Bay Area Latin Soul Project / Valerie Troutt

Vincent De Jesus is a drummer, percussionist and teaching artist with roots in Mexico and Puerto Rico from San Antonio, Texas. Currently living in San Francisco, Vincent leads the Bay Area Latin Soul Project, a kaleidoscopic group fusing the Afro-Caribbean styles of Cuba and Puerto Rico with Black American music from the US like jazz, funk and hip-hop.

Valerie Troutt is an amazing vocal artist based in Oakland, California. Steeped in gospel and jazz, Valerie is a musical collagist, borrowing from ancestral centuries of sound, channeling spirits, and delivering the stories of our love, loss, and lives. There’s a light in this unapologetically unconventional artist/teacher/activist for whom art and activism are intertwined. Within this spiritual and social justice-driven performer is a lifelong hunger for craft, for connection, for cultural narratives and an indefatigable thirst to serve as an agape griot to a waiting people.