Workshops & Events

As part of the Springfield Jazz & Roots Festival, pianist and composer Zaccai Curtis will lead an interactive workshop exploring the roots, rhythms, and cultural significance of Afro-Caribbean music and jazz. Known for bringing together Afro-Cuban musical language, bebop, and modern jazz expression, Curtis will guide participants through some of the rhythmic ideas, improvisational practices, and cultural histories that shape his work.

Through live demonstration, explanation, and audience participation, the session will offer a direct and welcoming introduction to how Afro-Caribbean traditions and jazz speak to one another. Participants will get a closer look at rhythm, structure, and improvisation in the music, while also reflecting on the larger histories of migration, exchange, creativity, and resilience across the African diaspora.

Whether someone comes with a musical background or simple curiosity, the workshop is designed to help people hear more, understand more, and feel more connected to the artistic foundations behind the performance.

In addition to his featured performance at the Springfield Jazz & Roots Festival, trumpeter, composer, and sonic storyteller Etienne Charles will take part in a special public conversation inspired by his Gullah Roots project. Drawing from his travels through Gullah Geechee communities in coastal South Carolina and Georgia, the talk invites audiences deeper into the history, cultural memory, and living traditions that shape the music. Presented during festival weekend, the program will feature Charles in dialogue with a Gullah historian from the ensemble and a local moderator.

Together, they will explore the history of the Gullah Geechee people, descendants of enslaved Africans who preserved and remade culture across the coastal South. The conversation will reflect on Gullah as more than a subject of study: a way of life shaped by food, language, rhythm, community, spirituality, and everyday creativity. It will also help illuminate how Gullah history connects to America’s 250th anniversary by tracing the presence, knowledge, and cultural force of African-descended people within the broader story of the nation’s making.

Through storytelling, video clips, and audience Q&A, the program will offer a fuller understanding of how history lives inside sound. Charles will speak about how the suite’s compositions were shaped by Gullah musical traditions, including call-and-response, handclaps, foot stomps, syncopation, and other rhythmic practices that carry memory across generations. For Springfield audiences, the event creates a welcoming space for learning, connection, and reflection—especially for youth, families, and community members who want not only to hear the music, but to better understand the stories, survival, and freedom traditions that live within it.

As part of the Springfield Jazz & Roots Festival, All the Rivers will present a special Stories & Songs program that invites audiences deeper into the music, cultural roots, and lived experience behind the ensemble’s work. Alongside the group’s main-stage performance, this event creates space for ensemble members to share personal stories with the songs they perform, offering a richer understanding of the histories, traditions, and migration journeys that shape their artistry.

All the Rivers is an ensemble of immigrant and refugee musicians from 10 countries, performing original and traditional music in six languages with cultural roots across Africa, the Caribbean, and South America. Through conversation, live performance, and storytelling, audience members will encounter the music not only as sound, but as an expression of memory, identity, movement, and belonging.

Created to celebrate immigrant artistry, amplify immigrant voices, and build solidarity across communities, the program offers a chance to hear how individual stories open into larger histories of migration, resilience, creativity, and cultural continuity. Together with the ensemble’s festival performance, Stories & Songs creates a warm, joyful, and deeply human space for connection here in Springfield.