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Black History Month Music Celebration 2003
Berklee's annual celebration of Black music promises to be one of its most impressive, featuring Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., as the Warrick L. Carter lecturer and a performance and clinic by popular a cappella group Take 6. Other highlights include students performing the music of Bob Marley, and faculty concerts that range from soca and calypso to jazz and soul. All events are open to the public. Most events are free, except for those held in the Berklee Performance Center, which are normally priced at $5 per ticket. Please read over the full list of Black History Month Music Celebration 2003 events:
| Thursday, February 6, 7:30 p.m. |
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Music of Bob Marley
David Friend Recital Hall
Faculty pianist Matt Jenson presents a student ensemble performing the music of the Jamaican music icon Bob Marley. |
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| Thursday, February 13, 1:00 p.m. |
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Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Encarta Africana: "W.E.B. Du Bois to John Coltrane"
David Friend Recital Hall
Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is one of the most celebrated African American intellectuals teaching and writing today. A Yale University honors graduate, he became the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in its 800-year history. One of Gates's major contributions to society has been his recovery of lost African American literature. He became famous in 1983 when he recovered and helped republish the novel Our Nig, proving that the author, Harriet E. Wilson, was African American and pushing back the date of the first African-American novel to 1859. Since 1980 Gates has been unearthing, collecting, compiling and republishing thousands of lost texts written by African Americans. Gates built a reputation as a literary critic, tracing the practice of signifying, an African American language game, to its African roots in his 1988 book The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. As a multiculturalist, Gates has promoted revising American education to include not only the study of the great works of Western civilization but also the great works produced by non-Western cultures. Gates also has supported the proliferation of Black studies programs in the United States.
Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Humanities, Harvard University; Chair of Afro-American Studies, Harvard University and Director of the W.E.B DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard University. Gates is the author of numerous works of literary criticism including Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the 'Racial' Self (Oxford University Press, 1987); and The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (Oxford, 1988) winner of the 1989 American Book Award. Additionally, Gates coauthored The Future of the Race (Knopf, 1996) with Cornel West and is coeditor of of the Encarta Africana encyclopedia published on CD-ROM by Microsoft (1999) and in book form by Basic Civitas Books under the title Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (1999). His honors and grants include a MacArthur Fellowship "genius" grant (1981), the George Polk Award for Social Commentary (1993), Chicago Tribune Heartland Award (1994), the Golden Plate Achievement Award (1995), Time magazine's "25 Most Influential Americans" list (1997), a National Humanities Medal (1998), election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1999), and selection to the Pulitzer Prize Committee Board (2001). |
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| Thursday, February 13, 8:15 p.m. |
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Anthology of Soul: Music from the '60s, '70s, and '80s
Berklee Performance Center
Faculty member Winston Maccow and students Lisa Goolsby and Naedia Halliburton will present a soul concert featuring the music of Marvin Gaye; Stevie Wonder; Roberta Flack; the Isley Brothers; Earth Wind & Fire; Tina Turner; Michael Jackson; Whitney Houston; and Chaka Khan. A cast of students will perform the music of these great artists as a tribute to the contributions they have made to r&b, soul, and other musical genres around the world.
Afro’kan: Neo-Soul Era
The second half of this concert will feature one of the most popular styles of black music today: neo-soul. Some of the performers include Berklee students Nia Allen, Nikki Glaspie, Danny McClain, Tiffany Anderson, David and Gerald Langford, and many others. Under the direction of Omobosede Ajaka, the performers will explore the roots and evolution of soul music in a variety of settings. |
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| Tuesday, February 18, 8:15 p.m. |
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Kindred Spirits presented by Ron Reid
Berklee Performance Center
Faculty bassist and steel drummer Ron Reid will present a concert featuring contemporary compositions for the steel drum and lively soca and calypso arrangements. Guests will include Professional Education Division Chair Larry McClellan on trombone; Jetro DaSilva , piano; Winston Maccow, bass; Thaddeus Hogarth, harp and guitar; and guest vocalist Alvin Roberts. |
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| Thursday, February 20, 1:00 p.m. |
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Ron Mahdi
David Friend Recital Hall
An exciting mixture of danceable, exploratory, improvisation-based music will be performed by Berklee College of Music faculty members Armstead Christian, vocals; Jetro DaSilva, keyboards; and Ron Savage, drums, under the direction of bassist Ron Mahdi. |
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| Tuesday, February 25, 8:15 p.m. |
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Jeff Ramsey
Berklee Performance Center
Personal Taste II - An evening of R&B, jazz and gospel featuring a 14 piece-band directed by faculty vocalist Jeff Ramsey. |
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| Thursday, February 27 |
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| 2:00 p.m. |
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8:15 p.m. |
Take Six - Clinic
David Friend Recital Hall |
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Take Six - Performance
Berklee Performance Center |
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| Take 6 can rightly lay claim to having given the world of contemporary music something truly lasting and uniquely its own. Performing in an a cappella format, the six-man group achieved a huge success with its debut album in 1988—the million-plus-selling Take 6—a recording that caught listeners' ears with extraordinary vocal arrangements and a sophisticated harmonic eloquence. Ten albums later, having sold millions of records and won a long list of Grammy, Soul Train, Dove, and Down Beat Awards, Take 6 continues to surprise, delight, and amaze. Group members are David Thomas, Alvin Chea, Cedric Dent, Mark Kibble, Claude V. McKnight III, and Joey Kibble (who replaced Mervyn Warren).
Grounded in gospel, Take 6 has built a catalog of songs that draws from so many genres of popular music—jazz, doowop, r&b, pop, 1960s soul, and hip-hop, to name a few—its sound is impossible to categorize.
While best known for a cappella singing, the group explored a range of instrumental approaches on its latest recording, Beautiful World, coproduced with Marcus Miller. The album features bold reconstructions of 11 classic songs of popular music, including the Doobie Brothers' "Takin' It to the Streets," Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready," Bill Withers's "Lovely Day," and the gospel standard "Wade in the Water." Take 6 will share its music and wisdom with students and the general public in an afternoon clinic and evening concert. Tickets to the Take 6 evening concert are $8 and $2 for Berklee students, staff and faculty. |
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General admission for Berklee Performance Center concerts is $5. Tickets can be purchased at the box office, located in the Berklee Performance Center, 136 Massachusetts Avenue. There is free admission for Berklee students, faculty, and staff who present a Berklee I.D. up until the day before the show. All events in the David Friend Recital Hall are free and open to the public. The David Friend Recital Hall is located in the Genko Uchida Building, 921 Boylston Street.
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