Your Instructor's Bio

Some Things to Know about Your Instructor

The information presented to you in any course gets filtered through all the experience--academic and real life--of your instructor. Read this brief bio so you have a little helfpful background as far as where the content and ideas for this course have been gathered.

David G. Such may not be your typical professor, author or musician; he goes the extra mile. He exchanged lessons on the Egyptian and western flutes with Egypt’s best players, while sitting in the wee morning hours atop Cairo’s ancient pyramids. After graduating with his Ph.D., David taught ethnomusicology (world music) and the development of jazz at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has authored a critically acclaimed book entitled Avant-garde Jazz Musicians: Performing ‘Out There’ (University of Iowa Press) and a number of articles for trade journals and music dictionaries. Eager to branch out, he joined the Hollywood studio scene as a recording artist and performed on numerous sound tracks for film, television and documentaries; and he recorded two of his own CDs, which a critic for Dirty Linen calls “masterful and magical.”

David often travels the world performing, collecting musical instruments, or studying native musical traditions. When one of his adventures led him to a group of former headhunters living in the remote mountains of Northern Luzon, Philippines, he produced a short documentary about their music and instrument making, which won an international award in the category of culture. This led to a second documentary that explores the life of Amador Ballumbrosio and black Peruvian music. Recently, David took his crew to County Sligo, Ireland, where he shot over 30 hours of video that chronicles the region’s rich musical traditions.