Afro Yaqui Music Collective’s debut album, Mirror Butterfly: the Migrant Liberation Movement Suite dramatizes years of interviews and movement building with environmental and ecosocialist activists in Mexico, Syria, Kurdistan, and Tanzania. 

A 25-piece postcolonial big band delivers three portrait arias, woven in what poetic playwright Ruth Margraff calls “vocal art,” all accompanied by martial arts Afro-Asian choreography (Peggy Myo-Young Choy). The result been hailed as a “praise-song to the wretched of the Earth.” (Marcus Rediker, author, The Slave Ship) The staged work has travelled both activist and performing arts spaces: it has been presented at the Kennedy Center in DC, at the Mesopotamian Water Forum in Iraq, at the New Hazlett Theater in Pittsburgh (where it was incubated) and now, is available in this album form--a global siren call for a new world where many worlds fit. 2018 released on Innova Records, New Hazlett Theater (Pittsburgh) Oct 11-12, 2018, the opera featured a 15-piece band jazz band, three choral singers, and 7 dancer-actors. It then went on to the Kennedy Center Millenium Stage November 23, 2018 (Washington DC); and has been developed by Nov 4, 2018 National Ensemble Theater conference plenary performance (Tucson); NPN showcase Dec 14-15, 2018 (Pittsburgh); at the 1st Mesopotamian Water Forum Apr 6-8, 2019 (Kurdistan, Iraq); and released on Innova Records at Red Rooster/Ginny's Supper Club (Harlem); on Aug 3, 2019. Excerpts featured on howlround, the New Sounds playlist, on 91.3 WYEP Aug 27, 2019 in partnership with the Yaqui Námakasia Radio, and at The National Jazz Museum in Harlem on October 3, 2019 as part of the Jazz and Social Justice salon.