MASHPEE – When Naheem Garcia re-connected with Mwalim in 1992, both were young actors in the New African Company, the oldest continuous Black theater company in New England.
They had met a few years earlier but when they saw each other again, “We connected,” said Garcia, an actor and theater educator with an impressive acting resume of almost two dozen TV shows and movies, as well as many plays, as both director and actor.
Garcia, Mwalim’s longtime collaborator who has directed many of Mwalim’s plays at venues throughout New England, described Mwalim as “a geek, a square, a brainiac. He’s a cool square. He was just different. He knew a lot. He had a lot of information… Most intellects sound really corny, but he wasn’t. He had a lot of soul. He’s a musician, a deep thinker, and a brilliant writer.”
Mwalim, Da Phunkee Professor CAPE COD WAVE PHOTO
Mwalim, aka Da Phunkee Professor (birth name Morgan James Peters), certainly does have a lot of information inside the many compartments of his brain. A founder of the popular original funk, jazz and soul band, The Groovalottos, Mwalim is a composer, musician, theater artist, filmmaker, writer and educator – and it all connects in his growing and prolific body of award-winning work in several fields.
In fact, recalled Mwalim, 54, who lives in Mashpee, one of his many collaborators in the various fields he has mastered, “once told me, ‘Your brain is like a spider web. It stretches out and circles around and you can see connections sometimes that nobody else does.’ ”
He is a multi-disciplinary artist, or what is often called a Renaissance man. Mwalim prefers the term “polymath.”
“You have people that hold onto conventions that talk about being a jack of all trades and master of none,” he said. “You meanwhile have won awards in all of these things that you supposedly are a jack of. Now where do you go with the jack of all trades comment?”
Formed in the Bronx and Mashpee
His father is Mashpee Wampanoag, and his mother, who family is from Barbados, was born in New York. The two met because his father’s family was selling land in Mashpee that his mother’s family, who lived in the Bronx, were interested in buying in order to build a summer home.
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