Samora Pinderhughes Berklee Ensemble

The Signature Series presents composer, pianist, vocalist, filmmaker, and multidisciplinary artist Samora Pinderhughes leading the Samora Pinderhughes Berklee Ensemble. Matthew Stevens, associate professor in the Ensemble Department, selected the student performers and rehearsed them with Pinderhughes's chosen repertoire in preparation for the concert. Pinderhughes has collaborated with many artists across boundaries and scenes, including Herbie Hancock, Glenn Ligon, Sara Bareilles, Simone Leigh, Daveed Diggs, Kyle Abraham, Titus Kaphar, and Lalah Hathaway. 

He works frequently with Common on compositions for music and film, and is featured as a composer, lyricist, vocalist, and pianist on the new albums August Greene and Let Love with Common, Robert Glasper, and Karriem Riggins. He has performed his compositions at Carnegie Hall, the Sundance Film Festival, and the Kennedy Center, and toured internationally with Branford Marsalis, Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah (formerly Christian Scott), José James, and Emily King, among others. Pinderhughes is also known for using his music to examine sociopolitical issues and fight for change. He works in the tradition of the Black surrealists, those who bend words, sounds, and images toward the causes of revolution. Pinderhughes is a prison abolitionist and an advocate for process over product. 

His music is renowned for its emotionality, its honesty about difficult and sensitive topics, and its careful details in word and sound. As an artist, Pinderhughes’s goal is that people will live differently after experiencing what he makes—that it will affect how they think, how they act, how they relate to others, and how they consider their daily relationships to their country and their world.