Alchemy Sound Project West Coast Tour

Alchemy Sound Project is hitting the road in November! We’re so excited to be playing the West Coast. Thank you CMA and SA Jazz Roads! Check out all the tour dates here.

2023 Pew Fellowship in the Arts

Sumi Tonooka and the presenting organization Ars Nova Workshop are among The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage’s 2023 grantees, the organization announced today. In total, Pew awarded 40 new grants and fellowships — $8.1 million in project funding to 28 local arts organizations, and $900,000 in unrestricted funds to a dozen individual artists in the Philadelphia area.

In becoming a Pew Fellow, Tonooka, who lives in Germantown, will receive a $75,000 award. “This gives me an opportunity to kind of start to reassess what it is that I hold, and what it is that I carry, and make some decisions about how to move forward in the most authentic and joyful way,” she says in a video montage of 2023 grantees.

NEW FILM SCORE

Sumi contributed a couple songs to Erin O’Hara’s original film score in the award winning documentary, The Picture Taker. It’s about the life and work of photographer Ernest Withers, whose path intersected key flash points in 20th century history. Withers developed over a million images that came to define America’s civil rights struggle. He photographed the Emmett Till murder trial, the desegregation of Little Rock High, the Montgomery bus and Memphis sanitation workers strikes and was behind the scenes with Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Despite his commitment to truth-telling through photojournalism, Withers took a closely-guarded secret to his grave: for over a decade of his professional career, he worked for the FBI.