Marcus Grant and the Movement: "How It Feels To Be Free"
The Durham Jazz Workshop / Sharp 9 Gallery
4608 Industry Lane, Suite L
Durham NC 27713
Friday, January 22, 7PM
Marcus Grant and the Movement
Marcus R. Grant is a professional drummer, percussionist, musicologist, and educator from West Chester, Pennsylvania. He is currently a PhD candidate in Musicology & Ethnomusicology at Brown University, with a secondary certificate in the Department of Africana Studies. Grant holds a BM in jazz performance from Temple University, an MM in jazz performance, an MM in musicology from the University of Miami (FL), and an MA in musicology and ethnomusicology from Brown University. As a scholar, he focuses his research on 2020 Black Lives Matter protest music and hip-hop, and the intersections of musical protest and digital culture. Other research interests include jazz studies and music of the Black church.
Program notes: This concert celebrates the voices of Nina Simone and Abbey Lincoln; not just their musical voices, but also the ways in which these women were outspoken on issues of anti-Black racism, politics, gender, class, Black-transnational unity across the diaspora, and, ultimately, striving to exemplify and express what it means to be free. The selections in this concert were either recorded, written, arranged, and/or performed by Lincoln and Simone between the years 1960 and 1967, including songs from the albums We Insist!: The Freedom Now Suite, Silk & Soul, and Nina Simone: In Concert. These songs flow freely between the musical languages of Black American Music (also known as “jazz”) and the free and ever-shifting avant-garde or “free jazz.” Their music was both a self-expression of personal thoughts and beliefs, as well as a cathartic and often abrasive social commentary on the continual plight of Black folks across the globe. The messages in these songs are still appropriate today as we continue to face oppression at the hands of law enforcement, in our education system, throughout the prison-industrial system, at the voting polls, in our hospitals and clinics, and in our everyday lives. This concert seeks to take the songs of these women and use their messages to show that the issues they spoke and sang about sixty-plus years ago are still affecting us today. It is through this contemporary lens that we continue to wish to know how it would feel to be free.
Marcus Grant: Drums/MD
Alexandria Dewalt: Vocals and flute
Desiree Jaha Bannister: Vocals and percussion
Kweku Aggrey: Bass
Geraldo Marshall: Trumpet
Noah Campbell: Saxophone
Luther Allison: Piano