Biography
Claire Jones joins the faculty of the Univeristy of Washington School of Music in Fall 2016 as a lecturer in the Ethnomusicology program.
Jones, who served in 2015 as visiting mbira instructor for the University of Washington Ethnomusicology Division, began studying Zimbabwean music in 1976 with the late Dumisani Maraire; Dr. Maraire was the first Visiting Artist to teach Zimbabwean mbira and marimba at the UW (and North America). Claire became a member of the traditional mbira group Mhuri Yekwa Muchena while living in Zimbabwe in the late 1980s, and is the author of Making Music: Musical Instruments in Zimbabwe Past and Present (Baobab/Academic Books 1992). She completed her doctoral degree at UW in 2006 with a dissertation on the modern Zimbabwean marimba. Her Seattle-based group Mahonyera Mbira Ensemblehas been together since 1991.