HYDE PARK — A slate of concerts this week featuring performances by local youth will celebrate the history of Black American music and its African roots, from hymns and swing to Gullah shouts and Stevie Wonder.
Uniting Voices Chicago‘s annual Black History Month concert series returns 11 a.m. Thursday and Friday to the Chicago Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave. in the Loop.
This year’s performance, under the theme Soul to Soul: The Evolution of African Music in America, will bring together more than 2,700 Chicago Public Schools students to sing selections which explore Africa’s influence on American music.
Students in the Hyde Park Neighborhood Choir — Uniting Voices’ oldest neighborhood choir — will join students from other schools citywide in performing “Step It Down,” a traditional Gullah ring play in which participants dance and call out to the ancestors.
“The only time they will get to sing it [with] all the schools together is at the Symphony Center,” said Magdalena Delgado, the Hyde Park choir’s conductor. “It is exciting for them to see all the other schools just like them and realize, ‘Oh wow, we are not an island after all.’
“It is nerve-wracking. For many of them, it’s the first time they are on a stage like that.”
Other selections include Civil Rights anthem “We Shall Overcome,” Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke” and jazz standard “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).”
The concerts are free but closed to the public. Students, school community members, educators, administrators and donors and are among the expected attendees, said Lonnie Norwood, Uniting Voices’ director of Africana studies.
Students at numerous Hyde Park, Woodlawn and South Shore-area schools are among the thousands to take the stage this week, including kids from:
- Bret Harte Elementary
- Kozminski Community Academy
- Murray Language Academy
- Beulah Shoesmith Elementary
- Woodlawn Community Elementary
- South Shore Fine Arts Academy
- James Madison Elementary
Black students in the Hyde Park Neighborhood Choir have taken pride in their performances, as they’ve seen in the curriculum, instructors said.
“They’re recognizing their culture by singing hip-hop, funk, gospel,” Delgado said. “It’s a huge impact that helps the self-esteem of the students [and] their sense of belonging in their communities, and in this great city of Chicago.”
The rehearsal process “takes them down a little bit of a rabbit hole to find out more about [their] ancestral roots — why you have a particular ear for percussive sounds in hip-hop music, and why that has been a centuries-old kind of thing for our people,” Norwood said.
Beyond practicing their selections, performers engage with Africana through games, choreography and other activities. Rehearsals are discussion-heavy, which gives non-Black students opportunities to learn “what it is to be an ally through empathy,” Delgado said.
“When I have a diverse group — particularly a large Latino population and Black students — we do have these open discussions,” Delgado said. “I allow for my Black students to express the most, and for the others to be listening the most. They always have questions about something they might be curious about [regarding each other’s cultures].
“They can understand other cultures through music. It’s something that maybe seems complicated, but it’s actually easier explaining other cultures and feeling empathetic about other cultures through singing the music. When they sing something they’re not familiar with, they’re connecting on a deeper level.”
For South Siders looking to further explore Africana and the roots of Black music and culture, Norwood recommended visits to:
- Ayodele Drum and Dance workshops, as the group holds an art residency in Sherman Park.
- Muntu Dance Theatre and the eta Creative Arts Foundation, two South Shore-based organizations.
- The Kafolike School of Percussion in the South Loop.
- Local capoeira courses.
“Chicago is the big safekeep, the big melting pot of these incredible musical cultures where people have to otherwise travel to Brazil or Peru or Ghana or Nigeria … to get that info,” Norwood said. “You can get that right here in Chicago.”
Ahead of this week’s performances, Uniting Voices singers and Norwood also recorded “Eyes on de Prize,” which was released this month and is available on Spotify, Apple Music and other platforms.
The title’s use of “de” in place of “the” reflects “the tongue of Africans in America in the early day of plantations,” Norwood said.
It’s a form of language “that needs more attention than we give it, as opposed to shaming it or castigating it because it doesn’t fit into Americans’ accepted norms,” he said.
From diction to the use of the banjo, too much Black music vernacular has “been shamed out of us, to the point where we have lost a lot of memory about the origins of the music,” Norwood said.
To combat further memory loss: “Leave Beyoncé alone” for making country music, he said.
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