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In City Lights’ series ‘Speaking of Music’, local musicians share their works and stories in their own voices. In this article, we spotlight the Atlanta musician and music professor Mausiki Scales. His band, Mausiki Scales and the Common Ground Collective, “explore the threads that connect African music and the African diaspora”. He further describes their musical work as follows:
An accomplished key player, Scales also sings, composes, arranges and performs African percussion instruments. However, he learned to play the piano from the age of eight, playing classics such as Earth, Wind and Fire, The Emotions, and Gil Scott-Heron.He liked listening to soul music, so his musical education started early. “One day I heard ‘Flashlight’ by Parliament Funkadelic playing on my boombox and we started playing it together on his family’s piano,” Scales recalled. “I never took it out of my system.”
A graduate of Tuskegee University and Clark Atlanta University, Scales believes that those schools and the culture of the Southern HBCU created “fertile soil” for fostering a passion for music and music history. He himself is now an educator in the fields of history and African American studies. He has taught at Morehouse, GSU, Clark Atlanta, Morris and Brown College. “The HBCU experience is still alive and well at ATL,” he says, Scales.
Leaving plenty of room for improvisation and exploration, Scales weaves techniques and traditions of the past into their music, maintaining a link to the creativity of African and post-Diaspora musicmakers. “I came to have a deep respect for the artistry that shaped these sounds,” he said Scales. “The testimonies of these songs show that my ancestors were able to create music that served as a source, a lifeline, to educate them in times of uncertainty and doubt. “Summer Solstice,” the featured track from his recent album Westwest Africa, is a brass cycle over warm jazz chords and a slow but irresistibly funky bassline. We bring you this wisdom in the form of hypnotic and hypnotic melodies.
Music by Mausiki Scales and the Common Ground Collective can be found at https://www.mausikiscalescommonground.com/.
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