REMEMBER ME TO HARLEM

“Melting pot Harlem - Harlem of honey and chocolate and caramel and rum and vinegar and lemon and lime and gall. Dusky dream Harlem...” - Langston Hughes

This collection celebrates Harlem as a mecca of migration, a center of Renaissance and revolution, a place where generations of musicians have met and mingled, bringing their traditions from everywhere to create new sounds that could only come from here. Listen to this music and you hear the sweet thunder of jazz and the blues, the resolve of Sunday church service, the sway of love songs and lamentations, and above all the sound of American life, of history in the making.

CLASSICAL DREAMS

Benny Golson is, at 92, the last living musician featured in the iconic photograph A Great Day In Harlem. On a Tuesday morning in 1958, Art Kane’s lens captured jazz’s Greatest Generation -- 57 jazz legends including Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins, Charles Mingus, and Thelonious Monk, posed together in front of a Harlem brownstone. Benny is now among the last of that generation, and he’s shown me just how long and glorious a life in music can be. We’ve celebrated milestones together -  I played at his gala 80th birthday at the Kennedy Center, days after Obama’s inauguration when the streets of DC were still covered with parade confetti. He writes me the most exquisitely poetic emails. He’s taught me many things, including the importance of ordering my fries extra crispy. And he’s written glorious piano music for me, always from the bottom of his big, beautiful heart. Classical Dreams, with love…

LOVE WILL FIND A WAY

According to Langston Hughes, Eubie Blake’s 1921 Shuffle Along was the real start of the Harlem Renaissance. In Hughes’ words: “Everybody was in the audience, including me. It gave just the proper push, a pre-Charleston kick, to that Negro vogue of the '20s that spread to books, African sculpture, music and dancing.” As Broadway’s first all-Black hit musical, with an all-star cast including Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker, the show ran for an unprecedented 504 performances and changed the history of the American Musical Theater. Love Will Find a Way is one of the show’s most beautiful tunes, a plaintive love song that reminds us that no matter how dark the path or how gray the skies, love will always find a way.

SONG FOR THE LONELY

William Grant Still’s music was shaped by his youth in Mississippi and Arkansas and his studies at the Oberlin Conservatory, but it was defined by his arrival in Harlem, right after World War I. A 23 year old fresh out of the Navy, he fell in with the young lions of the Harlem Renaissance as the 1920s roared along --  Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Countee Cullen --  and took the lead in translating the ideas of the “New Negro” into music. In 1931 his first symphony was performed by the Rochester Philharmonic -- the first time a major American orchestra played a full work by a Black composer.  By the end of World War II the piece had been performed in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, and London. Still’s life was full of “firsts” as a Black composer and conductor who broke many color barriers during his long career. Song For The Lonely could speak to the loneliness of always going first - but when we dare to go first, we also lead the way.

WHEN THE DOVE ENTERS IN

As a Black student at Northwestern University in the 1920’s, Margaret Bonds felt like an outsider for all the obvious reasons. As she tells it, when she found the poetry of Langston Hughes, it changed her life: “I was in this prejudiced university, this terribly prejudiced place…. I was looking in the basement of the Evanston Public Library where they had the poetry. I came in contact with this wonderful poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and I’m sure it helped my feelings of security. Because in that poem he tells how great the black man is. And if I had any misgivings, which I would have to have – here you are in a setup where the restaurants won’t serve you and you’re going to college, you’re sacrificing, trying to get through school – and I know that poem helped save me.” Ten years later, Bonds and Hughes became friends and he convinced her to move to Harlem, where the Renaissance was in full swing. They collaborated constantly - her music revealing new harmonies and rhythms in his poems. When The Dove Enters In is a song about human connection -- about redemption and salvation, about being stronger together.