A Concert Meditation on Civil Rights in America

Sunday April 19 5:00pm

Cantate Welcomes Afro Blue!

Cantate is thrilled to team with jazz a cappella virtuosos Afro Blue of Howard University (acclaimed finalists on NBC’s The Sing-Off) in a concert tribute to the musical heritage of the Civil Rights movement that reaches across styles and generations. Featuring spirituals, dazzling and reflective jazz, and songs of courage and consolation—from “Precious Lord” to an excerpt of jazz great Mary Lou Williams’s Mass for Peace to arrangements of Bill Withers’s “Lean on Me” and U2’s “MLK”—and the timely premiere of Rise, a newly commissioned work by Judah Adashi with text by Tameka Cage Conley.

Join us as we close our 30th anniversary season at an historic venue in the heart of the nation’s capital, the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, a gothic structure built by free blacks and former slaves where funerals were held for Frederick Douglass and Rosa Parks. With a special appearance by renowned journalist Gwen Ifill.

    Read the full press release.

    Read a Q & A conversation with composer Judah Adashi and poet Tameka Cage Conley about their collaboration in creating Rise.

Map to Metropolitan A.M.E. Church