Samuel Thomas
- Adjunct Professor Cali School of Music
Biography
Dr. Thomas teaches Introduction to World Music and Introduction to Music for Montclair State, specializing in using the Canvas-based online learning platform.
Dr. Samuel Torjman Thomas is an artist-scholar – ethnomusicologist and multi-instrumentalist (saxophone/clarinet, oud, nay, vocals, bendir) – whose performance and research work centers on North African, Middle Eastern, and jazz traditions. Dr. Torjman Thomas is a professor of music, interdisciplinary studies, and Sephardic Studies at the City University of New York (Hunter College, John Jay College, and Brooklyn College) and Montclair State University, lecturing on a range of topics including Muslim-Jewish intercultural exchange in music, philosophy, theology, and poetics, American popular music, jazz history and improvisation, and diaspora studies. He is also the Director of Curriculum and Institutional Programming at the Brooklyn Music School.
After graduating from Berklee College of Music (2000) with Bachelors of Music degrees in Jazz Composition and Performance, Dr. Torjman Thomas founded the critically-acclaimed ensemble ASEFA (http://www.asefamusic.com) in 2001, a North African jazz-fusion ensemble. In 2012, he founded the New York Andalus Ensemble (http://www.newyorkandalusensemble.com) – a multiethnic large ensemble featuring a choir and instrumentalists performing traditional musics of North Africa and Spain, in Hebrew, Arabic, and Spanish. He has recorded two albums with ASEFA –“Asefa” (2005) and “Resonance” (2011) – and three albums with the jazz trio Four Minus One – “At Any Given Moment,” “Live,” and “Split Decision.” Dr. Torjman Thomas completed a Ph.D in Ethnomusicology at the City University of New York with the publishing of his dissertation Redefining Diaspora Consciousness: Musical Practices of Moroccan Jews in Brooklyn (2014). He has published several articles and book chapters since, on various topics in ethnomusicology and cultural studies.