Days of Black Future Past: Black Rock Coalition at The Met

Above: Sandra St. Victor
Below: Shelley Nicole
Black Rock Coalition: The History of Our Future
Metropolitan Museum of Art
photos: Paula Lobo

"Black music has been the taproot of every significant movement in rock music. Sadly, the vast majority of Black artists in rock have been erased from the historical narrative or relegated to footnotes."

--Darrell M. McNeill

When you imagine venues to host one of the badbadbadass-iest rock concerts of all times, do you think of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art?

Mmmhmmm.

Well, think again, because you missed Black Rock Coalition: The History of Our Future, a MetLiveArts show designed to demonstrate that Black people not only did rock first but they did it best, do it now and have no intention of stopping. Under Darrell M. McNeill's creative and musical direction, the famed Black Rock Coalition Orchestra and featured guests rocked that house last night with a steady roll. All walls and pedestals should be checked for damage.

Named for BRC Orchestra's 1991 album, the two-hour show started off with the pumping Sly Stone hit "Dance to the Music." That funk functioned here like it did when it was new back in 1967--a sure-fire commercial success for David Geffen's CBS Records and, in 2019, an icebreaker like no other. Though the predominantly white Met Museum audience needed the initial permission to dance to the music, as the evening sped along, folks required little prompting to get up on their feet.

The stage of the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium was packed, side to side and front to back, with instruments and artists including a revolving cast of standout featured performers--among them, Nona Hendryx, Toshi Reagon, Stew, Carl Hancock Rux, Living Colour's Vernon Reid and Corey Glover and, led by a commanding Sandra St. Victor, The Family Stand reunited. Yoruba chants and drumming, spoken word, jazz vocals, traditional work songs, gospel tunes, rock and roll and straight-up rock presented a stream of Black genius, all telling a story of determination, improvisation, spiritual depth and lust for life in the face of a long, long stretch of rough times under white supremacy. Times are still rough; the music persists and continues to do its work.

"So what is rock and roll?" Hancock Rux asked, "We begin with juke joints, and women loving women...." He went on to say it's rooted in "trying to find our way home."

Each performance--like vocalist Everett Bradley's unquestionable authority on both "Dance to the Music" and Louis Jordan's "Choo Choo Ch'Boogie"--felt like a sturdy home and one connected, at the foundation, to every other home. Places of rest and reflection, generous nourishment, everyday miracles and jubilation. Hendryx, above all others, took all my heart with witchy renditions of the jazz classic "Afro Blue" and, later, an unexpectedly expanded and capacious "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." She enters a song at unusual angles, spies just the right, clear path, then guides you through as intensity builds. Reagon quietly took up and met the challenges of Curtis Mayfield's bleak "When Seasons Change" with agility of voice and soul. Stew, with David Barnes on harmonica, updated Bo Diddley's "I'm A Man," making a statement on toxic masculinity from the White House to the church house, from FOX News to NPR. And it was just pure fun to watch Glover rock out again to "Cult of Personality," the show's closer.

An historic one-night only event. So, if you didn't catch it, bummer! But if you love rock, you can still check out Play It Loud: The Instruments of Rock & Roll, at the Met through October 1. Plan your Met visit here.

*****

Featured Artists:

Nona Hendryx
Fantastic Negrito
Vernon Reid, Corey Glover (Living Colour)
Toshi Reagon
Stew (The Negro Problem)
The Family Stand
"Captain" Kirk Douglas (The Roots, Hundred Watt Heart)
Carl Hancock Rux
Ronny Drayton

Black Rock Coalition Orchestra:

Darrell M. McNeill (bass)
LaFrae Sci (drums)
Howie Robbins (keyboards)
Elenna Canlas (keyboards)
Marcus Machado (guitar)
Marvin Sewell (guitar)
Gordon "Nappy G" Clay (percussion)
V. Jeffrey Smith (saxophone, flute)
Don Byron (clarinet, saxophone)
Bruce Harris (trumpet)
JS Williams (trombone)
Sophia Ramos (vocals)
Shelley Nicole (vocals)
Bruce Mack (vocals)
Everett Bradley (vocals, percussion)
Kelsey Warren (vocals)
David Barnes (harmonica)
Mikal Amin (vocals)

******

DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

******

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BAM Next Wave presents NYC premiere of "The Exalted"

Carl Hancock Rux (l) and Theo Beckmann
in costume for The Exalted
(photo: John Labbe)

I might have drawn closer to The Exalted--or, at least, felt a better grasp of its purpose--had writer/teller Carl Hancock Rux delivered his words with a consistent clarity to match their earnestness. I found myself often straining to follow text stuffed with historical and biographical data, distracted from other elements of the collaborative piece--strangely enough, Onome Ekeh's trippy and quite showy video. I started off wishing that Rux could speak without being hemmed in by music but quickly realized that the problem was not the impingement by Theo Bleckmann's sound design but Rux's vocal and narrative cloudiness. Bleckmann's ethereal melodies and supple voice, in fact, handsomely served this multimedia fantasy throughout its hour.

Bleckmann, as performer, contributes an understated elegance, wafting in and out of Rux's awareness like a shade. He portrays the influential German-Jewish art historian and critic Carl Einstein, noted for his scholarship on African sculpture and Cubism, leftist ideology and engagement in the Spanish Civil War. Trapped in Nazi-occupied France in 1940, Einstein committed suicide. Rux's interest in the writer appears to have roots in his own history--an adoptive father who served in World War II, a revelation, through genealogical research, of a link to Germany, and perhaps more.

Under the direction of SITI Company's Anne Bogart, The Exalted gracefully incorporates physical theater--characteristic movement and articulate gestures through which the men initiate a playful understanding of each other. But in a telling scene, Rux stands stock still, mid-space, warily gazing at Bleckmann as he skirts around him, lecturing on how Europeans devalue African art. In this encounter--and, perhaps, in this work--so much remains to be unpacked and examined.

With lighting by Brian H Scott and scenic and costume design by Maureen Freedman

The Exalted continues its run tonight through October 31 with performances at 7:30pm. For information and tickets, click here.

BAM Fisher/Fishman Space
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

How's that Ailey troupe looking?

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
performing Ronald K. Brown's Four Corners
(photo: Paul Kolnik)

Holiday time has come again. As we ask each year, then, how's the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater looking?

Looking good! That is not news. That is pretty much what they do.

I have no news for you in this post.

And I really won't be able to tell you much about the 2014 New York City Center season, because I'm making only one dip into it, and that happened last night in the company of loyal fans of America's cherished dance ambassadors to the world.

Antonio Douthit-Boyd
in Ulysses Dove's Bad Blood
(photo: Steve Wilson)

The troupe performed Bad Blood (Ulysses Dove, 1984), Four Corners (Ronald K. Brown, 2013) and After the Rain (Christopher Wheeldon, 2005), capping the evening off with Ailey's Revelations (1960). I wouldn't call this slate a program of radical experimentation or risk on the part of Robert Battle. I'd say it maintains the status of Ailey as filled with expertly sculpted performers whose bodies are the point and the meaning behind whole stretches of movement of any kind in any season. Give Ailey audiences this beauty, this technical facility, this passionate physicality to behold, and the job is done. We go to kick back and drink in these marvelous stars and stars-in-waiting, maybe to feel a little better about the potential of the human race, and they give us their all.

This is not all I look for in an experience of dance. Far from it. But it's not nothing either. It is what it is.

Ailey dancers in Four Corners
above: Belen Pereyra
below: Kervin Douthit-Boyd

Last night's marquee item might have been the pas de deux from Christopher Wheeldon's After the Rain, danced by Linda Celeste Sims and Glenn Allen Sims. Anything coming from the world of ballet has a certain built-in sheen to it, and this is Wheeldon, after all. Safe choice. But, for me, Brown's Four Corners was the evening's knockout. The piece stirs Brown's eclectic (and perennial) movement elements and embodied spirituality to silky perfection. And look at its primary inspiration--a song by poet Carl Hancock Rux with grief for the fallen, angels seeking to bestoy healing peace and a ringing exhortation to the people:

Yours is simply this

Command and stand up

Stand

You are beautiful

And lovely

Beautiful and lovely

In this time of pain and despair, could there really be anything more in the spirit of Ailey?

an excerpt from Four Corners

The 2014 Ailey season at New York City Center continues through January 4. For schedule and ticket information, click here.

Artist activists talk on self-determination, funk and jazz, Saturday

Creative Time and Weeksville Heritage Center

in collaboration with

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

present

Conversations on Self Determination: 

Funk and Jazz

at Weeksville Heritage Center

Saturday, October 4, 3:30-5:30pm

Free 

with required RSVP

Explore music as a soundtrack for social justice. Leading contemporary Brooklyn artists reflect on their art while revisiting the anthems that fortified and consoled the African-American-led struggle for desegregation and equal rights.

Moderator: Una-Kariim A. Cross, artist, writer, and educator

Speakers: Willard Jenkins, jazz writer and radio/TV host; Toshi Reagon, activist, singer, songwriter, and musician working in genres from folk to blues and funk; and Carl Hancock Rux, interdisciplinary performative artist, writer, and playwright.

Performer: Martha Redbone, singer-songwriter and community activist

Click to RSVP

Weeksville Heritage Center
158 Buffalo Avenue (between Bergen Street and St. Marks Avenue), Brooklyn
(map/directions)

What is rock and roll? Asked and answered at Lincoln Center Out of Doors

Two fantabulous singers: Nona Hendryx (above)
and Corey Glover (below)
All photos (c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Clearly, that's a question best suited to a multiple choice quiz where the correct answer is "All of the above." And, most of all, it is Black. Race music--from blues to gospel and beyond--is the mother source of rock and roll. Or, to put it another way, as writer Carl Hancock Rux did, rock "is one big family with a whole lotta children running around, and some of them don't know who their daddy is."

To Toshi Reagon (music director of Deep Roots of Rock and Roll), the Black Rock Coalition and all of the artists involved in yesterday afternoon's sensational Lincoln Center Out of Doors show, I will quote Rux quoting gospel singer Sallie Martin (1895-1988) in his narration: "Sing what you need to sing. Just keep singing it 'til it takes you where you need to go."

We all want to go there with you!

Here are a few of my photos from the day. Click for more.

Above: Toshi Reagon
Below: Nona Hendryx
among numerous musical artists performing at Lincoln Center Out of Doors
in Deep Roots of Rock and Roll
All photos (c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Above: a dance by Adaku Utah
Below: Narrator Carl Hancock Rux
taking us deep into Black American music history
All photos (c)2014, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Lincoln Center Out of Doors continues through August 10. Click here for schedule of these free events.

Harlem Stage's "Makandal" opera will tour Haiti and South Africa

Harlem Stage Prepares to Export Its Own Opera
by Felicia R. Lee, The New York Times, July 28, 2013

Writes of Spring

FIRE & INK, INC

invites you to

WRITES OF SPRING

A Benefit for Fire & Ink 

featuring

STACEYANN CHIN and CARL HANCOCK RUX

Saturday, April 30, 7-11pm

Food, festivities, music and readings, hosted by Steven G. Fullwood and Reginald Harris

$25 per person (All proceeds benefit Fire & Ink, Inc.)

For location information and to purchase advance tickets, click here.

Unapologetically Caribbean and Black, Asian and lesbian, woman and New Yorker, Staceyann Chin is the author of the memoir, The Other Side of Paradise. Award-winning poet, playwright, novelist, essayist and recording artist, Carl Hancock Rux is the author of Asphalt and Pagan Operetta.

Fire & Ink, Inc. is devoted to increasing the understanding, visibility and awareness of the works for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender writers of African descent and heritage.

For additional information, please email Steven G Fullwood or Reginald Harris.

10*10*10: Celebrating TOPAZ ARTS

TOPAZ ARTS celebrates its 10th anniversary!

Includes performances by Monstah Black, Molissa Fenley & Dancers and Paz Tanjuaquio with a reading by Carl Hancock Rux, a film short by Todd Richmond

also literary luminaries Luis H. Francia, Queens Poet Laureate Paolo Javier
and the opening of a solo exhibition of new paintings by Roy Fowler

Hosted by Christalyn Wright

The event continues with DecadeDance! featuring music compilations by
guest DJs Bruce Tantum and Niles Ford

TOPAZ ARTS
55-03 39th Avenue
Woodside, Queens

Information and directions

Tickets

WeDaPeoples uptown

Harlem Stage presents

WeDaPeoples Cabaret

curated by Carl Hancock Rux

co-presented by the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University

and the Columbia/Harlem Jazz Project

Saturday, September 25, 9:30pm

Harlem Stage 

at Aaron Davis Hall

WeDaPeoples Cabaret was created in 2006 by Sekou Sundiata for The American Project. Fusing political consciousness with artistic mastery in the spirit of Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln's "We Insist: Freedom Now Suite."  Carl Hancock Rux curates a raucous night of art and activism inspired by Sundiata's vision of extending insurgent testimony and discourse beyond the academy and into the art space to reach the community at large.

Features:

Helga Davis
Queen Esther
Toshi Reagon
Greg Tate
Roger G. Jeffreys/Subtle Changes Dance Company

and more

with DJ Phonozone

Information and ticketing

Aaron Davis Hall
on campus of The City College of New York
between West 133 and 135 Streets, Convent Avenue, Manhattan

Directions