LaFrae Sci: Founder and Artistic Director

Groove diplomat LaFrae Sci is an award-winning and internationally acclaimed multi-instrumentalist, educator, and composer. Her work transcends genres, cultures, and boundaries, yet it authentically and reverentially embraces many creative traditions.

She is a bold conceptualist, an in-demand drummer, a jazz musician, an electronic musician who builds her own synths, a musical ambassador, a podcaster, a band leader, and a film composer. To date, her professional career spans 30 years and she has shared her purposeful creativity with 38 countries.

Bedrock to her artistry is the roots and the fruits of the blues from spirituals to afro futuristic soundscapes. As a composer, she writes for film, theater, and large and extended jazz and classical orchestras. She is able to write for any instrument, and her creative range spans immersive and ambisonic music, blues, jazz, classical and orchestral music, various ethnomusicological traditions, rock, pop, hip-hop, and electronic music. 

LaFrae has been featured in Modern Drummer, NPR, Jazz Times, and The New York Times. Her 80-piece youth big band has had the distinction playing a series of sold-out shows in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, Russia, and NYCs Winter Jazz Fest and BRIC’s Jazz Fest. LaFrae has played drums for The Burnt Sugar Arkestra, The Black Rock Coalition Orchestra, Valerie June, Keziah Jones, Sandra Bernhard, Eli Yamin, Vernon Reid, Kelis, Nancy Sinatra (w/ Morrissey), blues greats Jr. Mack and Pinetop Perkins, Irene Cara, Bumblefoot, Cyndi Lauper, Reuben Wilson, Rachel Z, Kelis, and Dr. Lonnie Smith. LaFrae has also worked as a Cultural Ambassador for the U.S. State Department and the founder of the empowering cross-cultural platform NGO Groove Diplomacy Inc. (www.groovediplomacy.org). As an educator, LaFrae has curated potent youth educational performances at the Apollo; she has worked as an educational consultant for Jazz at Lincoln Center for JALC’s Middle School Jazz Academy Brooklyn Chapter; and she is also founding teaching member of the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls in N.Y.C.

More information at lafraesci.me