Martín Perna has been making music for over thirty years. He began his musical journey in New York in the early 1990s, where he founded the groups Antibalas and Ocote Soul Sounds and was a founding member of The Dap Kings and frequent contributor to TV on the Radio. His flutes, saxophones, percussion and production are featured on over 100 albums. He has served as musical director at Carnegie Hall for three all-star tribute concerts: Paul Simon (2014), David Byrne/Talking Heads (2015), Aretha Franklin (2017) and the Music of Billie Holiday (2017) at the Apollo Theater. Since moving to the Bay Area in 2019, he has birthed a solo flute and woodwind guided psychedelic jazz project MARTEZ and composed/performed the soundtrack to the 2022 PBS American Masters: “Roberta Flack” documentary.
He collaborates frequently with his partner, visual/performance artist Courtney Desiree Morris and other Bay Area-based artists including Toro y Moi, Lateef the Truthspeaker, Tommy Guerrero, TuneYards, Sulah Jordan,Orchestra Gold and Platurn. He is a co-founder of Keys to the City, an Oakland-based library of vintage keyboards and keyboard-activated musical experiences. Martín has lived and worked in diverse locales, from rural Pacific Mexico to the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, where he arranged and co-produced an album with Palo de Mayo music legend Mango Ghost, to Sicily where he helped produce and arrange work by Palermo troubadour Fabrizio Cammarata. In 2017, he travelled to Benin, West Africa in collaboration with Angelique Kidjo and students at the CIAMO arts academy to create the “Kids Against Malaria” PSA song and video. In 2018, he served on the faculty of African American Studies at Pennsylvania State University teaching Africa Diaspora Music. He was named director of the SF Jazz / Oakland Public Conservatory’s youth jazz orchestra for their fall 2019 season. As a writer, he has authored liner notes for the 2018 Grammy-nominated Orquesta Akokan and liner notes/bios for several contemporary global music artists. In July 2020, he scored and performed music for Daveed Diggs’s performance of the poetry polemic “Fourth of July.” He is a contributing editor for the literary travel magazine Stranger's Guide.
