extensive grounding in American cultural and political history of the 1930s and 40s and the prehistory of the folksong movement. During her tenure as Research Associate and Editor at the Association for Cultural Equity (ACE) she became thoroughly familiar with the biographies of John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, whom she knew well as her uncle throughout most of her life. Ellen compiled and edited the Haitian Diary: Papers and Correspondence From Alan Lomax’s Haitian Journey 1936−37, one of two books included in Alan Lomax in Haiti (2009), a definitive portrait of 1930s Haiti in recorded sound. She is Editor of the Profiles section of the ACE website, a collection of portraits, many of which she authored, of people whom Alan Lomax knew and worked with. She also compiled and annotated the Discussions, Interviews and Lectures Collection in ACE’s Research Center, a series of revealing audiotapes of Alan Lomax and his collaborators at work, spanning the 1950s to the 1990s. Previously, Ellen served as text editor of the liner notes to the Alan Lomax Collection, an anthology of 100 CDs of Lomax’s recordings published on the Rounder Records label, and was translator/editor for the multi-volume Italian Treasury series in the Collection. She grew up in New York and Italy and has degrees in Italian literature and romance philology from Temple and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, respectively. She has been with ACE since 1998.
ConsultantsGage Averill ethnomusicologist specializing in Caribbean music, is Provost at the University of Toronto and also Professor of History and Culture in the Department of Music. His books on Haitian music, American barbershop quartets, and cultural criticism have won awards from the Association of Recorded Sound Collections, the American Library Association, and the Society for American Music. He is editor of Alan Lomax’s 1937 recordings in Haiti. John Bishop is an ethnographic filmmaker, author, and former faculty member in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA (Adjunct Associate Professor, 1995-2008), where he worked with professional and student dancers and choreographers on translating dance to the screen. His first film, a collaboration with his wife, anthropologist Naomi Bishop, investigated the socio-ecology of langur monkeys in a Himalayan forest. The Buddhist temple village they lived in was the subject of his first book, An Ever Changing Place, Simon & Schuster, 1976), and of the award-winning ethnographic film, Himalayan Herders (1997). Other films include Rhesus Play (1977), an investigation of why monkeys play; The Land Where the Blues Began (1979), made with Alan Lomax and folklorist Worth Long, about the origins of the blues; New England Fiddles (1984) and New England Dances (1990) which present French, Scottish and Irish music and dance traditions in the northeast United States. A Cambodian series includes Khmer Court Dance (1992), Cambodian Court Dance: The Next Generation (2001), and a film about a modern classical Cambodian dance. Hosay Trinidad (1998) looks at the complex communities that come together for a Shiite Muslim observance in the Caribbean. John Bishop is an ACE Board Member, and a consultant to ACE on Lomax’s Performance Style Research. He has supervised the reissue of DVD editions of films by Lomax and his colleagues. John Cowley is an internationally recognized expert in the commercial recordings of Caribbean music and in the historical musicology of the Caribbean of the Mississippi Delta. The author of the classic Carnival, Canboulay, and Calypso: Traditions in the Making (Cambridge 1996), as well as many scholarly articles, Cowley has served as a consultant for many institutions including the Library of Congress, and is currently a Visiting Fellow in Black Music and Caribbean Studies at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in the U.K. He is consultant on the recordings made by Alan Lomax in the Caribbean, and is editor of the landmark CDs, Trinidad: Roots of Carnival (2001) and Blues Songbook (2004) in the Alan Lomax Collection (Rounder). Judith R. Cohen an ethnomusicologist specializing in Spanish and Judeo-Spanish music, serves as Graduate Faculty in the Music Department at York University, Toronto, and is the author of numerous scholarly publications, articles, and CDs. Judith is also a sought-after performer and lecturer on Sephardic songs and medieval and traditional music, including Ibizan, Balkan, Portuguese, Yiddish, French Canadian, and pan-European balladry. The Crypto-Jewish regions of the Portuguese-Spanish border are among her areas of specialized research. She is general editor and curator of the recordings made by Alan Lomax in Spain in 1952. Gideon D’Arcangelo is an interactive media designer who specializes in the intersection of new technology and musical experience. A partner in ESI Design in New York City, D’Arcangelo’s recent projects include the World Hunger Action Center for Mercy Corps (opening September 2008), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Visitor Experience Redesign (launching March 2009), the Children’s Museum of Los Angeles (opening March 2009), and the Reuters Sign at Three Times Square (2001). He is creator/producer of National Public Radio’s Listening In on Weekend America, which explores the ways music appears in everyday life (http://listeningin.org) and has been teaching multimedia design in the Graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program of the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. D’Arcangelo worked with Alan Lomax on the Global Jukebox, an illustrated database of world song and dance styles. His writings include "Recycling Music, Answering Back: Toward an Oral Tradition of Electronic Music" (NIME 2004 Proceedings) and "Alan Lomax and the Big Story of Song" (Rounder). He is an ACE Board Member. Steve Dunstan is the database developer for the ACE Research Center. He is Vice President/Enterprise Systems Architect at Daiwa Securities America. Steve graduated from Arizona State University in 1992 and has extensive experience as a software engineer. Michael Del Rio is Chief Technology Officer at Task Stream and has helped build the company to provide web-based educational services to million of teachers and hundreds of universities worldwide. Previously, he designed edutainment CD-ROMs for Learn Technologies Interactive; created multimedia kiosks for RGA; and developed a content delivery system that was sold to Univision, Time Warner, and other networks. In the 1990s he worked with Alan Lomax to develop the Global Jukebox, a multimedia project illustrating how cultures express and transmit tradition through music and dance. He is technical consultant to ACE on the datasets that comprised the Global Jukebox. David Evans is Professor of Music at The University of Memphis and a distinguished scholar of African American vernacular music and folklore. Also a writer, musician, and filmmaker, Evans is the author of Tommy Johnson (1971) and Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (1982), as well as many articles, reviews, and album notes. Evans won a Grammy Award in 2003 for his notes to Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton. He severed as general editor for the 12-volume Deep River of Song series in the Alan Lomax Collection on Rounder Records. Jeffrey A. Greenberg is a partner in Beldock Levine and Hoffman LLP, a firm founded by distinguished civil rights lawyer Myron Beldock and jazz and folk music advocate Eliot Hoffman. Greenberg specializes in entertainment and intellectual property law, and represents musicians, music publishers, film and television producers, festival, tour and live event producers, event marketers, actors, comedians, screenwriters, composers, and television and radio personalities. His producer credits include the 100-CD Alan Lomax Collection (Rounder); Popular Songbook (2003); Terrance Simien, There’s Room For Us All (Black Top 1993); Rob Wasserman, Trilogy (Rounder Records 2004); Genevieve Waite, Romance Is On The Rise (Chrome Dreams 2004); John Phillips, John, The Wolfking of L.A (Varese Sarabande 2006). He was awarded a Grammy as Producer of the Best Historical Recording of 2006, Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax. He is a member of the ACE Board and legal advisor to the Alan Lomax Estate and the Association for Cultural Equity. Nancy Johnson received her M.A. in art history from New York University and has worked as an independent archivist in the New York City area since the 1970s, building a distinguished professional record. Specializing now in folklore collections, Nancy Johnson began her career with the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1970-1996). She has written exhibition catalog essays, historical surveys and articles, and many finding aids, and her clients have included the Lotos Club, the Knickerbocker Club, the Brooklyn Public Library, the Whitney Museum of American Art; The Brooklyn Museum; Montclair Art Museum; City Lore; Center for Traditional Music and Dance; and the Calandra Italian American Institute of CUNY. She serves on the Board of the New York Folklore Society. At ACE, Nancy compiled and annotated the Performance Style and Culture Research Collection, the largest single collection of Alan Lomax’s papers. Forrestine Paulay is a Laban effort-shape notation specialist, choreographer, teacher, and movement therapist. Paulay studied Laban’s system of effort observation with Irmgard Bartenieff. As a Western-trained dancer working with dance therapist Judith Kestenberg, she recognized pre-shaping in movement as comparable in importance to pre-effort. With Alan Lomax and initially with Bartenieff, Paulay created the method of cross-cultural dance analysis known as Choreometrics. In 1970 she became Assistant Director of the project, and along with Lomax, developed the coding system, assembled, selected, and analyzed the film samples, trained coders, and analyzed data. She and Lomax coauthored several teaching films, and an unpublished book, "World Dance". She consults with ACE on Performance Style Research and Choreometrics. Goffredo Plastino, Reader in Ethnomusicology at the University of Newcastle, England, was a student of Diego Carpitella at the University of Rome and completed his doctorate at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris. He is author of numerous books and articles, including the authoritative work on the Southern Italian lira and a study of Italian rap. He is editor of the volume, Mediterranean Mosaic (Routledge 2002), and of L’Anno più felice della mia vita (Il Saggiatore 2008), a book of the photographs Alan Lomax made in Italy in 1954-55. His current research is on Neapolitan popular music. Plastino is general editor and curator of the field recordings made by Lomax in Italy. Steve Rosenthal is the founder of the Magic Shop Recording Studio (New York City), where he combines vintage analog recordings with cutting-edge digital technology, and of The Blue Room, designed in 2002, which facilitates high quality audio restoration and analog-to-digital transfer. His clients include Bjork, Coldplay, Oasis, Joe Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, The Ramones, and Duran Duran. His recent remastering projects include The Rolling Stones, Sam Cooke, Frank Sinatra, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and Jelly Roll Morton and scores of other recordings by Alan Lomax since 1996. Richard Smith is a system integration specialist with 10 years of network and information management system support and development at AT&T Bell Labs, and as an independent consultant since 1998. He recently developed architecture for business applications using Browser/Applet client interfaces with Apache/Tomcat HTML/Servlet/JSP and HTTP tunneling for applet/Servlet communications. He has served as an Oracle DBA, and PL/SQL, JDBC and Pro*C (both C and C++) programmer. Richard Smith has served as consultant to the ACE digital catalogs project; in 2007 he extracted and normalized the performance style and culture datasets. Marcos Sueiro is an audio engineer specializing in historical recordings and noise reduction and is currently the Recorded Sound Archivist at Columbia University. Trained by the late Malcolm Chisholm, engineer at the Chess Records studios, and he has served as Sound Specialist at Columbia College’s Center for Black Music Research in Chicago, and as sound digitization and preservation consultant to ACE. Howard Wuelfing is a writer and publicist, and a veteran of Columbia Records and JEM Records. He brings a love of diverse musics and his extensive experience to his publicity company, Howling Wuelf Media, and to his work as ACE consulting publicist.
In MemoriamMolly W. Sirignano was bookkeeper and office manager at ACE. She passed away in December 2010 and is survived by her daughter Monica Sirignano. In 2009 she told us this about herself: "I was born in the Netherlands and my parents moved to the States when I was very young. I grew up in New York State in the Catskills where most of my five brothers and sisters still live. I attended college in New York and Florida, and am divorced and the mother of one child. I took up the career of bookkeeping fifteen years ago and am very happy with it; I enjoy the challenge of working with numbers and the organization it provides me. In my spare time, I love to explore New York City and to see plays. I am a voracious reader and always have a book in my hands. I also enjoy taking courses for the fun of learning. I love animals and am presently the owner of three cats, all with different personalities." |