Selendis S. A. Johnson
Selendis Sebastian Alexander Johnson (* San Francisco, USA) is a vibraphonist and trombonist. She has been living in New York City since 2018, where she completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts in jazz and contemporary music at The New School. Johnson works with a variety of musical styles, and plays and organizes performances of Black-American improvisation based music. She leads projects and large ensembles, alternating between trombone, vibraphone and megaphone.
Johnson organises performances and plays in churches, homes, colleges, record stores or fixed venues, always looking for the new and the collaborative. Her pieces emerge from approaches in which musicians and instruments grow together before dismantling structures, breaking conventions and creating something new together. Johnson’s pieces emerge from traditional approaches in which the musicians and instruments grow together before breaking down the structures, breaking through the conventions and creating something new together.
In New York, she can be seen with her projects “Under the Hands of Each Other” (4 brass + 2 bass, collective conducting ensemble), Palenque Monastery (jazz sextet placing the works of Thelonious Monk in a historical-political context), her Big Band (performing mainly the works of Cal Massey & Fred Ho) or with her show series “We Are Greater Than (The Sum [From 1 To Selendis {=?=} Choice] Of 4n): The Show Series” – in her apartment or anywhere else in the city.
She returned to The New School in 2023 as a guest lecturer, leading a student big band that performed Cal Massey’s “Black Liberation Movement Suite” (1969) and Fred Ho’s “Struggle for a New World Suite” (2006), and premiered her rather more improvised work “Unity & Struggle (for Amílcar Cabral and Fred Ho)”.
