Chas Smith

Cleveland State University music professor Chas Smith has been teaching and exploring the cultural aspects of American Roots music for ten years. He is the author of From Woodstock to the Moon: The Cultural Evolution of Rock Music, The Soul of Sunrise: Grassroots Music in America; Kendall-Hunt Pub, 2000/2004, and Rumble in the Jungle: Indigenous Music of the Americas and the Caribbean; K/H 2007. Smith has been playing keyboards and singing for over 30 years in just about every genre of music imaginable, spent 17 years creating soundscapes on his weekly SwampRadio ESO radio show at WCSB Cleveland, works with the Cleveland Opera as a music mentor, as well as teaching his Roots of American Music classes at CSU.

Space Trance One in the Pufferdome

Presented by author and educator Chas Smith, this workshop is a musical guided-meditation workshop. A quick overview of where things stand theoretically with physics today combined with our place in space physically and spiritually followed by an hour of sonic meditation. Please arrive on time, as once we start, the Pufferdome doors can't be opened. Subtones will be in use.

The Soul of Sunrise

Seminar on the magical/spiritual aspects of American and Caribbean roots music, presented by Chas Smith and Ken Narouski. Author and educator Chas Smith (Author - From Woodstock to the Moon, The Soul of Sunrise, Rumble in the Jungle: Indigenous Music of the Americas) - professor of music at Cleveland State University - hosts this presentation seminar that focuses on the pagan aspects of grassroots music in the Americas, where such diverse musical ideas from Africa, Native America, the Caribbean, and Celtic heritage tied strongly to the spiritual beliefs of the pagan cultures they came from, came together with Euro-Christian ideas as a means of survival, maintaining community and sense of cultural self, and ultimately developing into the strong staples of American music we know today gospel, blues, bluegrass, reggae, and of course, rock and roll.