Music

Thingamakids: Oakland students make music from scratch

A teaching artist with Thingamajigs taught a weeklong workshop at charter school East Bay Innovation Academy on “sound engineering,” where students learned about physics, design, and mathematics by making their own instruments and learning about how they make sound.

Tales of Two Cities Podcast: Remembering and Forgetting

In this episode of “Tale of Two Cities,” we explore forgotten areas of the Easy Bay and how people are working to keep their traditions and memories alive. From reporter Cecilia Lei, we hear about how volunteers are helping to save neglected, stray dogs in Richmond. Next, reporter Betty Marquez Rosales and sound engineer Rosa Amanda Tuiran take us to Corazón del Pueblo, a non-profit center in Oakland where visitors remember Dia de los Muertos during sugar skull workshops. Lastly,…

Tales of Two Cities Podcast – Where Are You From?

Welcome back to the Tales of Two Cities podcast! We’ve missed coming to you through your headphones the last few months. This episode’s theme is “Where Are You From?” It’s a broad topic that encompasses the idea of home. This week you’ll hear all kinds of stories about what home means to people in Richmond and Oakland, and the types of things that make these two cities feel like home. This episode was produced by Kaitlin Benz and hosted by…

Open mic highlights experiences of women of color

In Berkeley, the La Peña Cultural Center and the UC Berkeley Womxn of Color Initiative hosted an open mic night on January 26 called “Empowering Women of Color Open Mic.”  The event opened a three-show series intended to provide a safe space for women of color to express themselves.

Oakland’s Grand Lake Theater pays tribute to the vaudeville

Before every 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. weekend screenings at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theater, Gordon Pratt pays tribute to the vaudeville–an act made obsolete by technological advancements in sound. While the ushers are still cleaning up spilled popcorn and the audience is beginning to file in, Pratt plays a few tunes on the pipe organ–a complex musical instrument, which has seen its best days fly by.