SAMA Music + Art

Mission

SAMA cultivates a hub for global roots music in the Pacific Northwest & Worldwide, growing empathy across cultures through transformative music and arts experiences.

Vision

A polyphonic world, a world where many worlds fit. Celebrate Diversity while always championing our shared humanity.

Context

SAMA was birthed as a counterpoint to today’s fragmented, polarized societies as regions around the globe are increasingly engulfed in wars, rising authoritarianism, mass extinctions, ecological degradation, devastating climate change impacts and resulting displacement and migrations. At the time humanity most needs relationship skills, those skills appear to be dwindling. We may be globally connected, but we are not listening. Music has the power to communicate our common humanity across divisions by directly engaging the right hemisphere of the brain—the area that attends to experience, emotion, relationship, and all that is alive. SAMA, therefore, centers and celebrates music’s inherent relationality and humanity’s ancestral music roots in its work.

SAMA focuses on live performances, tapping into the human need to be social and the communal aspects of music. Live performances generate a flow of relationship amongst music, musicians, and audiences. Music communicates emotions—felt directly in the body without needing interpretation. When people with varied cultural traditions experience music together, it opens awareness of different ways of being within a shared humanity. SAMA’s vision is that this awareness, rooted in an empathic, social experience, grows the capacity for a polyphonic world, a world where many worlds fit.

SAMA’s Work

SAMA develops relationships with artists worldwide whose work engages traditional roots and sacred and healing aspects of music.

SAMA connects artists with new global audiences through recorded interviews and performances released on its social media platforms
SAMA leverages its artist relationships worldwide and its founders’ long standing relationships in the Pacific Northwest to present live performances in the Seattle-area.
Through its network of artists and venues, SAMA cultivates an international corridor for global roots artists to perform in the Pacific Northwest, expanding local communities’ access to enriching cultural experiences.
SAMA’s community & calendar web app reduces barriers to attending local live performances by curating a trusted list of exceptional events, connecting individuals to a local community of global music enthusiasts, and offering a system of incentives to cultivate a thriving music ecosystem.
Through educational programming with local partners and visiting artists, SAMA explores the interplay of traditional and contemporary music influences, layered cultural identities resulting from immigration and colonization, and the artistic process of finding roots within dominant cultures.
Through documentary films, SAMA explores sacred and healing music traditions around the globe, fostering empathy across difference and appreciation for our shared humanity.
SAMA has created satellite efforts in Portugal and Poland. We have filmed performances and interviewed artists who are creating compelling work that melds tradition with compelling new forms of art in music.
SAMA plans on bringing artists from these countries to the PNW for concerts, lectures, and to develop curriculum with the University Of Washington School of Music.

SAMA: Music & Art