Heavy Descipline
A monthly nightime creative music series at Goodbellies Cafe (4659 Telegraph Avenue Oakland, CA 94609). Please contact Marshall Trammell for more information.


R & D (Research and Development)
In order to reach out and build community around our music, Mutual Aid Project is creating a free teaching residency at Goodbellies Cafe. Beginning saturday July 14th, students will explore music through the various approaches and teaching styles of the trio. For information and submission requests, please contact Marshall Trammell.


Decolonizing the Imagination
Decolonizing the Imagination is an Arts Practicum which was developed by Mutual Aid Project. The Practicum reveals the process of our analyses of colonialist effects, generally and specifically. We explore how these manipulations served to erode, warp, erase and/or change forever generations of culture and indigenous power. Our art is a reflection and open dialogue of these thoughts which firmly grounds us in the anti-oppression movement.

Given this tapestry of history:

• We documented our decoding of Colonialism in terms of our relationship to power, politics, and musical expressions;
• We traced our personal histories and lineages from our various respective motherlands and journeys that brought us to the City of Oakland;
• We looked at our disciplines, our influences, our participation in social change and the great potential for our art/our music to have a role in making social change;
• We decided that Mutual Aid Project should stand for something beyond a metaphor for Improvisation, but a useful tool for resistance, for building together, for family, for consistency, and for a relationship with our past, our present, and our future;
• Finally, after this thorough practice, we made the sounds, the structures and the disciplines, that convey our worldview and democratic ideal.

Before we really started putting the music out in the world, we felt that we should break bread together to strategize a methodology for being in and for the world. We performed solidarity at benefits, brought ideas of mutual aid economics to a local farmers market, and worked to forge performance opportunities in unconventional places and audiences not quite accustomed to our exploratory and sometimes explosive sound. Mutual Aid Project has, by and large, veered away from venues that did not support our audiences of People of Color as well as from working class communities that reflect us.