MUSIC
January 13, 2019
Freddy Greene - Street Genie
3pm
Free Admission
Jazz up your new year with a free concert featuring Freddy Greene - Street Genie on saxophone and a band sure to have you dancing in the aisles! The Street Genie will perform with Bakru Hunsel (percussion), William Danny Ray (aka “Steele Will”) (drums), Stephen Klingman (guitar), and Rony Thomas (keyboard). Reserve your free ticket in advance at pinecone.org. A limited number of tckets will also be available at the Museum the day of the event. This concert is supported in part by the North Carolina Museum of History Associates and North State Bank.
North Carolina Museum of History
5 East Edenton Street
(919) 664-8333
www.pinecone.org
January 31, 2019
Toni Braxton with special guest SWV
7:30pm
Admission: $55.50+
Seven-time Grammy winner Toni Braxton will be taking her “As Long As I Live” tour on the road in support of her current “Sex & Cigarettes” album. The tour begins on January 19 in Columbia, SC and runs through March 3 in LA and will stop at DPAC on January 31, 2019. SWV, one of the best-selling girl groups of all time, will be a special guest. Toni’s “Sex & Cigarettes” album entered the charts in the Top 5 and the “As Long As I Live” single was #1 on the charts for nine weeks. Both Toni and SWV will be performing all their #1 hits on this tour.
Durham Performing Arts Center
123 Vivian Street, Durham
(919) 680-2787
www.dpacnc.com
February 1, 2019
Ron Miles I Am A Man with Jason Moran, Brian Blade, Bill Frisell & Scott Colley
8pm
Admission: $25+
During the last decade, there has been no jazz quintet more impressive than the one that trumpet and cornet master Ron Miles assembled to make 2017’s poignant I Am a Man. Miles — a versatile and especially expressive player — had already helmed two wonderful trio records with guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Brian Blade, two of the most sophisticated voices in jazz. But given the country’s current state of affairs, Miles felt these songs deserved the heft and the magnified sense of urgency of a larger band. Miles has said that, “it’s impossible to separate spirituality and politics, and art and politics.” He invited two musicians who understood this dimension of the project, pianist Jason Moran and bassist Thomas Morgan (at Duke, replaced by Scott Colley), to record this new composition. In 2017, NPR raved that “no album struck a better balance of beauty and urgency.”Taking its name from the slogan that protesters took up during the landmark 1968 sanitation strike in Memphis, I Am a Man continues the vital African American musical tradition of using music as a means of protest and an assertion of humanity. These tunes wrestle with family turmoil and religious perseverance, with images of inadequacy and pride. The quintet patiently works through these seven compositions, with their elegantly arching melodies sometimes collapsing into moments of exhilarating dissonance. Understated, elegant, and assured, these players always pull through, arriving time and again at a place of profound hope. As All About Jazz declared, “I Am a Manoccupies a rare space, existing as a musical mark of pride and dignity, a statement driven by social activism, a history-propelled piece of art, and an album that challenges and unites.”
Duke Performances
Baldwin Auditorium
1336 Campus Drive, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
February 14 - 17, 2019
Stew & The Negro Problem: Notes of a Native Song
Various times
Admission: $25+
Nearly forty years passed before the Tony Award-winning playwright and singer Stew realized that James Baldwin had changed his life. As a Los Angeles teenager, Stew loved Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain: he empathized with Baldwin’s desire to live in a country where people were not persecuted for the color of their skin. Stew eventually followed in Baldwin’s footsteps by moving to Europe, an experience that afforded him an invaluable perspective on his homeland and became the inspiration for his Broadway play with collaborator Heidi Rodewald, Passing Strange. Decades later, when he reread Go Tell It on the Mountain, Stew recognized the profound gift Baldwin had given him. In the new song cycle Notes of a Native Song — written for Harlem Stage’s Baldwin centenary celebration and named for Baldwin’s 1955 collection of essays on being black in America, Notes of a Native Son — Stew and his mighty band the Negro Problem use Baldwin’s work to examine our lingering civil rights woes through a rapturous mix of rock, jazz, and soul. The show turns Baldwin into a sort of rock star, which has how Stew has long seen him — a flawed, essential visionary who transforms how we see ourselves. Notes of a Native Song reaffirms Baldwin’s inspirational stature while humanizing him, giving a hero new life.
Duke Performances
Rubenstein Arts Center / Von Der Heyden Studio Theater
2020 Campus Drive, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
February 15, 2019
Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah
8pm
Admission: $27+
Working expertly in a hybrid of styles and traditions, New Orleans trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah comes to Chapel Hill to headline the Carolina Jazz Festival.
Memorial Hall
114 E. Cameron Ave, Chapel Hill
(919) 843-3333
www.carolinaperformingarts.org
February 15, 2019
Susana Baca
8pm
Admission: $35+
Long before Susana Baca became one of international music’s essential stars, she ranked as one of the most important figures in the Afro-Peruvian revival. Overcoming the cultural stigma surrounding women performers, not to mention the lowly status of black music in Peru, Baca forged an extraordinary career. In 1995, David Byrne included her heartrending rendition of “María Lando” on his compilation Soul of Black Peru,bringing her music to a global audience; she has since released six albums on Byrne’s Luaka Bop label. The founder of a museum and cultural center celebrating Afro-Peruvian traditions, Baca made history in 2011 when she was appointedPeru’s first black female minister of culture. When Baca was a student in Chorrillos, in Lima, she began a lifelong journey as an ethnomusicologist, collecting and performing a vast repertoire of songs at the cultural crossroads of Africa, the Andes, and Spain. She takes “unique musical forms like the halting lando and lively festejointo the twenty-first century without diluting their essence,” declares the BBC. As she approaches the fifth decade of her career, Baca is renowned as much for her songs as for her graceful and commanding stage presence: surrounded by a band playing traditional Peruvian instruments, Baca dances barefoot as she sings.
Duke Performances
Carolina Theatre
309 West Morgan Street, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
February 22 & 23, 2019
Pedrito Martinex & Alfredo Rodriguez
Feb. 22 at 8pm
Feb. 23 a 5pm & 8pm
Admission: $24+
Grammy-nominated artists Alfredo Rodríguez and Pedrito Martinez first worked together on Alfredo’s 2012 critically acclaimed release Invasion Parade. Since that initial recording session, they have had the rare occasion to perform together as a duo, leaving audiences completely mesmerized by their fearless and virtuosic playing.Each artist brings a different approach to the collaboration. A protégé of Quincy Jones, who took him under his wing when he defected to the US in 2009, Alfredo was schooled in the rigorous classical conservatories of Havana. His riveting artistry is informed as much by Bach and Stravinsky as it is by his Afro Cuban and jazz roots. Pedrito’s musical training came directly from the streets of the Cayo Hueso neighborhood of Old Havana in which he was raised, and he has subsequently performed with artists such as Sting, Paul Simon, and Wynton Marsalis. Together, these two master musicians create a combustive interplay that takes listeners from the lively streets of Havana to the concert hall and back again.Titmus Theatre, Thompson Hall
2241 Dunn Ave, Raleigh
North Carolina State University
www.live.arts.ncsu.edu
March 7, 2019
Brother Ali - Building Bridges: Muslims in America
8pm
Admission: $25+
From his complicated backstory to his compelling rhymes, Brother Ali is a rapper without a rival. Albino and legally blind, he struggled to find peers in the midwestern states where he spent his youth. But in a pivotal moment at age eight, he found rap, which gave him an outlet and, through the references his favorite rappers made, led him to Islam. For twenty years, he has funneled these elements of his distinctive identity into increasingly profound verses, pairing feverish calls for social justice with candid admissions about his own mental fragility. Brother Ali has never walked this tightrope better than on 2017’s gripping All the Beauty in This Whole Life. Written during a period of extreme political upheaval, Beauty not only acknowledges the world’s problems but aims to overcome them — to celebrate love in the face of hate, to cherish wisdom in the midst of madness. Ali turns bad encounters with TSA agents into lessons on humor and empathy, a poem for his son into a sermon on staring down intolerance. His perspective — delivered from Motorco’s stage as part of Duke Performances’ Building Bridges project — feels more necessary than ever, providing hard-won light in the face of darkness.
Duke Performances
Motorco Music Hall
723 Rigsbee Ave, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
March 22 - 23, 2019
Manual Cinema - No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks
8pm
Admission: $25+
In less than a decade, the bold and talented Chicago collective Manual Cinema has become a theatrical powerhouse with mesmerizing shadow-puppet spectacles. Blending techniques from animation and film and performing with original music, Manual Cinema reimagines puppetry, inventing what The New York Times calls “a spectral parade of fantastical images.” The company deploys handmade props and puppets animated by an army of actors working in shadow. Manual Cinema’s work has been called “a brilliant mix of hi-fi and lo-fi” (The Times UK), and “something like a vintage silent film” (The Washington Post). Visually stunning and technically inspired, the company has won an Emmy Award and a growing international reputation as a sensational theatrical innovator. Manual Cinema concludes its Duke Performances residency with its latest work, No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, its most audacious yet. No Blue Memories celebrates the political awakening and poetic legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks, the pioneering American literary titan and community organizer who, in 1950, became the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize. In songs written by sisters Jamila and Ayanna Woods, No Blue Memories turns some of Brooks’ most provocative verses into new jazz compositions. As a quintet plays this score, Manual Cinema’s intricate shadow puppetry re-creates Brooks’ Chicago in miniature. No Blue Memories is a show the likes of which you’ve never seen before.
Duke Performances
Reynolds Industries Theater
Bryan University Center
125 Science Drive, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
March 26, 2019
Black Atlantic: Fatoumata Diawara
8pm
Admission: $25+
Fatoumata Diawara is poised to become one of Africa’s most significant international stars in decades. Born to Malian parents in Côte d’Ivoire, Diawara became a well-known child actor back in Mali. At the age of nineteen, she decamped to France, pursuing a career with a street-theater company that, in turn, led her to pick up a guitar and explore the sounds of her homeland. Before long, she was collaborating with Malian diva Oumou Sangaré, jazz legend Herbie Hancock, and Blur cofounder Damon Albarn, and she had signed with World Circuit. Diawara’s 2012 debut, Fatou, was a simmering folksong beauty, updating Mali’s Wassoulou tradition with a sheen of R&B in which her conversational alto wrapped like smoke around serpentine guitars and driving polyrhythms. Her 2018 follow-up, Nterini, strides toward African pop music, with bold beats and sophisticated arrangements.
Duke Performances
Motorco Music Hall
723 Rigsbee Ave., Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
March 27, 2019
Black Atlantic: Noura Mint Seymali
8pm
Admission: $25+
In the seaside Saharan country of Mauritania, Noura Mint Seymali was born into a Moorish griot dynasty, surrounded by the ecstatic sounds of this Arabic-influenced modal music. Her stepmother, Dimi Mint Abba, was one of Mauritania’s most powerful singers, and when Seymali started writing songs and singing backup for her at age thirteen, her father, a composer, encouraged Seymali to experiment with tradition. On two hypnotic albums, Seymali, her guitarist husband Jeich Ould Chighaly, bassist Ousmane Touré, and drummer Matthew Tinari popularize Mauritania’s traditional sounds into something rich and modern. They exchange electric guitar for tidinit (a four-stringed lute), and put drums and bass alongside the ardine, a calabash harp. Seymali’s songs, pairing modern rhythms with traditional poetry and melodies, are a roadmap forward for Mauritanian music, little known on these shores.
Duke Performances
Motorco Music Hall
723 Rigsbee Ave., Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
March 28, 2019
Black Atlantic: Dayme Arocena
8pm
Admission: $25+
The incandescent young singer, composer, and choral director Daymé Arocena is the future of Cuban music. Raised in Havana in a small home crowded with twenty-one people and enlivened by an endless stream of music, Arocena enrolled in one of the country’s chief conservatories as a child. A prodigy, she learned the customs of Western choral music while exploring the intricacy and variety of Cuba’s own synthesis of sounds — indigenous, African, and European. On 2017’s triumphant Cubafonía, her songs combine Cuban sounds — including the sounds of Santería — with gospel’s exultancy and jazz’s flexible spine. Arocena has worked with BBC DJ and impresario Gilles Peterson, leading his acclaimed Havana Club Rumba Sessions. Drawing deeply from her country’s rich musical traditions and buoyed up by an irrepressible enthusiasm, Arocena is a mighty new missionary for modern Cuban culture, rooted in the pride of its past.
Duke Performances
Motorco Music Hall
723 Rigsbee Ave., Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
March 29, 2019
Black Atlantic: Tal National
8pm
Admission: $25+
Tal National is the world’s most energetic rock ’n’ roll band right now. A collective of thirteen singers and instrumentalists based in Niger’s bustling capital of Niamey, its members represent the country’s separate ethnic and cultural strains — the Hausa, Tuareg, and Songhai among them. The group bridges those languages and sounds in hyperkinetic songs written and played by rotating teams of seven people, each tune delivering an electrifying mix of inspirations and ideas. With ecstatic rhythms and communal vocals, Tal National funnels more sounds into a five-minute span than many bands manage in an entire album, especially on their intoxicating 2018 record, Tantabara. These songs dare the audience to dance and sing, to exalt in a sense of pure communion. In Niamey, Tal National runs a rock club where they are known to play all-night concerts, members moving in and out as needed; expect nothing less than that sense of unbridled delight when they step onto the Motorco stage.
Duke Performances
Motorco Music Hall
723 Rigsbee Ave., Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
April 2, 2019
Gary Clark Jr.
8pm
Admission:$44
Gary Clark Jr. began playing guitar at the age of twelve. Born and raised in Austin, TX, Clark played small gigs throughout his teens, until he met promoter Clifford Antone, proprietor of the Austin music club Antone's. Antone's was the launch pad from which Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan redefined blues at the time. Soon after meeting Clifford, Clark began to play with other musical icons. Jimmie Vaughan and others in the Austin music community helped Clark along his musical path. Rolling Stone declared Clark "Best Young Gun" in its April 2011, "Best of Rock" issue.Clark sang on the bonus track cover of "I Want You Back" by the Jackson 5 on Sheryl Crow's album. More recently, Clark recorded with Alicia Keys on two different songs in New York City. He co-wrote the song Fire We Make with Alicia Keys, Pop Wansel and Oak Feider for the album Girl on Fire.
Durham Performing Arts Center
123 Vivian Street, Durham
(919) 680-2787
www.dpacnc.com
April 8, 2019
Angelique Kidjo: Ramain in Light
8pm
Admission: $35+
In 1983, just as her star was on the rise, the luminous multilingual singer Angélique Kidjo fled her home country of Benin for Paris to escape political turmoil. In the years since, she has not only brought African traditional music into a contemporary context and given it a pop music glow; Kidjo has also brought attention to women’s rights, cultural preservation, and sustainable development with her radiant and commanding voice. Her work has never been more compelling as it is on Remain in Light, her full-length repatriation of the 1980 landmark album by U.S. art-rock band the Talking Heads. In the late 1970s, Talking Heads co-founder David Byrne and the band’s producer, Brian Eno, took inspiration from Afrobeat, the energetic and fiercely political music associated with Nigeria’s Fela Kuti. That sound served as Remain in Light’srhythmic framework to which the Talking Heads added elliptical lyrics and angular guitars. Not long after leaving Benin, Kidjo fell in love with Remain in Light; now she takes these songs back home, reconnecting the album’s African elements with their source material. Kidjo adds horns that embolden the original melodies and choirs that give Byrne’s fragmented words deeper meaning. Unveiled at Carnegie Hall in 2017 and released in 2018, Kidjo’s Remain in Light is a spectacular reassertion of Africa’s rich and vast musical legacy.
Duke Performances
Carolina Theatre
309 West Morgan Street, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
April 13, 2019
Toshi Reagon and BIGLovely
8pm
Admission: $27+
Unimpeachably original, singer/songwriter Toshi Reagon embodies American music from folk to funk, and blues to rock, with performances that feel intimate no matter the venue. In BIGLovely, she has assembled an all-star band to back her up as she returns following her incredible US premiere of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower in CPA’s 2017/18 season.
Memorial Hall
114 E. Cameron Ave, Chapel Hill
(919) 843-3333
www.carolinaperformingarts.org
April 23, 2019
North Carolina Jazz Repertory Orchestra with special guest Branford Marsalis
7:30pm
Admission: $37+
The North Carolina Jazz Repertory Orchestra celebrates its 25th anniversary with friend and fellow North Carolina resident Branford Marsalis in a program highlighting the music of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn.
Memorial Hall
114 E. Cameron Ave, Chapel Hill
(919) 843-3333
www.carolinaperformingarts.org
April 23, 2019
Afro-Cuban All Stars
8pm
Admission: $35+
Without the Afro-Cuban All Stars, the world would know a lot less about the musical riches of Cuba. In 1996, popular tres player and bandleader Juan de Marcos González recruited an unparalleled assortment of his country’s best musicians for a series of sessions in Havana. They made three albums, including Buena Vista Social Club and Introducing … Rubén González, that became springboards for Cuban music’s modern renaissance. The third album was the Afro-Cuban All Stars’ astounding A Toda Cuba Le Gusta, a magnetic survey of Cuba’s past, reinvigorated by the energy of the present.
Duke Performances
Carolina Theatre
309 West Morgan Street, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
August 23, 2019
The Temptations and The Four Tops
7:30pm
Admission: $45+
For more than fifty years, The Temptations have prospered, propelling popular music with a series of smash hits, and sold-out performances throughout the world. “The crowds are bigger, the sales are sizzling,” says one industry report. “The outpouring of affection for this super-group has never been greater”. The history of The Temptations is the history of contemporary American pop. An essential component of the original Motown machine, that amazing engine invented by Berry Gordy, The Temps began their musical life in Detroit in the early sixties. It wasn’t until 1964 however, that the Smokey Robinson written-and-produced “The Way You Do the Things You Do” turned the guys into stars. One of Motown's most consistent hit-makers, The Four Tops are among the most stable and consistent vocal groups. In 1990, with 24 Top 40 pop hits to their credit, The Four Tops were inducted into The Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. Though they would no longer have hits on record, the group continued to be a hit in concert, touring incessantly, a towering testament to the enduring legacy of the Motown Sound they helped shape and define.
Durham Performing Arts Center
123 Vivian Street, Durham
(919) 680-2787
www.dpacnc.com
January 13, 2019
Freddy Greene - Street Genie
3pm
Free Admission
Jazz up your new year with a free concert featuring Freddy Greene - Street Genie on saxophone and a band sure to have you dancing in the aisles! The Street Genie will perform with Bakru Hunsel (percussion), William Danny Ray (aka “Steele Will”) (drums), Stephen Klingman (guitar), and Rony Thomas (keyboard). Reserve your free ticket in advance at pinecone.org. A limited number of tckets will also be available at the Museum the day of the event. This concert is supported in part by the North Carolina Museum of History Associates and North State Bank.
North Carolina Museum of History
5 East Edenton Street
(919) 664-8333
www.pinecone.org
January 31, 2019
Toni Braxton with special guest SWV
7:30pm
Admission: $55.50+
Seven-time Grammy winner Toni Braxton will be taking her “As Long As I Live” tour on the road in support of her current “Sex & Cigarettes” album. The tour begins on January 19 in Columbia, SC and runs through March 3 in LA and will stop at DPAC on January 31, 2019. SWV, one of the best-selling girl groups of all time, will be a special guest. Toni’s “Sex & Cigarettes” album entered the charts in the Top 5 and the “As Long As I Live” single was #1 on the charts for nine weeks. Both Toni and SWV will be performing all their #1 hits on this tour.
Durham Performing Arts Center
123 Vivian Street, Durham
(919) 680-2787
www.dpacnc.com
February 1, 2019
Ron Miles I Am A Man with Jason Moran, Brian Blade, Bill Frisell & Scott Colley
8pm
Admission: $25+
During the last decade, there has been no jazz quintet more impressive than the one that trumpet and cornet master Ron Miles assembled to make 2017’s poignant I Am a Man. Miles — a versatile and especially expressive player — had already helmed two wonderful trio records with guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Brian Blade, two of the most sophisticated voices in jazz. But given the country’s current state of affairs, Miles felt these songs deserved the heft and the magnified sense of urgency of a larger band. Miles has said that, “it’s impossible to separate spirituality and politics, and art and politics.” He invited two musicians who understood this dimension of the project, pianist Jason Moran and bassist Thomas Morgan (at Duke, replaced by Scott Colley), to record this new composition. In 2017, NPR raved that “no album struck a better balance of beauty and urgency.”Taking its name from the slogan that protesters took up during the landmark 1968 sanitation strike in Memphis, I Am a Man continues the vital African American musical tradition of using music as a means of protest and an assertion of humanity. These tunes wrestle with family turmoil and religious perseverance, with images of inadequacy and pride. The quintet patiently works through these seven compositions, with their elegantly arching melodies sometimes collapsing into moments of exhilarating dissonance. Understated, elegant, and assured, these players always pull through, arriving time and again at a place of profound hope. As All About Jazz declared, “I Am a Manoccupies a rare space, existing as a musical mark of pride and dignity, a statement driven by social activism, a history-propelled piece of art, and an album that challenges and unites.”
Duke Performances
Baldwin Auditorium
1336 Campus Drive, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
February 14 - 17, 2019
Stew & The Negro Problem: Notes of a Native Song
Various times
Admission: $25+
Nearly forty years passed before the Tony Award-winning playwright and singer Stew realized that James Baldwin had changed his life. As a Los Angeles teenager, Stew loved Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain: he empathized with Baldwin’s desire to live in a country where people were not persecuted for the color of their skin. Stew eventually followed in Baldwin’s footsteps by moving to Europe, an experience that afforded him an invaluable perspective on his homeland and became the inspiration for his Broadway play with collaborator Heidi Rodewald, Passing Strange. Decades later, when he reread Go Tell It on the Mountain, Stew recognized the profound gift Baldwin had given him. In the new song cycle Notes of a Native Song — written for Harlem Stage’s Baldwin centenary celebration and named for Baldwin’s 1955 collection of essays on being black in America, Notes of a Native Son — Stew and his mighty band the Negro Problem use Baldwin’s work to examine our lingering civil rights woes through a rapturous mix of rock, jazz, and soul. The show turns Baldwin into a sort of rock star, which has how Stew has long seen him — a flawed, essential visionary who transforms how we see ourselves. Notes of a Native Song reaffirms Baldwin’s inspirational stature while humanizing him, giving a hero new life.
Duke Performances
Rubenstein Arts Center / Von Der Heyden Studio Theater
2020 Campus Drive, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
February 15, 2019
Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah
8pm
Admission: $27+
Working expertly in a hybrid of styles and traditions, New Orleans trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah comes to Chapel Hill to headline the Carolina Jazz Festival.
Memorial Hall
114 E. Cameron Ave, Chapel Hill
(919) 843-3333
www.carolinaperformingarts.org
February 15, 2019
Susana Baca
8pm
Admission: $35+
Long before Susana Baca became one of international music’s essential stars, she ranked as one of the most important figures in the Afro-Peruvian revival. Overcoming the cultural stigma surrounding women performers, not to mention the lowly status of black music in Peru, Baca forged an extraordinary career. In 1995, David Byrne included her heartrending rendition of “María Lando” on his compilation Soul of Black Peru,bringing her music to a global audience; she has since released six albums on Byrne’s Luaka Bop label. The founder of a museum and cultural center celebrating Afro-Peruvian traditions, Baca made history in 2011 when she was appointedPeru’s first black female minister of culture. When Baca was a student in Chorrillos, in Lima, she began a lifelong journey as an ethnomusicologist, collecting and performing a vast repertoire of songs at the cultural crossroads of Africa, the Andes, and Spain. She takes “unique musical forms like the halting lando and lively festejointo the twenty-first century without diluting their essence,” declares the BBC. As she approaches the fifth decade of her career, Baca is renowned as much for her songs as for her graceful and commanding stage presence: surrounded by a band playing traditional Peruvian instruments, Baca dances barefoot as she sings.
Duke Performances
Carolina Theatre
309 West Morgan Street, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
February 22 & 23, 2019
Pedrito Martinex & Alfredo Rodriguez
Feb. 22 at 8pm
Feb. 23 a 5pm & 8pm
Admission: $24+
Grammy-nominated artists Alfredo Rodríguez and Pedrito Martinez first worked together on Alfredo’s 2012 critically acclaimed release Invasion Parade. Since that initial recording session, they have had the rare occasion to perform together as a duo, leaving audiences completely mesmerized by their fearless and virtuosic playing.Each artist brings a different approach to the collaboration. A protégé of Quincy Jones, who took him under his wing when he defected to the US in 2009, Alfredo was schooled in the rigorous classical conservatories of Havana. His riveting artistry is informed as much by Bach and Stravinsky as it is by his Afro Cuban and jazz roots. Pedrito’s musical training came directly from the streets of the Cayo Hueso neighborhood of Old Havana in which he was raised, and he has subsequently performed with artists such as Sting, Paul Simon, and Wynton Marsalis. Together, these two master musicians create a combustive interplay that takes listeners from the lively streets of Havana to the concert hall and back again.Titmus Theatre, Thompson Hall
2241 Dunn Ave, Raleigh
North Carolina State University
www.live.arts.ncsu.edu
March 7, 2019
Brother Ali - Building Bridges: Muslims in America
8pm
Admission: $25+
From his complicated backstory to his compelling rhymes, Brother Ali is a rapper without a rival. Albino and legally blind, he struggled to find peers in the midwestern states where he spent his youth. But in a pivotal moment at age eight, he found rap, which gave him an outlet and, through the references his favorite rappers made, led him to Islam. For twenty years, he has funneled these elements of his distinctive identity into increasingly profound verses, pairing feverish calls for social justice with candid admissions about his own mental fragility. Brother Ali has never walked this tightrope better than on 2017’s gripping All the Beauty in This Whole Life. Written during a period of extreme political upheaval, Beauty not only acknowledges the world’s problems but aims to overcome them — to celebrate love in the face of hate, to cherish wisdom in the midst of madness. Ali turns bad encounters with TSA agents into lessons on humor and empathy, a poem for his son into a sermon on staring down intolerance. His perspective — delivered from Motorco’s stage as part of Duke Performances’ Building Bridges project — feels more necessary than ever, providing hard-won light in the face of darkness.
Duke Performances
Motorco Music Hall
723 Rigsbee Ave, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
March 22 - 23, 2019
Manual Cinema - No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks
8pm
Admission: $25+
In less than a decade, the bold and talented Chicago collective Manual Cinema has become a theatrical powerhouse with mesmerizing shadow-puppet spectacles. Blending techniques from animation and film and performing with original music, Manual Cinema reimagines puppetry, inventing what The New York Times calls “a spectral parade of fantastical images.” The company deploys handmade props and puppets animated by an army of actors working in shadow. Manual Cinema’s work has been called “a brilliant mix of hi-fi and lo-fi” (The Times UK), and “something like a vintage silent film” (The Washington Post). Visually stunning and technically inspired, the company has won an Emmy Award and a growing international reputation as a sensational theatrical innovator. Manual Cinema concludes its Duke Performances residency with its latest work, No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, its most audacious yet. No Blue Memories celebrates the political awakening and poetic legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks, the pioneering American literary titan and community organizer who, in 1950, became the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize. In songs written by sisters Jamila and Ayanna Woods, No Blue Memories turns some of Brooks’ most provocative verses into new jazz compositions. As a quintet plays this score, Manual Cinema’s intricate shadow puppetry re-creates Brooks’ Chicago in miniature. No Blue Memories is a show the likes of which you’ve never seen before.
Duke Performances
Reynolds Industries Theater
Bryan University Center
125 Science Drive, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
March 26, 2019
Black Atlantic: Fatoumata Diawara
8pm
Admission: $25+
Fatoumata Diawara is poised to become one of Africa’s most significant international stars in decades. Born to Malian parents in Côte d’Ivoire, Diawara became a well-known child actor back in Mali. At the age of nineteen, she decamped to France, pursuing a career with a street-theater company that, in turn, led her to pick up a guitar and explore the sounds of her homeland. Before long, she was collaborating with Malian diva Oumou Sangaré, jazz legend Herbie Hancock, and Blur cofounder Damon Albarn, and she had signed with World Circuit. Diawara’s 2012 debut, Fatou, was a simmering folksong beauty, updating Mali’s Wassoulou tradition with a sheen of R&B in which her conversational alto wrapped like smoke around serpentine guitars and driving polyrhythms. Her 2018 follow-up, Nterini, strides toward African pop music, with bold beats and sophisticated arrangements.
Duke Performances
Motorco Music Hall
723 Rigsbee Ave., Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
March 27, 2019
Black Atlantic: Noura Mint Seymali
8pm
Admission: $25+
In the seaside Saharan country of Mauritania, Noura Mint Seymali was born into a Moorish griot dynasty, surrounded by the ecstatic sounds of this Arabic-influenced modal music. Her stepmother, Dimi Mint Abba, was one of Mauritania’s most powerful singers, and when Seymali started writing songs and singing backup for her at age thirteen, her father, a composer, encouraged Seymali to experiment with tradition. On two hypnotic albums, Seymali, her guitarist husband Jeich Ould Chighaly, bassist Ousmane Touré, and drummer Matthew Tinari popularize Mauritania’s traditional sounds into something rich and modern. They exchange electric guitar for tidinit (a four-stringed lute), and put drums and bass alongside the ardine, a calabash harp. Seymali’s songs, pairing modern rhythms with traditional poetry and melodies, are a roadmap forward for Mauritanian music, little known on these shores.
Duke Performances
Motorco Music Hall
723 Rigsbee Ave., Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
March 28, 2019
Black Atlantic: Dayme Arocena
8pm
Admission: $25+
The incandescent young singer, composer, and choral director Daymé Arocena is the future of Cuban music. Raised in Havana in a small home crowded with twenty-one people and enlivened by an endless stream of music, Arocena enrolled in one of the country’s chief conservatories as a child. A prodigy, she learned the customs of Western choral music while exploring the intricacy and variety of Cuba’s own synthesis of sounds — indigenous, African, and European. On 2017’s triumphant Cubafonía, her songs combine Cuban sounds — including the sounds of Santería — with gospel’s exultancy and jazz’s flexible spine. Arocena has worked with BBC DJ and impresario Gilles Peterson, leading his acclaimed Havana Club Rumba Sessions. Drawing deeply from her country’s rich musical traditions and buoyed up by an irrepressible enthusiasm, Arocena is a mighty new missionary for modern Cuban culture, rooted in the pride of its past.
Duke Performances
Motorco Music Hall
723 Rigsbee Ave., Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
March 29, 2019
Black Atlantic: Tal National
8pm
Admission: $25+
Tal National is the world’s most energetic rock ’n’ roll band right now. A collective of thirteen singers and instrumentalists based in Niger’s bustling capital of Niamey, its members represent the country’s separate ethnic and cultural strains — the Hausa, Tuareg, and Songhai among them. The group bridges those languages and sounds in hyperkinetic songs written and played by rotating teams of seven people, each tune delivering an electrifying mix of inspirations and ideas. With ecstatic rhythms and communal vocals, Tal National funnels more sounds into a five-minute span than many bands manage in an entire album, especially on their intoxicating 2018 record, Tantabara. These songs dare the audience to dance and sing, to exalt in a sense of pure communion. In Niamey, Tal National runs a rock club where they are known to play all-night concerts, members moving in and out as needed; expect nothing less than that sense of unbridled delight when they step onto the Motorco stage.
Duke Performances
Motorco Music Hall
723 Rigsbee Ave., Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
April 2, 2019
Gary Clark Jr.
8pm
Admission:$44
Gary Clark Jr. began playing guitar at the age of twelve. Born and raised in Austin, TX, Clark played small gigs throughout his teens, until he met promoter Clifford Antone, proprietor of the Austin music club Antone's. Antone's was the launch pad from which Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan redefined blues at the time. Soon after meeting Clifford, Clark began to play with other musical icons. Jimmie Vaughan and others in the Austin music community helped Clark along his musical path. Rolling Stone declared Clark "Best Young Gun" in its April 2011, "Best of Rock" issue.Clark sang on the bonus track cover of "I Want You Back" by the Jackson 5 on Sheryl Crow's album. More recently, Clark recorded with Alicia Keys on two different songs in New York City. He co-wrote the song Fire We Make with Alicia Keys, Pop Wansel and Oak Feider for the album Girl on Fire.
Durham Performing Arts Center
123 Vivian Street, Durham
(919) 680-2787
www.dpacnc.com
April 8, 2019
Angelique Kidjo: Ramain in Light
8pm
Admission: $35+
In 1983, just as her star was on the rise, the luminous multilingual singer Angélique Kidjo fled her home country of Benin for Paris to escape political turmoil. In the years since, she has not only brought African traditional music into a contemporary context and given it a pop music glow; Kidjo has also brought attention to women’s rights, cultural preservation, and sustainable development with her radiant and commanding voice. Her work has never been more compelling as it is on Remain in Light, her full-length repatriation of the 1980 landmark album by U.S. art-rock band the Talking Heads. In the late 1970s, Talking Heads co-founder David Byrne and the band’s producer, Brian Eno, took inspiration from Afrobeat, the energetic and fiercely political music associated with Nigeria’s Fela Kuti. That sound served as Remain in Light’srhythmic framework to which the Talking Heads added elliptical lyrics and angular guitars. Not long after leaving Benin, Kidjo fell in love with Remain in Light; now she takes these songs back home, reconnecting the album’s African elements with their source material. Kidjo adds horns that embolden the original melodies and choirs that give Byrne’s fragmented words deeper meaning. Unveiled at Carnegie Hall in 2017 and released in 2018, Kidjo’s Remain in Light is a spectacular reassertion of Africa’s rich and vast musical legacy.
Duke Performances
Carolina Theatre
309 West Morgan Street, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
April 13, 2019
Toshi Reagon and BIGLovely
8pm
Admission: $27+
Unimpeachably original, singer/songwriter Toshi Reagon embodies American music from folk to funk, and blues to rock, with performances that feel intimate no matter the venue. In BIGLovely, she has assembled an all-star band to back her up as she returns following her incredible US premiere of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower in CPA’s 2017/18 season.
Memorial Hall
114 E. Cameron Ave, Chapel Hill
(919) 843-3333
www.carolinaperformingarts.org
April 23, 2019
North Carolina Jazz Repertory Orchestra with special guest Branford Marsalis
7:30pm
Admission: $37+
The North Carolina Jazz Repertory Orchestra celebrates its 25th anniversary with friend and fellow North Carolina resident Branford Marsalis in a program highlighting the music of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn.
Memorial Hall
114 E. Cameron Ave, Chapel Hill
(919) 843-3333
www.carolinaperformingarts.org
April 23, 2019
Afro-Cuban All Stars
8pm
Admission: $35+
Without the Afro-Cuban All Stars, the world would know a lot less about the musical riches of Cuba. In 1996, popular tres player and bandleader Juan de Marcos González recruited an unparalleled assortment of his country’s best musicians for a series of sessions in Havana. They made three albums, including Buena Vista Social Club and Introducing … Rubén González, that became springboards for Cuban music’s modern renaissance. The third album was the Afro-Cuban All Stars’ astounding A Toda Cuba Le Gusta, a magnetic survey of Cuba’s past, reinvigorated by the energy of the present.
Duke Performances
Carolina Theatre
309 West Morgan Street, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
August 23, 2019
The Temptations and The Four Tops
7:30pm
Admission: $45+
For more than fifty years, The Temptations have prospered, propelling popular music with a series of smash hits, and sold-out performances throughout the world. “The crowds are bigger, the sales are sizzling,” says one industry report. “The outpouring of affection for this super-group has never been greater”. The history of The Temptations is the history of contemporary American pop. An essential component of the original Motown machine, that amazing engine invented by Berry Gordy, The Temps began their musical life in Detroit in the early sixties. It wasn’t until 1964 however, that the Smokey Robinson written-and-produced “The Way You Do the Things You Do” turned the guys into stars. One of Motown's most consistent hit-makers, The Four Tops are among the most stable and consistent vocal groups. In 1990, with 24 Top 40 pop hits to their credit, The Four Tops were inducted into The Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. Though they would no longer have hits on record, the group continued to be a hit in concert, touring incessantly, a towering testament to the enduring legacy of the Motown Sound they helped shape and define.
Durham Performing Arts Center
123 Vivian Street, Durham
(919) 680-2787
www.dpacnc.com