MUSIC
September 21, 2018
Flutronix
8pm
Admisison: $37+
Ingenious composers, musicians and vocalists Nathalie Joachim and Allison Loggins-Hull create original works for flute, voice, electronics and live drums featuring their signature art pop sound. This performance is a Carolina Performing Arts commission.
Moeser Auditorium in Hill Hall
145 E. Cameron Ave,Chapel Hill
(919) 843-3333
www.carolinaperformingarts.org
September 27 - 29, 2018
VrroomVIP JazzFEST
This event brings the best Jazz from across the country to Durham, NC in a small intimate setting. In addition, experience unannounced surprises that will make each evening truly unforgettable. And don't forget to attend early and taste the VrroomVIP experience, with classy 'Light Delights' at a pre-show Mix & Mingle (1 hour before concert) .
Durham Arts Council - PSI Theater
120 Morris Street, Durham
www.vrroomvipjazzfest.com
September 28 - 29, 2018
Art of Cool Festival
The mission of the Art of Cool Project is to present, promote and preserve jazz-influenced music. Their Art of Cool Festival presents progressive jazz and alternative soul music at venues throughout downtown Durham. This years headliners include Nas, Erykah Badu, Damien Escobar, Sons of Kemet, Iman Omari and Sango. Presented by DOME Group http://domegroupinc.com
Downtown Durham
www.acofestival.org
September 29, 2018
Buddy Guy
8pm
Admission: $62+
Eric Clapton calls him the best guitar player alive. His radical gumbo of Chicago blues, avant rock, soul, and free jazz has influenced pretty much any guitarist whose name you know. And his live performances are legendary; at his 2012 White House concert he had President Obama singing along. Don’t miss Buddy Guy’s second appearance in Chapel Hill!
Memorial Hall
114 E. Cameron Ave, Chapel Hill
(919) 843-3333
www.carolinaperformingarts.org
October 5 & 6, 2018
Branford Marsalis Quartet
8pm
Admission: $50+
Branford Marsalis is jazz royalty. Raised in the rich culture of New Orleans by a family of professional musicians, Marsalis got his start touring with Art Blakey’s legendary Jazz Messengers. He has gone on to win three GRAMMYs, write scores for Broadway, appear with leading symphony orchestras, and collaborate with the likes of the Grateful Dead and Sting. Marsalis and bandmate (and fellow Durhamite) Joey Calderazzo also serve as artists-in-residence at the award-winning Department of Music at NCCU. But Marsalis shines brightest as the leader of the long-running Branford Marsalis Quartet, hailed as “a prime example of modern American jazz” by the BBC. In Durham, the Quartet delivers two separate, powerful sets at Baldwin Auditorium. For Marsalis, the two-night engagement continues an ongoing partnership with Duke Performances begun in 2013. Pianist Calderazzo, bassist Eric Revis, and drummer Justin Faulkner are some of jazz’s preeminent players; together, they create an electrifying testament to jazz’s past and present. The group’s top-level technique and telepathic communication allow it to roam freely inside the form, from original compositions to spirited standards, making it, as The Guardian declared, “one of the most formidable lineups on the international circuit.”
Duke Performances
Duke Unversity
Baldwin Auditorium
1336 Campus Drive, Durham
(919) 660-3356
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
October 11, 2018
Buika
8pm
Admission: $35+
Concha Buika sees soulful Spanish flamenco through a cultural kaleidoscope. Born to African political exiles in hiding on the Spanish island of Mallorca, Buika was raised in a hardscrabble Roma neighborhood where she learned cante jondo flamenco from her friends, listened to her parents’ jazz records, and sang Guinean folk songs with her mother. Turned down for gigs as a drummer and bassist because she was a woman, Buika became a singer, recording a string of acclaimed flamenco albums inflected with R&B, jazz, soul, son, and ranchera. Buika’s layered harmonies and rhythms are intoxicating, her singing “so musical and overpowering that it can override your built-in genre switch,” raves The New York Times.
Carolina Theatre of Durham
309 West Morgan Street, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
October 18, 2018
Oddisee Building Bridges: Muslims in American
8pm
Admission: $27+
Amir Mohamed el Khalifa, or the incisive rapper and elegant producer Oddisee, grew up in two worlds. The son of an African-American mother and a Sudanese father, he spent his weeks in affluent Maryland suburbs, and his weekends in tougher D.C. neighborhoods. To his Sudanese family, he was the exotic western cousin, raised on rap and big-city trappings; to his Washington family, he was the suburban Muslim nerd who watched too much news. That tension has made Oddisee a modern musical visionary, “a focused beam of hip-hop soul that rattles loudly in our present political moment,” as Pitchforkexclaimed. Oddisee arrives in Durham for Duke Performances’ Building Bridges project and ongoing Hip-Hop Initiative. At Motorco, with an airtight live band, he funnels his perspective as a Muslim Sudanese-American artist into his music. Oddisee’s songs sound joyous, with cascading horns and mellifluous keyboards. But as a lyricist, especially on 2017’s brilliant The Iceberg, he addresses broader questions about the American experiment. A daring thinker and rapper, Oddisee delivers hip-hop that makes us ponder the world’s trials and triumphs — one ebullient beat and breathless rhyme at a time.
Duke Performances
Motorco Music Hall
723 Rigsbee Ave., Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
October 19, 2018
Ranky Tanky
8pm
Admission: $30+
“Combining revered Gullah kinship with a jazz sensibility, Ranky Tanky accentuates the spirituality connected to the ring shouts and praise houses, proposing a modern rendition of their ancestral music.” – All About Jazz “Gullah” comes from West African language and means “a people blessed by God.” “Ranky Tanky” translates loosely as “Work It,” or “Get Funky!” In this spirit, this Charleston, SC based quintet performs timeless music of Gullah culture born in the southeastern Sea Island region of the United States. From playful game songs to ecstatic shouts, from heartbreaking spirituals to delicate lullabies, the musical roots of Charleston, SC are “rank” and fertile ground from which these contemporary artists are grateful to have grown. Pre-show talk with members of the band at 7pm.
North Carolina State University
Talley Student Union
2610 Cates Ave, Raleigh
(919) 515-1100
ww.live.arts.ncsu.edu
October 27, 2018
Youssou Ndour
8pm
Singer, songwriter, composer, occasional actor, businessman, and politician, N’Dour is the undisputed king of Senegalese music, mixing the country’s traditional mbalax with everything from Cuban rumba to hip-hop, jazz, and soul.
Memorial Hall
114 E. Cameron Ave, Chapel Hill
(919) 843-3333
www.carolinaperformingarts.org
October 27, 2018
Lizz Wright
8pm
Admission: $35+
The daughter of a minister and music director in rural Georgia, Lizz Wright grew up playing piano and singing in her father’s church. Her music calls up the lively passion of Southern sacred tradition, connecting the texture of church music with the groove of jazz, endowing both with new depth and radiance. Her extraordinary voice “simmer[s] with midnight heat and the cadences of gospel music,” according to The Guardian. Across six critically acclaimed records, she has cemented her place as one of the most captivating, versatile vocalists of her generation. Wright, who lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, hits a new high with her 2017 recording, Grace, a compelling combination of Appalachian earthiness and big-city cool, created with GRAMMY Award-winning producer Joe Henry. On it, Wright transforms “Stars Fell on Alabama,” into a folk dream, while a church choir forms the backdrop for her tender rendition of “Seems Like I’m Never Tired Lovin’ You.” Grace landed on the year-end list of The New York Times, which called it “a generous bestowal from one of today’s great voices.”
Carolina Theatre
309 West Morgan Street, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
November 2, 2018
Steve Coleman & Natal Eclipse
8pm
Admission: $25+
While struggling as an eager young alto saxophonist in New York during the mid-1980s, Steve Coleman stumbled upon an idea that seemed obvious but has proven revolutionary: Music should reflect the experiences of those who make it. Coleman’s nascent philosophy, M-Base, has since become gospel for some of the world’s foremost jazz players. For the ever-inquisitive Coleman, it has prompted daring albums that turn conceptual obsessions (mathematics, the African Diaspora, the body’s joints) into some of our era’s most sophisticated compositions and improvisations. The recent winner of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, Coleman is, as The New York Times has noted, “one of the most rigorously conceptual thinkers in improvised music.” In Durham, Coleman leads his newest and most immersive band yet, the drummerless octet Natal Eclipse.
Duke Performances
Baldwin Auditorium
1336 Campus Drive, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
November 16 & 17, 2018
Hilton Als
8pm
Admission: $37+
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and theater critic for The New Yorker Hilton Als comes to Carolina Performing Arts to stage the work-in-progress of his debut play, Lives of the Performers—a provocative work that explores race, the self (and those forces that threaten to destroy it), and sisterhood. Directed by Peter Born and starring Helga Davis and Okwui Okpokwasili, with support from the Ford Foundation.
Current Artspace + Studio
123 W. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill
(919) 843-3333
www.carolinaperformingarts.org
December 3, 2018
In the Jazz Tradition: Nneena Freelon
7pm & 9pm
Admission: $25+
Nnenna Freelon does not simply interpret the standards of the great American songbook. She reinvents them entirely, stretching their melodies and pushing and pulling at their meters until they are reborn. Whether singing the songs of Billie Holiday on her GRAMMY-nominated Blueprint of a Lady or paying tribute to Lena Horne in her show Lena: A Lovesome Thing, her warm voice glides from stately sophistication to kinetic joy, delighting in the possibility of the tune at hand. Concurrently raised on a stack of jazz records and in the grand gospel tradition of her childhood Massachusetts church, Freelon took time to listen, learn, and develop her own approach before recording her debut in her late thirties. In the quarter century since, she has been nominated for six GRAMMYS, entertained at the White House, become an accomplished actor, and earned a reputation, according to NPR, as “one of the greatest vocalists to come along in decades.” Freelon is a creative and philanthropic force in Durham, where she has lived since 1978, and she provides a fitting invocation for In the Jazz Tradition, with hometown artistry as rich as that of any jazz singer in the world.
Duke Performances
Durham Fruit & Produce
305 South Dillard Street, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
December 4, 2018
In the Jazz Tradition: Cecile Mclorin Salvant with Sullivan Fortner
7pm & 9pm
Admission: $24+
Cécile McLorin Salvant is a stunning singer with a peerless style and a knack for finding obscure jazz and blues songs and giving them new life. In just five years, Salvant has gone from an unknown upstart to the brightest new star in the jazz firmament, winning Best Jazz Vocal GRAMMYs for consecutive albums and resurrecting popular interest in the form. With an extraordinary range bolstered by rock-solid classical technique, she sings with her whole body, using physical movement to create new possibilities of timbre and tone. Wynton Marsalis did not mince words when he told The New Yorker just how important Salvant is to the future of jazz: “You get a singer like this once in a generation or two.” And though she sings with total command, Salvant’s concerts tend to be playful and disarming, a quality that has helped make her previous two sold-out appearances at Baldwin Auditorium feel intimate: she has the great singer’s gift of making you feel she is singing for you alone. At Durham Fruit & Produce, in one of the smallest rooms she will play all year, Salvant is joined by Sullivan Fortner, one of jazz’s most dynamic young pianists.
Duke Performances
Durham Fruit & Produce
305 South Dillard Street, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
December 6, 2018
In the Jazz Tradition: Catherine Russell
7pm &9pm
Admission: $25+
Catherine Russell was born into jazz royalty. The daughter of Luis Russell, Louis Armstrong’s longtime music director, and Carline Ray, who collaborated with the great Mary Lou Williams and played guitar for the legendary International Sweethearts of Rhythm, the New York native was raised on the best jazz the world had to offer. But Russell took a long detour to a career as a jazz singer, spending decades supporting others with her warm and flexible voice, whether touring and recording with David Bowie or singing background vocals for hundreds of albums. In 2006, Russell finally stepped into the spotlight with the first of a string of six sterling records, eventually returning to the jazz of her youth on 2016’s immaculate Harlem on My Mind. Russell has become one of jazz’s most versatile and dynamic performers, whether her voice is drifting over lonesome piano or belting over a barrelhouse band. She can be flirtatious, even lascivious, harkening back to the heyday of Bessie Smith; or slinky and seductive, channeling the ardor of the great torch singers who populate her regal jazz lineage.
Duke Performances
Durham Fruit & Produce
305 South Dillard Street, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
December 7, 2018
In the Jazz Tradition: Jazzmeia Horn
7pm & 9pm
Admission: 25+
In 2015, Jazzmeia Horn strode onto the stage of the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition and left a panel of esteemed judges slack-jawed in astonishment. For her performance, she selected “Evidence” — a devilishly difficult Monk number that demands total dynamic control from the performer — and jubilantly scatted her way through its vaulting melody and twisting meter. Horn’s victory launched her career as one of the world’s most daring young singers in any style. On her GRAMMY-nominated 2017 debut, A Social Call, Horn recalls the likes of Nina Simone and Betty Carter as she serenades and scats through an unapologetically urgent, political take on jazz. She lambasts social structures that have kept people poor, attaches gospel standards to Coltrane themes, and renders ballads with frank poignancy. A student of past masters, Horn is a brave new voice for jazz’s vocal resurgence and a mighty clarion for its future.
Duke Performances
Durham Fruit & Produce
305 South Dillard Street, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
December 8, 2018
In the Jazz Tradition: Rene Marie
7pm & 9pm
Admission: $25+
The rise of René Marie embodies the triumphant spirit of song. A talented teenage bandleader in her small Virginia hometown, Marie shelved her musical aspirations for decades, returning to the stage only after her oldest son urged her to sing again at the age of forty-one. When her husband delivered an edict — leave music or leave me — she chose music, a move that gave jazz a commanding new voice. Also a composer, arranger, and theatrical performer, Marie quickly made up for lost time, recording eleven albums and drawing on a wide swath of genres to create a distinctive and captivating hybrid style. She summons the sultry allure of Eartha Kitt (to whom she paid tribute on 2013’s dazzling I Wanna Be Evil) and the sophisticated verve of Sarah Vaughan, whether shouting old-time blues, singing one of her own confessional compositions, or lending her powerful voice to the world premiere of Gerald Clayton’s Piedmont Blues at Duke in 2016. Unpredictable and bold, Marie sings with the delight of someone whose life was saved by music
Duke Performances
Durham Fruit & Produce
305 South Dillard Street, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
December 11, 2018
Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis: Big Band Holidays
7:30pm
Admission: $62+
The tradition continues. Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis and an all-star roster of guest vocalists celebrate holiday standards in new and traditional arrangements of Yuletide favorites. The Big Band Holidays concert is perfect for jazz lovers and families alike.
Memorial Hall
114 E. Cameron Ave, Chapel Hill
(919) 843-3333
www.carolinaperformingarts.org
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
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 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
September 21, 2018
Flutronix
8pm
Admisison: $37+
Ingenious composers, musicians and vocalists Nathalie Joachim and Allison Loggins-Hull create original works for flute, voice, electronics and live drums featuring their signature art pop sound. This performance is a Carolina Performing Arts commission.
Moeser Auditorium in Hill Hall
145 E. Cameron Ave,Chapel Hill
(919) 843-3333
www.carolinaperformingarts.org
September 27 - 29, 2018
VrroomVIP JazzFEST
This event brings the best Jazz from across the country to Durham, NC in a small intimate setting. In addition, experience unannounced surprises that will make each evening truly unforgettable. And don't forget to attend early and taste the VrroomVIP experience, with classy 'Light Delights' at a pre-show Mix & Mingle (1 hour before concert) .
Durham Arts Council - PSI Theater
120 Morris Street, Durham
www.vrroomvipjazzfest.com
September 28 - 29, 2018
Art of Cool Festival
The mission of the Art of Cool Project is to present, promote and preserve jazz-influenced music. Their Art of Cool Festival presents progressive jazz and alternative soul music at venues throughout downtown Durham. This years headliners include Nas, Erykah Badu, Damien Escobar, Sons of Kemet, Iman Omari and Sango. Presented by DOME Group http://domegroupinc.com
Downtown Durham
www.acofestival.org
September 29, 2018
Buddy Guy
8pm
Admission: $62+
Eric Clapton calls him the best guitar player alive. His radical gumbo of Chicago blues, avant rock, soul, and free jazz has influenced pretty much any guitarist whose name you know. And his live performances are legendary; at his 2012 White House concert he had President Obama singing along. Don’t miss Buddy Guy’s second appearance in Chapel Hill!
Memorial Hall
114 E. Cameron Ave, Chapel Hill
(919) 843-3333
www.carolinaperformingarts.org
October 5 & 6, 2018
Branford Marsalis Quartet
8pm
Admission: $50+
Branford Marsalis is jazz royalty. Raised in the rich culture of New Orleans by a family of professional musicians, Marsalis got his start touring with Art Blakey’s legendary Jazz Messengers. He has gone on to win three GRAMMYs, write scores for Broadway, appear with leading symphony orchestras, and collaborate with the likes of the Grateful Dead and Sting. Marsalis and bandmate (and fellow Durhamite) Joey Calderazzo also serve as artists-in-residence at the award-winning Department of Music at NCCU. But Marsalis shines brightest as the leader of the long-running Branford Marsalis Quartet, hailed as “a prime example of modern American jazz” by the BBC. In Durham, the Quartet delivers two separate, powerful sets at Baldwin Auditorium. For Marsalis, the two-night engagement continues an ongoing partnership with Duke Performances begun in 2013. Pianist Calderazzo, bassist Eric Revis, and drummer Justin Faulkner are some of jazz’s preeminent players; together, they create an electrifying testament to jazz’s past and present. The group’s top-level technique and telepathic communication allow it to roam freely inside the form, from original compositions to spirited standards, making it, as The Guardian declared, “one of the most formidable lineups on the international circuit.”
Duke Performances
Duke Unversity
Baldwin Auditorium
1336 Campus Drive, Durham
(919) 660-3356
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
October 11, 2018
Buika
8pm
Admission: $35+
Concha Buika sees soulful Spanish flamenco through a cultural kaleidoscope. Born to African political exiles in hiding on the Spanish island of Mallorca, Buika was raised in a hardscrabble Roma neighborhood where she learned cante jondo flamenco from her friends, listened to her parents’ jazz records, and sang Guinean folk songs with her mother. Turned down for gigs as a drummer and bassist because she was a woman, Buika became a singer, recording a string of acclaimed flamenco albums inflected with R&B, jazz, soul, son, and ranchera. Buika’s layered harmonies and rhythms are intoxicating, her singing “so musical and overpowering that it can override your built-in genre switch,” raves The New York Times.
Carolina Theatre of Durham
309 West Morgan Street, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
October 18, 2018
Oddisee Building Bridges: Muslims in American
8pm
Admission: $27+
Amir Mohamed el Khalifa, or the incisive rapper and elegant producer Oddisee, grew up in two worlds. The son of an African-American mother and a Sudanese father, he spent his weeks in affluent Maryland suburbs, and his weekends in tougher D.C. neighborhoods. To his Sudanese family, he was the exotic western cousin, raised on rap and big-city trappings; to his Washington family, he was the suburban Muslim nerd who watched too much news. That tension has made Oddisee a modern musical visionary, “a focused beam of hip-hop soul that rattles loudly in our present political moment,” as Pitchforkexclaimed. Oddisee arrives in Durham for Duke Performances’ Building Bridges project and ongoing Hip-Hop Initiative. At Motorco, with an airtight live band, he funnels his perspective as a Muslim Sudanese-American artist into his music. Oddisee’s songs sound joyous, with cascading horns and mellifluous keyboards. But as a lyricist, especially on 2017’s brilliant The Iceberg, he addresses broader questions about the American experiment. A daring thinker and rapper, Oddisee delivers hip-hop that makes us ponder the world’s trials and triumphs — one ebullient beat and breathless rhyme at a time.
Duke Performances
Motorco Music Hall
723 Rigsbee Ave., Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
October 19, 2018
Ranky Tanky
8pm
Admission: $30+
“Combining revered Gullah kinship with a jazz sensibility, Ranky Tanky accentuates the spirituality connected to the ring shouts and praise houses, proposing a modern rendition of their ancestral music.” – All About Jazz “Gullah” comes from West African language and means “a people blessed by God.” “Ranky Tanky” translates loosely as “Work It,” or “Get Funky!” In this spirit, this Charleston, SC based quintet performs timeless music of Gullah culture born in the southeastern Sea Island region of the United States. From playful game songs to ecstatic shouts, from heartbreaking spirituals to delicate lullabies, the musical roots of Charleston, SC are “rank” and fertile ground from which these contemporary artists are grateful to have grown. Pre-show talk with members of the band at 7pm.
North Carolina State University
Talley Student Union
2610 Cates Ave, Raleigh
(919) 515-1100
ww.live.arts.ncsu.edu
October 27, 2018
Youssou Ndour
8pm
Singer, songwriter, composer, occasional actor, businessman, and politician, N’Dour is the undisputed king of Senegalese music, mixing the country’s traditional mbalax with everything from Cuban rumba to hip-hop, jazz, and soul.
Memorial Hall
114 E. Cameron Ave, Chapel Hill
(919) 843-3333
www.carolinaperformingarts.org
October 27, 2018
Lizz Wright
8pm
Admission: $35+
The daughter of a minister and music director in rural Georgia, Lizz Wright grew up playing piano and singing in her father’s church. Her music calls up the lively passion of Southern sacred tradition, connecting the texture of church music with the groove of jazz, endowing both with new depth and radiance. Her extraordinary voice “simmer[s] with midnight heat and the cadences of gospel music,” according to The Guardian. Across six critically acclaimed records, she has cemented her place as one of the most captivating, versatile vocalists of her generation. Wright, who lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, hits a new high with her 2017 recording, Grace, a compelling combination of Appalachian earthiness and big-city cool, created with GRAMMY Award-winning producer Joe Henry. On it, Wright transforms “Stars Fell on Alabama,” into a folk dream, while a church choir forms the backdrop for her tender rendition of “Seems Like I’m Never Tired Lovin’ You.” Grace landed on the year-end list of The New York Times, which called it “a generous bestowal from one of today’s great voices.”
Carolina Theatre
309 West Morgan Street, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
November 2, 2018
Steve Coleman & Natal Eclipse
8pm
Admission: $25+
While struggling as an eager young alto saxophonist in New York during the mid-1980s, Steve Coleman stumbled upon an idea that seemed obvious but has proven revolutionary: Music should reflect the experiences of those who make it. Coleman’s nascent philosophy, M-Base, has since become gospel for some of the world’s foremost jazz players. For the ever-inquisitive Coleman, it has prompted daring albums that turn conceptual obsessions (mathematics, the African Diaspora, the body’s joints) into some of our era’s most sophisticated compositions and improvisations. The recent winner of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, Coleman is, as The New York Times has noted, “one of the most rigorously conceptual thinkers in improvised music.” In Durham, Coleman leads his newest and most immersive band yet, the drummerless octet Natal Eclipse.
Duke Performances
Baldwin Auditorium
1336 Campus Drive, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
November 16 & 17, 2018
Hilton Als
8pm
Admission: $37+
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and theater critic for The New Yorker Hilton Als comes to Carolina Performing Arts to stage the work-in-progress of his debut play, Lives of the Performers—a provocative work that explores race, the self (and those forces that threaten to destroy it), and sisterhood. Directed by Peter Born and starring Helga Davis and Okwui Okpokwasili, with support from the Ford Foundation.
Current Artspace + Studio
123 W. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill
(919) 843-3333
www.carolinaperformingarts.org
December 3, 2018
In the Jazz Tradition: Nneena Freelon
7pm & 9pm
Admission: $25+
Nnenna Freelon does not simply interpret the standards of the great American songbook. She reinvents them entirely, stretching their melodies and pushing and pulling at their meters until they are reborn. Whether singing the songs of Billie Holiday on her GRAMMY-nominated Blueprint of a Lady or paying tribute to Lena Horne in her show Lena: A Lovesome Thing, her warm voice glides from stately sophistication to kinetic joy, delighting in the possibility of the tune at hand. Concurrently raised on a stack of jazz records and in the grand gospel tradition of her childhood Massachusetts church, Freelon took time to listen, learn, and develop her own approach before recording her debut in her late thirties. In the quarter century since, she has been nominated for six GRAMMYS, entertained at the White House, become an accomplished actor, and earned a reputation, according to NPR, as “one of the greatest vocalists to come along in decades.” Freelon is a creative and philanthropic force in Durham, where she has lived since 1978, and she provides a fitting invocation for In the Jazz Tradition, with hometown artistry as rich as that of any jazz singer in the world.
Duke Performances
Durham Fruit & Produce
305 South Dillard Street, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
December 4, 2018
In the Jazz Tradition: Cecile Mclorin Salvant with Sullivan Fortner
7pm & 9pm
Admission: $24+
Cécile McLorin Salvant is a stunning singer with a peerless style and a knack for finding obscure jazz and blues songs and giving them new life. In just five years, Salvant has gone from an unknown upstart to the brightest new star in the jazz firmament, winning Best Jazz Vocal GRAMMYs for consecutive albums and resurrecting popular interest in the form. With an extraordinary range bolstered by rock-solid classical technique, she sings with her whole body, using physical movement to create new possibilities of timbre and tone. Wynton Marsalis did not mince words when he told The New Yorker just how important Salvant is to the future of jazz: “You get a singer like this once in a generation or two.” And though she sings with total command, Salvant’s concerts tend to be playful and disarming, a quality that has helped make her previous two sold-out appearances at Baldwin Auditorium feel intimate: she has the great singer’s gift of making you feel she is singing for you alone. At Durham Fruit & Produce, in one of the smallest rooms she will play all year, Salvant is joined by Sullivan Fortner, one of jazz’s most dynamic young pianists.
Duke Performances
Durham Fruit & Produce
305 South Dillard Street, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
December 6, 2018
In the Jazz Tradition: Catherine Russell
7pm &9pm
Admission: $25+
Catherine Russell was born into jazz royalty. The daughter of Luis Russell, Louis Armstrong’s longtime music director, and Carline Ray, who collaborated with the great Mary Lou Williams and played guitar for the legendary International Sweethearts of Rhythm, the New York native was raised on the best jazz the world had to offer. But Russell took a long detour to a career as a jazz singer, spending decades supporting others with her warm and flexible voice, whether touring and recording with David Bowie or singing background vocals for hundreds of albums. In 2006, Russell finally stepped into the spotlight with the first of a string of six sterling records, eventually returning to the jazz of her youth on 2016’s immaculate Harlem on My Mind. Russell has become one of jazz’s most versatile and dynamic performers, whether her voice is drifting over lonesome piano or belting over a barrelhouse band. She can be flirtatious, even lascivious, harkening back to the heyday of Bessie Smith; or slinky and seductive, channeling the ardor of the great torch singers who populate her regal jazz lineage.
Duke Performances
Durham Fruit & Produce
305 South Dillard Street, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
December 7, 2018
In the Jazz Tradition: Jazzmeia Horn
7pm & 9pm
Admission: 25+
In 2015, Jazzmeia Horn strode onto the stage of the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition and left a panel of esteemed judges slack-jawed in astonishment. For her performance, she selected “Evidence” — a devilishly difficult Monk number that demands total dynamic control from the performer — and jubilantly scatted her way through its vaulting melody and twisting meter. Horn’s victory launched her career as one of the world’s most daring young singers in any style. On her GRAMMY-nominated 2017 debut, A Social Call, Horn recalls the likes of Nina Simone and Betty Carter as she serenades and scats through an unapologetically urgent, political take on jazz. She lambasts social structures that have kept people poor, attaches gospel standards to Coltrane themes, and renders ballads with frank poignancy. A student of past masters, Horn is a brave new voice for jazz’s vocal resurgence and a mighty clarion for its future.
Duke Performances
Durham Fruit & Produce
305 South Dillard Street, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
December 8, 2018
In the Jazz Tradition: Rene Marie
7pm & 9pm
Admission: $25+
The rise of René Marie embodies the triumphant spirit of song. A talented teenage bandleader in her small Virginia hometown, Marie shelved her musical aspirations for decades, returning to the stage only after her oldest son urged her to sing again at the age of forty-one. When her husband delivered an edict — leave music or leave me — she chose music, a move that gave jazz a commanding new voice. Also a composer, arranger, and theatrical performer, Marie quickly made up for lost time, recording eleven albums and drawing on a wide swath of genres to create a distinctive and captivating hybrid style. She summons the sultry allure of Eartha Kitt (to whom she paid tribute on 2013’s dazzling I Wanna Be Evil) and the sophisticated verve of Sarah Vaughan, whether shouting old-time blues, singing one of her own confessional compositions, or lending her powerful voice to the world premiere of Gerald Clayton’s Piedmont Blues at Duke in 2016. Unpredictable and bold, Marie sings with the delight of someone whose life was saved by music
Duke Performances
Durham Fruit & Produce
305 South Dillard Street, Durham
(919) 684-4444
www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
December 11, 2018
Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis: Big Band Holidays
7:30pm
Admission: $62+
The tradition continues. Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis and an all-star roster of guest vocalists celebrate holiday standards in new and traditional arrangements of Yuletide favorites. The Big Band Holidays concert is perfect for jazz lovers and families alike.
Memorial Hall
114 E. Cameron Ave, Chapel Hill
(919) 843-3333
www.carolinaperformingarts.org
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
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 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