Dialogue with Dunkley
When Leon Dunkley first applied to be director of the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture four years ago, there was a similar position opening up at Guilford College, a Quaker school also in North Carolina. "Religiously or morally, [Guilford's] a place I was drawn," Dunkley says. But for Dunkley, who received his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology and jazz studies from the University of Pittsburgh, religion took a backseat to another passion. "I'm much more powerfully driven by music and the idea of working in a center with Mary Lou Williams' name is such an honor," he says. Dunkley, now the center's director, teaches music, sings, plays piano, guitar, percussion, gamelan--a set of Indonesian percussion instruments--and has studied two West African percussion traditions.