Father McKenzie Music

Musicianship: Performance

I am a primarily an electric, acoustic, and classical guitarist, though I also play bass, keyboard, and drums. I have performed professionally in reggae, rock, funk, and R&B bands, and in the pit for numerous music theatre productions in Santa Cruz and Santa Clara counties. I have also performed a variety of world musics: I played in the UCSC Sundanese Gamelan ensemble, and now play west-African "Highlife" music in Atlanta. I taught lessons and classes in rock/pop musicianship, performance, and song-writing for nearly ten years, and am now leading Georgia Tech's Rock and Pop ensemble.

Highlife

I currently play lead guitar in (and arrange for) the Atlanta Highlife Ensemble at Morehouse College, directed by my colleage Aaron Carter-Ényì. Highlife is a form of west-African popular music. We play a variety of classic highlife, and afropop, tunes from the sixties and seventies. These genres combine elements of contemporary American pop music and jazz with distinctly African rhythmic and harmonic sensibilities. On the surface, the songs often sound (to Western ears) a lot like simple Reggae, but the percussion and the interaction between phrasing and the hypermeter are often quite different than what we find in the West—it's a lot of fun to play!

Check out our website and some of our promotional videos:

Fela Kuti, Water No Get Enemy
Nico Mbarga, Sweet Mother
Peter King, African Dialects
Christy Igbokwe, Seun Rere
Victor Uwaifo, Osalobua Rekpama

Rap Science

Harmonic Analysis

Highlife

Research

As a researcher, I combine humanistic and scientific methodologies in the study of music. Specifically, I engage in computational modeling of symbolic music data and behavioral experimentation with human participants. The questions and ideas I explore are all grounded in, informed by, and evaluated in light of, fundamentally humanistic music theory.

Music

I am an active musician and composer. As a guitarist, bassist, and drummer/percussionist, I play a variety of musics, mostly American vernacular music (rock, pop, hip-hop) and world music—I am also a trained classical guitarist. As a composer, I synthesize common-practice, popular, and world musics, especially focusing on sophisticated rhythm and tempo relationships, inspired by Indonesian Gamelan music.

Pedagogy

I've had the pleasure of music at four different universities, and with K-12 kids in afterschool classes and private lessons. I've taught entire music theory curricula, classes in music technology and music cognition,, and rock/pop music performance. I also love to teach scientific research methodologies, especially statistics, and programming.