Assistant Professor of Music Dr. JoVia Armstrong has worn many hats throughout her life — performer, composer, producer, band leader. And in 2022, she added another as a professor, bringing her talents and experience to University classrooms. Armstrong encourages her students to think practically and creatively, teaching a range of topics from working within the music business to composing contemplative music, all while maintaining her career as an independent artist and performer.
Armstrong grew up in Detroit and attributes her musical beginnings mainly to her father, who helped nurture her love for music from an early age as a vocalist, and to her sister, who bought her various percussion instruments to explore. Despite studying other instruments throughout high school like cello and French horn, Armstrong always found herself drawn to percussion.
This family of instruments lent itself to the music she was listening to, which included Latin and Afro-Cuban jazz, as well as music from Cuba, Brazil and Peru. Armstrong was fascinated with how these genres differed in rhythm from most American music.
“As a percussionist, those other styles taught me the most. It taught me way more than American music,” Armstrong said.
While on tour with a group of South American musicians, Armstrong learned to play the cajon, a small wooden box-drum on which she sits, and eventually created her own play style. Instead of having separate drums for her kick and snare, she creates both sounds by slapping the cajon. Surrounding her is a myriad of cymbals that she hits with a drumstick, similar to a typical kit.
This unique performance style offered her opportunities to play with Chilean Latin rock artist Joe Vasconcellos and compose for soul artists like JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound. In 2009, she released a solo album titled “Fuzzy Blue Robe Chronicles,” and in 2019, Armstrong founded her band Eunoia Society. The band fuses intricate rhythms with jazz chord progressions, heard in their two albums “Inception” and “The Antidote Suite.”
“There’s this jazz component that I put there because I am a person who absolutely fantasizes about freedom and liberation and whenever I have these moments in life where I feel free, that’s when I’m the most happy,” Armstrong said.
Although she has been writing original music for decades, Armstrong did not start thinking of herself as a composer until recently. She points out how noticeable the lack of diversity was in her field as she went through school.
“I was doing all these things that said I was a composer, but because I was in undergrad in the 90s, the only composers I saw were white men,” Armstrong said. “And so I just didn’t see myself in that world until a few years ago.”
Today, Armstrong balances her life as a musician with her job as a professor, educating University students through her unique musical and cultural perspectives. Armstrong began teaching at the University in 2022, currently teaching two graduate courses and four undergraduate courses, including MUSI 3060, “Motown vs. Everybody,” MUSI 3559, “Contemplative Music Ensemble” and MUSI 3559, “Black Music Composing and Performance.”
This past fall, Armstrong created a brand new class, MUSI 3373, “Creative Strategies for Independent Artists,” which she is teaching again next semester. Her goal for this class was to educate students about the practical ins and outs of working as an independent musician.
“I was just thinking that a course like that, as basic as it was, could possibly give students a little bit of confidence leaving school and entering this world of music,” Armstrong said.
Armstrong noticed that even if students were not necessarily music majors, there was a large community of University students in bands or performing in some capacity. She designed the class to be accessible for any University student, regardless of major or musical background.
The class covers topics such as understanding and negotiating contracts, online and physical record distribution, tour management and merchandise creation. For the final project, the class organized a music showcase and food drive in partnership with Visible Records — an artist-run gallery and studio space in Charlottesville. Armstrong’s favorite aspect of the class is how students began wanting to apply lessons to their musical work outside of the classroom.
“There were a lot of students coming to me after class with more questions about things they were actually doing or wanted to try,” Armstrong said. “They were coming to me for advice, saying things like ‘Me and my musician friend want to play this new cafe, how do you think we should go about doing X, Y and Z?’ I wanted to create that curiosity.”
Recently, Armstrong herself has focused on bringing more curiosity and exploration into the process of collaborative composition. In December, Armstrong went to Detroit to meet with her band and work on their next project. They went into the studio on day one without having anything previously planned or practiced — the first time the band had ever tried that. This was a challenge for Armstrong, but it also gave her fellow musicians, including Leslie DeShazor, Damon Warmack and Tony Cazeau more agency to bring their ideas to the table.
“I allowed Tony to come up with some really cool piano riffs, I allowed Leslie to create her own melodies,” Armstrong said. “And what happened is that I was able to play my rhythms, those things that influenced me as a kid, I was able to play those underneath what they were doing.”
Her upcoming solo album, set to release in August, will have sounds from instruments she has never worked with before, including a string quartet and a didgeridoo, a long hollow wind instrument traditional in Northern Australian Aboriginal culture.
As Armstrong continues to build her legacy at the University through her dual roles as artist and educator, her advice for music students is to find their voice and be persistent in trying to be heard.
“Maybe your message is way stronger than the chord progressions you choose or how tight your production is,” Armstrong said. “If you want to be a dope musician, you practice. If you want to be an artist and get your message out, and have these wacky ideas on how to produce your work, then do that. Ultimately, I’m saying ‘be yourself.’"
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