Selendis Sebastian Alexander Johnson - Promotional Biography

Sunday 12-3-2023

Selendis Sebastian Alexander Johnson is a vibraphonist, trombonist, and composer working across musical styles, though primarily rooting herself in the black experimental tradition. Born in 2000 in Dallas, Johnson’s family moved to Marin County, California in the San Francisco Bay Area a few months after she was born, where she would spend her whole youth until moving to New York City to attend the New School for Jazz & Contemporary Music in 2018. Having grown up loving jazz, being immersed in it through her family, she began to feel disillusioned with the music after being confronted with it in the way it exists in college pedagogy, and stopped playing for most of 2020, until returning by developing a solo improvisatory practice that forced her to find and express sounds that she truly loved and expand from there. This practice remains the root of all of her work and she often performs solo improvised sets around New York, primarily in unconventional DIY spaces.

Aside from her solo practice, Selendis also works regularly with flutist Samantha Kochis for their duo project Antivoid, and plays in bands such as TJ Milan-Bombara’s Filipino jazz-fusion project Angalo, and Simon Hanes’ surf-rock band Tsons of Tsunami. She also has a passion for big band/large ensemble work, returning to The New School as guest faculty in 2023 to run a student big band performing Cal Massey’s 1969 Black Liberation Movement Suite, Fred Ho’s 2006 Struggle for a New World Suite, and premiere her own more improvisatory work Unity & Struggle (for Amílcar Cabral and Fred Ho), and also took on curating the historic Creative Music Studio’s Improvisers Orchestra the same year.

She can be found on the web at avoiceiwanttoshare.net and on instagram at @lemwell7.