HEADLINES

Here’s a polished, publish-ready ACCESS article  you can drop straight into ONE MAG. It’s written as a premium, behind-the-scenes editorial about the platform and Plunky’s work—contextual, personal, and grounded in purpose: Most platforms talk about content. Few talk about continuity. The Oneness network was not built to be a content warehouse. It was built as a living system - a place where culture, education, memory, and practice live together. The goal is not just to host

The Oneness Network officially launches in March as a unified platform for culture, Plus Plunky's educational, and creative work. This is a long-term project designed to bring together music, film, writing, and learning into one connected network - built to grow over time through a steady release of content old and new. At launch, the Oneness Network will roll out with three core services , each serving a different way of engaging with the platform: 1) One Mind (Education) O

For over forty years, Plunky has carried this work into classrooms, colleges, community centers, and wherever people were willing to sit down and really listen. Not just dates and names - but context. Not just genres - but the conditions that gave them breath. That kind of teaching lives in rooms. It lives in conversation. It lives in the energy between people. Until now, a lot of that work existed in moments.

“Everything we’re talking about combines both present and past – and future,” he said. “A half century is a momentous occasion for anything.”

James “Plunky” Branch has been an avatar and champion of the Richmond music scene for over half a century. He grew up in Richmond, left in the 1960s, and then returned after a picaresque odyssey through student demonstrations, the San Francisco counterculture, a brief stint in the military and even longer getting away from it.

Strut Records presents the latest release by legendary Afro-jazz group Oneness Of Juju with their new album Made Through Ritual.

This part affirms Black music as history itself: a living organism that continues to grow, respond, and create new forms of expression with each generation.

This part frames hip-hop not simply as a genre, but as a living cultural system rooted in African diasporic traditions of oral history, rhythm, improvisation, and communal exchange.

This part situates Black music within a broader ecosystem of revolutionary cultural production, where sound becomes strategy and creativity becomes practice of freedom.

This part frames funk not only as a musical genre, but as a cultural practice that fused pleasure with politics and embodied freedom.

This part frames soul as the soundtrack of a people insisting on being seen, heard, and felt in full color.

This part frames gospel as a sacred continuation of the blues and spirituals, and as a musical force that energized the Civil Rights era and beyond.

This part frames jazz as both a continuation of African musical logic and a radical reimagining of musical possibility within modern urban life.

This part frames the blues not simply as a genre, but as a cultural technology for survival—an expressive system through which individuals claimed voice in a society still structured by racial inequality.

This part frames Black music in the Americas not as imitation, but as cultural survival under pressure - a continuation of African systems reshaped by new realities.

This section establishes Africa as the first “music conservatory” and introduces the musical systems, instruments, and philosophies that would later travel across the Atlantic and shape the music of the African diaspora.

Plunky & Oneness strike out in surprising new directions, taking their progressive jazz-funk sensibilities into the dance club environment with a deep house and other remixes of their “I’ll Be There” single. Music critics have hailed legendary saxophonist-vocalist James “Plunky” Branch as a vanguard of Afro-centric jazz – curating a myriad of musical forms from funk and R&B to house and go-go into a progressive message of empowerment, positivity, and cultural awareness. Plu