Music is the salve of the human soul, the great emotive voice which transcends the material world, invoking love, pain, sorrow, triumph and tragedy. It inspires songs of joy and worship, even calls to battle. The entirety of the human existence is codified in the ancient musical gene-pool created in the mixture of melody and rhythm. Music is the intangible gene in our DNA which can never be mapped. For millennia, cultures of the world developed their unique musical DNA in relative isolation. Like springs of inspiration bubbling up to form rich pools of ancient wisdom and heritage from which hundreds of generations drank. Eventually these isolated pools began to overflow across the vast global landscape, forming tributaries to what would become the great rivers of inspiration carrying the ships  of European explorers, colonists, even slave ships from Africa. 

This was the first great migration of knowledge and ideas. These great musical tributaries flowed from Scotland and Ireland across the Appalachian Mountains of the United States, gathering a momentum of melodies and stories, and settling in the Southern US. Another great tributary of rhythm and spirit flowed westward from Africa, washing over the islands of the West Indies, the Southern US, The Gulf of Mexico, and continuing deep into South America. These great tributaries converged to create the great confluence of styles which formed the basis of modern popular music. 

The goal of the Tributaries^TM series is to impassion today’s young music lover to understand the true origin of their musical DNA. To awaken to the spirit that inspired the various stylistic tributaries which merged to create Afro-Cuban jazz, Blues, Country, Rock & Roll, Reggae, even Hip-Hop & Rap music. The tributaries are long and have wandered through the centuries over a vast landscape, but the resulting spiritual river is at its deepest in the West Indies, Caribbean, Southern United States, and Latin America. This educational mission is in its infancy, and while the specifics of the programming are currently only speculative, the Tributaries team is beginning to form.  We are currently enlisting a Board of Advisors to help formulate the specific details and leverage knowledge, ideas, networks, partnerships and funding.