Department of Music

College of Arts and Sciences

Ed Pias, Ethnic Music-History

 

        

Dr. Ed Pias, Bio

Ed Pias holds a doctorate in percussion performance with a minor in ethnomusicology from the University of Washington in Seattle, a master’s degree in jazz composition with a minor in world music performance from the California Institute of the Arts (Cal-Arts) in Santa Clarita, CA, and a bachelor’s degree in jazz drum set performance from the Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA. In addition to his skills as a jazz musician, Ed also has a strong background in world music, having studied percussion from India and the Middle East for over twenty years.  He has performed in the US, Canada, Bangladesh and India with musicians as diverse as John Cage, Charlie Haden, Branford Marsalis, David Hykes, Ustad Afzalur Rahman and David Byrne. He has been a featured performer at the Du Maurier International Jazz Festival in Vancouver, BC, the Earshot World Jazz Festival in Seattle, and the annual Rabindranath Tagore festival in Mymensing, Bangladesh. He has been a guest lecturer on jazz and world percussion at New Mexico State University, Emory University in Atlanta, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cal-State Chico, UC Davis, and the American International School in Dhaka, Bangladesh. From 2000-2007 Ed built and maintained pakhawaj.net, a web site dedicated to online learning of Indian percussion thru the use of video and audio examples.