This Juneteenth we commemorate the holiday with two contrasting and powerful segments — Remembrance and Celebration. Remembrance is about the past and represents the struggle of Black Americans in fighting for where we are today. Celebration is filled with the joy and jubilee felt in the presence of positive change happening now and in the future. Listen now to this one-hour special that commemorates the emancipation of enslaved black Americans, with hosts Steve Staruch and Jeffrey Yelverton.
Remembrance
William Grant Still — And They Lynched Him on a Tree: No. 6 They Left Him Hanging
VocalEssence Ensemble Singers & Orchestra
William Grant Still — Darker America
American Symphony Orchestra
Margaret Bonds — The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Darryl Taylor, tenor; Maria Corley, piano
Undine Smith Moore — Before I'd Be a Slave
Maria Corley, piano
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Celebration
George Walker —  Folk Songs for Orchestra I. Going to lay down my sword and shield
Cleveland Chamber Symphony
Regina Harris Baiocchi — ‘Hold Out for Joy’
Picasso Ensemble
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor — African Suite: Danse Negre
London Symphony Orchestra
Adolphus Hailstork — ‘Shout for Joy’
The Aeolians
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]]>"It gets very frustrating," Downes explains of her motivations for the project, "to always be looking up at a lineage that doesn't reflect you. So as a person of mixed race, it became very personal at first. And then, it became a story that I really wanted to tell, because it's a story that changes another story: it changes the story of what is classical music, but also the story of what is American history."
Lara Downes: The first piece is a song that's become known as the "Black National Anthem" ... a hymn that began as a poem by the writer and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson in 1900. His brother, John Rosamund Johnson, set it to music for the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birthday in 1905. It's become a staple at Juneteenth celebrations and other events and gatherings in Black life. There are tons of choral recordings of it, lots of jazz covers... but I wanted to find a classical arrangement.
I found exactly one – a really beautiful set of variations by a Black female composer named Lettie B. Alston, who lived from 1953 to 2014. Listen to where she takes this simple tune:
She's really examining all the different moods of this song – from a feeling of tender reverence to a playful kind of swing, which then leads to a very expansive resolution.
Lara Downes: This is an arrangement of another song that I think a lot of people will know. First, the original...
It's one of the most important songs of the Civil Rights Era. Cooke wrote it after he and his entourage were turned away from a whites-only hotel in Louisiana. So, it was an expression of something deeply personal for him, but at the same time it sums up so much about the collective Black experience in America. So I asked my friend, the arranger Jeremy Siskind, to put together a solo piano version for me:
Rachel Martin, Morning Edition: What made this song a good fit for this project?
Lara Downes: I'm trying to be very intentional about bringing together various traditions of music from the Black experience, to show that it's all connected. This is a tree with many branches.
Would you mind sharing a little about what this song means to you personally?
My parents were Civil Rights activists, so I grew up hearing this song. But I think it really connected with my own experience when Barack Obama quoted from it in his acceptance speech in 2008, when he became our first Black president. That was such a formative moment for me – what he was saying then was that change is up to us. It's a long time coming, but we can make change. And I think we're living that truth now in such a big way.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
]]>This Juneteenth we commemorate the holiday with two contrasting and powerful playlists — Remembrance and Celebration. Remembrance is about the past, and represents the struggle of Black Americans to get to where we are today. Celebration is about the joy and jubilee felt in the presence of positive change for now and in the future.
00:00
William Grant Still: And They Lynched Him on a Tree
VocalEssence Ensemble Singers & Orchestra
18:00
Margaret Bonds: The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Darryl Taylor, tenor; Maria Corley, piano
22:32
Anthony Davis: Act II, Scene I — X, the Life and Times of Malcolm X
Orchestra of St. Luke’s
34:26
George Walker: Lilacs
Faye Robinson, soprano; Arizona State University Orchestra
48:36
Undine Smith Moore: Before I'd Be a Slave
Maria Corley, piano
52:32
Regina Harris Baiocchi: Hurston Songs — How It Feels to Be Colored Me
Rae-Myra Hilliard, soprano; Dana Brown, piano; Elizabeth Anderson, cello
58:22
William Grant Stills: Darker America
American Symphony Orchestra
00:00
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: African Suite: Danse Negre
London Symphony Orchestra
05:59
Will Marion Cook: Rain Song
William Brown, tenor; Ann Sears, piano
10:11
Florence Price: Mississippi River Suite
Women's Philharmonic
37:57
Adolphus Hailstork: Celebration!
Detroit Symphony Orchestra
41:21
Regina Harris Baiocchi: Hold Out for Joy
Picasso Ensemble
45:16
George Walker: Folk Songs for Orchestra
Cleveland Chamber Symphony
59:22
Robert Nathaniel Dett: The Chariot Jubilee
The Aeolians
1:10:52
Adolphus Hailstork: Shout for Joy
The Aeolians
This Juneteenth we commemorate the holiday with two contrasting and powerful segments — Remembrance and Celebration. Remembrance is about the past and represents the struggle of Black Americans in fighting for where we are today. Celebration is filled with the joy and jubilee felt in the presence of positive change happening now and in the future. Listen now to this one-hour special that commemorates the emancipation of enslaved Black Americans, with hosts Steve Staruch and Jeffrey Yelverton.
Remembrance
William Grant Still — And They Lynched Him on a Tree: No. 6 They Left Him Hanging
VocalEssence Ensemble Singers & Orchestra
Joel Thompson — Seven Last Words of the Unarmed
University of Michigan Men's Glee Club
Margaret Bonds — The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Darryl Taylor, tenor; Maria Corley, piano
Celebration
George Walker —  Folk Songs for Orchestra: I. Going to Lay Down My Sword and Shield
Cleveland Chamber Symphony
Regina Harris Baiocchi — ‘Hold Out for Joy’
Picasso Ensemble
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor — African Suite: Danse Negre
London Symphony Orchestra
Adolphus Hailstork — ‘Shout for Joy’
The Aeolians
            Â
]]>While a nearby outdoor PA piped out the modern, rocking country you'd expect, Brassville's horn players jovially launched into jazz tunes they knew in common. Since they'd already decided on a moniker that bent the name of the city to accommodate a brassy, new musical association, they made sure to display it on a sign.
The band was busking, a familiar sight in downtown Nashville, but the Brassville guys didn't much care whether or not anyone tossed them money. They were there to find out how a brass band would go over in a city unaccustomed to hearing that music, especially from performers who'd identified it as their niche to fill and lineage to extend.
"We wanted to see what the palate was for something like this," explains Nate McDowell, who lugged his sousaphone there that night. "There's not a lot of brass-band action in Nashville, so we knew that that would stop people ... We were like, 'We just need to be visible. When people see and feel what we do, we're going to get asked to do things.' And that's, really, exactly what happened."
In the months that followed, Brassville was invited to play many places, while adding members along the way, eventually solidifying a lineup of eight: McDowell, trumpeters and composers Jonathon Neal and Larry Jenkins, drummer Derrick Green, trombone players Marcus Chandler and MarVelous Brown, the latter also a heartily charismatic emcee, keyboardist Rashad Sylvester and bassist Adrian Pollard.
Each had connections to another, more established outfit: Tennessee State University's Aristocrat of Bands, one of the most revered programs among the high-stepping marching bands of historically Black colleges and universities. HBCU bands are well-known to Black southerners, even if it takes a moment of pop crossover like Beyoncé's Coachella concert film Homecoming to educate white audiences of their excellence. The AOB is a fixture at elite, annual invitationals in Atlanta, and also earned a coveted spot in the 2022 Rose Parade. Most members of Brassville marched in it as undergrads. Two, Neal and Jenkins, are instructors to its students.
"The band culture teaches discipline," Neal notes, "and that is the biggest thing we could take away from the Aristocrat of Bands."
They also carry with them the awareness that there's a long tradition of TSU's music program preparing Black players to embark on professional performing careers right there in the city where they'd studied. "I hear some of the stories funneling down from some of our former band members," says Jenkins. "So we really are part of a long history of great musicianship as well."
Aside from a lavish exhibit in the mid-2000s, many authoritative tellings of Nashville's music history have centered institutions like the Grand Ole Opry and Music Row's concentration of song-, record- and deal-making rooms, along with the industry infrastructure that grew from them. But that focus neglects a world of activity that went on in the historically Black part of town where TSU is located between the 1930s and the '60s.
Lorenzo Washington, who lived through it, calls Jefferson Street — then a central corridor, where numerous clubs hosted an evolving array of big-band jazz, jump blues and hot R&B combos. The "original Music Row."
"You have to know where you been before you can determine where you going," Washington notes sagely, "and where we as Black folk has been in this music is really to the top. Artists like Ray Charles and Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding, these guys were international artists and they put their footprints right here on Jefferson Street in North Nashville."
Washington reels off other famous names — Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, James Brown — who routed their tours through over the decades, and emphasizes, "When those guys would come through Nashville, they would come through with the intent of grabbing one of those Tennessee state musicians. Everybody around the country knew that Tennessee State has some of the baddest and the best musicians."
It was a robust scene, indeed, one where Charles scooped up saxophonist and TSU alum Hank Crawford, and where R&B singer Jackie Shane and blueswoman Marion James, both Nashville natives, launched their careers. Hendrix had a standing gig at one club for a time, and Etta James cut her first live album at another, but all the activity wound down after the city sliced through the district with an interstate.
In the early 2010s, Washington found that many elders who'd been a part of that era justifiably feared they'd been forgotten by Nashville. "I used to invite some of the musicians over to just sit around and talk, tell some of their stories about Jefferson Street," he says. "I started just hanging [their] pictures in the living room And then I had different ones bring artifacts over and, after about a year, they start telling me that I was the curator for Jefferson Street."
He took that to heart, transforming his personal collection of oral histories and mementos, even his house, into the Jefferson Street Sound Museum. The importance of the stories he's been telling was further amplified when the long-awaited National Museum of African American Music opened its doors in Nashville.
Since Jefferson Street's heyday, Black musicians who came up in the city or sought education there have had to be resourceful, charting other paths to performing opportunities. Brassville embraces the aims of more recent generations — including a wealth of hometown rap and contemporary R&B talent and the swelling numbers of Black artists specializing in country and roots styles — who've worked at making inroads in venues dominated by white faces.
Brassville has the agility required to adapt to different musical settings; traditionally, brass bands have supplied the syncopated jazz strut of New Orleans' second lines, but Brassville's players veered from that template in their instrumentation and repertoire.
"Because Nate and I marched together, we have that relationship," Pollard says of how the unorthodox bass-and-tuba combo works. "I know his style and I can piggyback on it, not more so to step on each other's toes, more so just to blend together."
McDowell puts it this way: "We're the evolution of what a brass band can be."
They have a sophisticated feel for the connections between jazzy, live-band elasticity and hip-hop, neo-soul, funk, and a repertoire that contains frisky originals and new renditions of tunes made popular by the likes of Silk Sonic, Kendrick Lamar and Big K.R.I.T. They typically work up Jenkins' and Neal's arrangements in rehearsal rooms at Tennessee State, gathering around the piano to sing their parts like a doo-wop group until everyone locks in. "We are here to complement one another," says Neal. "And so we choose music that we know this group can arrange and flip."
It's also well within their wheelhouse to accompany an array of artists who don't often have horns behind them, like lifelong resident and slyly perceptive hip-hop singer and songwriter Brian Brown, Nashville trap standard-bearer Starlito, electronic experimenter DK the Drummer and Tiera, one of the few Black women in country-pop with a label deal.
Proving that they're interested in and capable of moving between scenes has paid off for Brassville. They get asked to do a lot around town, enough that McDowell says they take care to measure the requests against their sense of community mission: "We look at, 'Does it make sense from a cultural standpoint? Is this something that we want to contribute to? Does somebody have a great idea that's benefiting the legacy of Nashville, Black music, Black band music, anything that is adding to things that we find valuable?' "
Last year was Brassville's busiest yet, by far: They played TSU's Homecoming, the 150th anniversary celebration of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the world-renowned a capella ensemble from a sister Nashville HBCU, and a number of other noteworthy events showcasing current and historic Black musical accomplishment in North Nashville. They also brought a Juneteenth show to Lower Broadway, where tourist-targeting honky-tonks reign, landed a month-long residency in the premiere venue 3rd & Lindsley and took the stage in numerous clubs where rock has been the stock in trade.
"I think we hold a firm place as ambassadors for the city and for the sound of Nashville, the new sound of Nashville," reflects Jenkins, "because what we bring to the table wasn't necessarily here."
Pleasing crowds is Brassville's chief ambition, but the members do it in a way that acknowledges Nashville's forgotten sounds, shares solidarity with the city's ascendant, Black music-makers and encourages the next generations to join them. They're always teaching.
"A couple of my students, they formed a band here," says Neal, "and that kind of influence came from Brassville, really."
To hear the broadcast version of the story, use the audio player at the top of this page.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
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