Music Technology

Abraham Gomez-Delgado

Abraham Gomez-Delgado is an Assistant Professor in the Creative Arts and Technology division at Bloomfield College. He is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and performance artist born in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico.

Bandleader Abraham Gomez-Delgado, of Peruvian descent, left his native Puerto Rico as a child and relocated to the US. He leads the experimental Latin music group Zemog el Gallo Bueno as well as co-leads the avant-latin jazz big band Positive Catastrophe and has a Performance Art group under the name Eje.

Gomez-Delgado is also a vocalist in his own compositions as well as in composer saxophonist Fred Ho’s Green Monster Big Band. Currently, he teaches Sound Art and production at Bloomfield College in New Jersey and is composing a Plena suite entitled Debrujo, Debrooho, debrewjo. •Recently he was awarded the New Jazz Works grant from Chamber Music America and the Doris Duke Foundation (2010). •Abraham has been awarded a Meet The Composer MetLife Grant (2010) •USArtists International Award, National Endowment for the Arts grant (2010).

Gomez-Delgado has his MFA with honors from Bard College and holds a BFA from Mass College of Art.

Adegoke Steve Colson is a Grammy-nominated pianist-composer (saxophonist-historian) who performs internationally as a soloist and leader of ensembles from trios to orchestras. Born in Newark and raised in East Orange, NJ, he earned his degree (BME) from Northwestern University School of Music. He joined the influential Association for Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in 1971.

His music has been compared to that of Monk, Mingus, and Ellington as well as Ives, Berio, and Stravinsky. His work is on labels including Columbia/Sony, Evidence, and Black Saint. He is co-owner of the Silver Sphinx record label with his wife and musical partner, Iqua Colson.

Steve was one of 23 educators selected by the NEA in 1981 to pilot the concept of Artist Residencies (Dr. Larry Ridley - Dir.). The pilot's success brought federal funding to Arts Residency programs. Steve is currently Artist-in-Residence in Jazz Studies at Cicely L. Tyson School of Performing & Fine Arts.

Steve joined Bloomfield College faculty in 1989. With master bassist Chris White he helped to start the Creative Arts & Technology Department in 1996 as part of an initiative led by Office of the President.

As headliner on festivals he has shared billing and stage with the greatest of artists - Dizzy Gillespie, Dr. Billy Taylor, Ray Charles, Art Blakey, Oscar Peterson, Miriam Makeba, Sun Ra, Gil Scott-Heron, Abbey Lincoln, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson, Max Roach, Muddy Waters, and Tito Puente.

The author of more than 100 ensemble pieces and five major works for 'Jazz orchestra,' his groups have included luminaries such as David Murray, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Davis, Rachelle Farrell, and Tyshawn Sorey. He has collaborated with visual artist Willie Cole, literary masters Amiri Baraka and Richard Wesley, and as Musical Director (Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God) he worked with legendary dancer Carmen de Lavallade.

In 2018 Steve was inducted into The East Orange Hall of Fame, where he joined other distinguished individuals of East Orange who have influenced science, sports, or the arts, such as Althea Gibson, Dionne Warwick, John Amos, Whitney Houston, and the group Naughty by Nature.

Steve has been on television: PBS (I'll Make Me a World), Another View (NJN), The Steve Adubato Show; he has been a guest on Radio France (Paris) and Radio 3 (Rome, Italy); and his work has aired on French television (Mezzo Channel). Steve has a cameo appearance in Youssou N’Dour’s documentary film Return to Goree (Winner – PAFF), and he was Sal Finestra’s piano player on the HBO series, Vinyl, produced by Mick Jagger and directed by Martin Scorsese. He is also documented in several books: The AACM – A Power Stronger Than Itself; The Black Revolution on Campus; Jazz in Newark; La Nuée L’AACM - un jeu de société musicale ; Freedom, Rhythm & Sound.

The City of Newark proclaimed November 13, 1989 Adegoke Steve Colson Day. He has other major awards and commissions from: National Endowment for the Arts; Illinois Arts Council; Arts International; New Jersey State Council on the Arts; Lila Wallace Readers’ Digest; East Orange Historical Society (150th Anniversary of East Orange); NJ Chamber Music Society (to open NJPAC); Absolut (National Lost Jazz Shrines); NJPAC (350tth Anniversary of Newark); American Composers Forum; South Arts Jazz Road Initiative. Steve recently received (2022) a Fromm Music Foundation Commission from Harvard University.

Peter Gordon is Professor of Music and Coordinator of the Music Technology Program.

Prof. Gordon attended the University of California, San Diego (B.A. Liberal Arts-Music) and Mills College (M.F.A. in Electronic Music and Recording.) He comes to Bloomfield College with a long career as a composer, producer, recording artist and arranger and his professional experience informs his teaching in classes in music composition, production, film music and improvisation.

Peter Gordon’s music transcends genres. Often billed as Peter Gordon & Love of Life Orchestra, it is heard in concerts, theaters, clubs and on the dance floor. Gordon’s music is released on the Sony Masterworks, DFA Records, Foom Music, and Unseen Worlds record labels, and on compilation albums curated by LCD Soundsystem and Khruangbin. Gordon has received an Obie Award for his work for  musical theater and a Bessie Award for his work for dance, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts; and residency grants from DAAD (Berlin), Japan-US Friendship Commission (Tokyo),  Asian Cultural Council (Seoul) and Emily Harvey Foundation (Venice.) His work includes four operas and numerous instrumental compositions, his video/music collaborations with Kit Fitzgerald have been presented on PBS and at the opera houses of the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Het Muziektheater in Amsterdam. Gordon’s music is featured in the Steven Spielberg produced Joe Versus the Volcano (Tom Hanks) and Tony Scott’s Déjà vu, on television on Desperate Housewives, The Deuce, and Pose and Gordon was music producer and orchestrator for Robert Ashley’s seminal video opera Perfect Lives. Gordon’s orchestrations and transcriptions of music for Yiddish theater, for Michael Tilson Thomas, has been performed by the New York Philharmonic and San Francisco Symphony. He has also worked with artists such as Arthur Russell, Laurie Anderson, Lawrence Weiner, Factory Floor, David Johansen, Bill T. Jones, Willi Smith, Richard Foreman and Chuck Berry. 

Bio Forthcoming