Marshall Trammell (Black/male/he/him/his) serves community interests beyond the limit of the bandstand. He is a mid-career, multidisciplinary, visionary artist keenly focused on investigating social practices, sensemaking, and aesthetic technologies embedded in indigenous design principles and weaponizing culture. Born in the early 1970’s, Trammell grew up marveling at the deep ridges the Ko’olau Mountain Range in Kaneohe, on Oahu, Hawai’i, experiencing the many narratives embedded in folkloric arts, crafts and complimentary tales. He is a multi-percussionist centered in African and Diasporic principles. Today he performs research and political education internationally from a platform for embodied social justice vernacular, organizational strategy, alternative infrastructure and solidarity economic development. Trammell is an improvising musician & self-styled Music Research Strategist with with deep roots in Creative Music scene and PIC Abolitionist work in and around the San Francisco Bay Area.
His work esponds to Black Lives Matters’ 2016 question regarding the role of artist in today’s political landscape. In that regard, he asks: What forms of invisible and visible cultural destruction impact interdisciplinary approaches to culture, identity politics, the preservation of memory and result in new configurations of power, privilege and powerlessness to excavate new insights from global meta-narratives (including, but not limited to, sustainability, transnational politics and nature building, religion, identity politics, and reconceptualizing human/nature relations)?
Trammell attended the Electronic Arts MFA program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2004-06) and an ever-growing list of collaborations and projects, including Zachary James Watkins, Laura Ortman, Dohee Lee, Jawwaad Taylor, Lisa E. Harris, Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten, Carlos Santistevan, William Fowler Collins, Aaron Turner, Sharmi Basu, Torji Dori, David Murray, Raven Chacon, Saul Williams, Pauline Oliveros, India Cooke, Genny Lim, Francis Wong, Jon Jang, Jon Dietrich, and more. He presents his works through East Side Arts Alliance, Southern Exposure (SF), Charlotte Street Foundation, and The Museum of Human Achievement. He is an Intercultural Leadership Fellow (2018-19) and a member of the Solidarity Research Center. This year his work brings to Mexico City, Kansas City, Valladolid (Spain), NYC and Vancouver (BC).
Music Research Strategies instigates social practice collaborations at sites of political opposition. Music Research Strategies began as a critical ethnographic framework bridging Trammell’s ongoing interests with improvising strategies, organizational improvisation and psychology, and street-level, social justice action. Music Research Strategies navigates the global economy as a touring musician performing research and political education nationally and internationally through a battery of modular, social science-based systems.
