The Music Mural Workshop is a fun, hands-on music, visual arts, and textile arts experience where elementary students work together to create their own original rhythm composition using percussion instruments, symbols, shapes, and teamwork.
Over the course of 4 weeks, students build a large collaborative “music mural” using textile arts — fiber, pattern, color, and texture — that connects to different percussion instruments and sounds. Working in small groups, students make creative decisions together, practice listening skills, and learn how individual ideas can become part of a larger group performance.
Students might choose to use fiber, color, pattern, texture, symbols, or shapes to represent different instruments as they create and organize their musical score. For example, purple circles could represent drums, yellow waves for shakers, green stars for bells, and blue squares for rhythm sticks. This visual system encourages creativity while helping all students participate and connect with the activity in their own way.
Using drums, shakers, bells, and rhythm sticks, students explore rhythm, improvisation, and ensemble playing in a supportive classroom environment where every contribution matters. The program encourages creativity, confidence, communication, and collaboration through accessible music-making activities designed for all experience levels.
At the end of the residency, students perform the musical score they created together as a class. The completed music mural remains as a visual reminder of their creativity, teamwork, and accomplishments, while also giving students the opportunity to teach their peers how to read and perform the mural they created together.
Photographs 2 & 3: Music Mural Workshop at the Jubilee School of West Philadelphia
Watch Da Road 🖤🩵💛
Rhythmic Roots is a dynamic 90-minute cultural music program that immerses students in the rich traditions of African, Brazilian, New Orleans and Caribbean percussion. Through hands-on instrument exploration, call and response, and collaborative music making, participants discover how rhythm connects culture, community, and identity.
Rooted in the African diaspora and the vibrant carnival and street parade traditions of Brazil, New Orleans and the Caribbean, Rhythmic Roots introduces students to the foundational rhythmic patterns that drive Samba, Junkanoo, Secondline and Black Masking musical traditions. Students explore these rhythms through listening, body percussion, and a variety of instruments — building both musical skills and cultural awareness along the way.
Sessions are structured to take students from listening to creating. Drawing on live recordings and the original field research of Bloco Director Elaine Smith — whose work spans parade traditions in New Orleans Mardi Gras, Secondline, Black Masking culture, and the Junkanoo festival of the Bahamas — students gain a firsthand connection to living rhythmic traditions. From there, students progress to guided practice culminating in a full-group Bloco playing.
All sessions are facilitated using the learning-in-the-round technique, with chairs and musicians arranged in a circle. This approach places every student at the center of the music-making experience, ensuring no one is in the back of the room or on the sidelines. Learning in the round promotes equal participation, strengthens listening skills, and allows students to make eye contact with one another — deepening their sense of collective music making and shared rhythm. It also reflects the communal circle traditions found in African diasporic music cultures, connecting the classroom experience directly to the traditions being studied.
We’re thrilled to announce our partnership with CraftNOW (@craftnowphl ) to bring our cultural arts programming to Philadelphia Parks & Recreation (@philaparkandrec )sites across our city!
Philadelphia youth deserve access to arts programming that connects them to their roots, their culture, and each other — and we’re making sure more Philadelphia neighborhoods have exactly that.
📍Myers Recreation Center (at Daroff School), Cobbs Creek
📍Roosevelt Recreation Center, NE Philadelphia/Tacony
📍Belfield Recreation Center, Germantown
📍Lonnie Young Recreation Center, East Germantown
📍Pleasant Recreation Center, Mt.Airy
📍Jerome Brown Recreation Center, North Philadelphia
📍Kendrick Recreation Center, Roxborough
📍Hunting Park Recreation Center, Hunting Park
📍Morris Estate Recreation Center, West Oak Lane/Logan
📍 Finley Recreation Center, West Oak Lane
Sneak Peek 👀
This year at the Jubilee School Spring Concert on Friday, May 22nd at One Art Community Center(@oneartcommunitycenter ), we’ll welcome our littlest sambistas as they join PHonk! Philly’s intergenerational Bloco Afro Oyá.
Also, we want to thank our Jubilee School Art Teacher Kalila (@kalilacrochet ) who supported us and our Jubilee Sambistas with all of our Spring Concert arts & crafts projects in preparation for their end of school year performance.
Blocos Afros
Blocos Afros are Afro-Brazilian Carnival groups born from resistance. Black Brazilians were largely excluded from mainstream Carnival parades. Beginning in Salvador, Bahia in the 1970s, these groups reclaimed the festival — centering African rhythms, Black history, and community pride.
Ilê Aiyê, founded in 1974, was the first Bloco Afro, revolutionizing Carnival with purely African-inspired rhythms and themes rooted in global Black history.
Olodum and Malê Debalê emerged shortly after, each deepening the movement’s reach through music, drumming, and cultural advocacy.
Today, Blocos Afros serve as year-round community centers — promoting self-esteem, self-identity, and racial awareness, and using music, dance, and education to celebrate African heritage.
PHILLY! Please join us on May 22nd at One Art Community Center(@oneartcommunitycenter ) for our Jubilee School Spring Concert.
What a year it’s been. I’m so incredibly grateful for the opportunities to share all the things I love about Brazilian music, culture, history, and community with my favorite sambistas at the Jubilee School.
We couldn’t have done it without the unwavering support of our Jubilee School teachers, parents, mom-moms and pop-pops, aunties and uncles who bring our students to share in and build community with us outside of school. The Jubilee community is PHamily, and I could not be more grateful to be part of it.
We shared culture & community beyond the classroom through powerful cultural exchange and community experiences, including Samba Foundations, Bloco Afro Oyá, the Calder Gardens Opening Parade, the African American Museum of Philadelphia Kwanzaa Celebration, and Lavagem PHL.
Each of these moments deepened our connection to rhythm, history, and diaspora traditions, while strengthening the bridges between communities we are honored to learn from and move with.
#philadelphia #blocoafro #intergenerationallearning
We had the honor of having Professora Mac play a couple of our xequerés at LAVAGEM PHL ✨✨
Let’s join her at her 6 week Ṣẹ̀kẹ̀rẹ̀ class starting May 29th. Link in bio 🔗
“Join poet, percussionist, and vocalist janet mac for a 6 week Ṣẹ̀kẹ̀rẹ̀ class. Walk ins welcome the first class!
As part of janet mac’s Artist Residency at d’griot cafe & gallery, she will be hosting a 6 week Ṣẹ̀kẹ̀rẹ̀ class ending in a community performance.
Featured at d’griots 3rd Thursday Jam Session , a 6 week Sekere class, and a 2nd Saturday Jam.
janet mac is a singer, songwriter, percussionist, and spoken word artist from Philadelphia, PA. She has performed with several well-known local cultural artists, including The Women’s Ṣẹ̀kẹ̀rẹ̀Ensemble, The Voices of Africa Choral and Percussion Ensemble, and Sistahs Laying Down Hands. She co-founded the female a cappella ensemble, Foundation Singers (2003-present). Janet is a proud cast-member of No Longer Bound, the Musical, a story about the history of the African-American journey from the shores of Africa to today. Her latest project is World Gumbo: Rhythms & Voices with drummer/percussionist Thomas “Pops” Lowery, which is currently available on CD and will soon be released on all streaming platforms.”
Did you know Goombay is the heartbeat of Bahamian culture?
Goombay is a traditional form of Bahamian music — and the drum used to create it. Handcrafted from goatskin, this membranophone is played with the hands to produce that unmistakable, iconic Junkanoo rhythm that moves your whole body. 🌊🇧🇸
Friendly Reminder PARADE PRACTICE Saturday May 2nd 4-6pm
Join us for the second installment of Parade Practice! As part of the @nextfab_phl x Leeway residency, @esholts is sharing Samba Foundation + Bloco Oya.
Bloco Oyá is rooted in African, Brazilian, and Caribbean traditions of rhythm and movement. Oyá, the orisha of wind and transformation reminds us that change happens through movement—and that transformation is a shared process.
💃🏾 Free to attend April 25th 4–6pm beginning at @nextfab_phl 1800 N. American Street!
🥁 Register to attend via the link in our bio or at /rws0xdp9
This Saturday we’re going deeper—tapping into the rhythms and energy of Bahamian Junkanoo as part of my ongoing research into African diaspora festival traditions.
Junkanoo isn’t just a parade—it’s resistance, identity, and community power in motion.
Through my NextFab Leeway residency, I’m sharing and teaching from this research and documentation—bringing Junkanoo’s sonic sound into conversation with the traditions we’re building here in Philadelphia. Kalik-Kalik 👏🏾
We are so proud of our 5th & 6th grade Jubilee School Sambistas.
Join us as our students honor the Philadelphia activists in our community who are working to make the world a better place. Come celebrate with us and hear about their incredible work for yourself.
Human Rights Day
📅 Wednesday, May 6th
🕓 4:00 PM
📍 Central Library
The beautiful faces and people who made LAVAGEM PHL so special.
I want to personally thank the women near and far (Boston) who make PHonk!Philly feel like family—who support me, our beautiful city Philly, and the work I’ve poured into over the past eight years.
Thank you for helping me understand my purpose and how I can build on what’s already been laid, so Black Philadelphians—and Philadelphians of all ages—can find joy & community with us. We’ll be here at the Hawthorne Cultural Center with our little South Philly Bloco Afro.
BE GREAT. I love you 💚💚
#phonkphillyproduction #culturalexchange #artsandculture #philadelphia #community
