Tap, clap and learn as African/gospel beat comes to free concert in park

In a 70-minute musical mash-up under the towering trees at South Bend’s Potawatomi Park, Black roots will meet the strings of a classical concert hall.

Twenty members of the South Bend Symphonic Choir will sing along with four local gospel soloists. A string quintet from the South Bend Symphony Orchestra will play alongside a gospel keyboardist, bass player and drummer. And two drummers will pound out a beat as the choir sings and a local African troupe dances.

“Lifting Our Voices: A Celebration of African American Music and Dance” starts at 7 p.m. Aug. 13 as one of the free weekly outdoor performances on summer Saturdays at Potawatomi’s Chris Wilson Pavilion. The Community Foundation of St. Joseph County arranges the Saturday series.

"Lifting Our Voices” springs from the orchestra’s annual concert to mark the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday that Marvin Curtis, dean emeritus of IU South Bend’s Raclin School of the Arts, had co-founded and led since 2010.

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This winter, instead of performing in a large music hall, Curtis split the event into three concerts in Black churches in South Bend where church choirs sang to a woodwind quintet’s instrumentals. He wanted to bring the music to its real home.

Laura Moran Walton dropped in on the concert at Faith Alive Ministries and found, “It was nothing short of amazing.”

So moved, she invited Curtis to replicate the “joyful, uplifting experience” in the Potawatomi series that she helps to organize in her role as the Community Foundation’s vice president of communication and public relations.

Curtis replied: Why not add dance?

“Black people do more than gospels,” he explains. “I wanted people to understand how music got there and how dance got there.”

Stories in the songs

Between conducting most of the music, Curtis will also narrate, adding context and African history to language in the spirituals.

“It’s important to me to give context not only to the songs but to the place of African Americans,” he says.

When he was growing up, he recalls, he was ashamed to hear old songs with words like “dese” and “dose” rather than “these” and “those.” He didn’t talk like that. White culture told him that was because Black people had big lips and tongues. Wrong. He explains that songs came about from slaves who, because of their native languages, had a phonetic problem with the “th” sound. Also, slaves learned English from slave masters who often were illiterate themselves, Curtis says.

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The songwriters were, in fact, clever, often using coded language, he says, with lyrics about following a “drinking gourd” as code for the Big Dipper to navigate routes to freedom.

By breaking down fallacies, he says, “People get to understand the differences are not what they thought they were.”

The park setting, Walton says, makes the music and culture more accessible, as it does for other parts of the series. It’s free. It’s ADA accessible. It’s on two bus lines. And it has a nearby playground in case kids get fidgety.

The concerts draw anywhere from 300 to 500 people in the audience for many performances and up to nearly 1,300 for the full South Bend Symphony Orchestra’s concert.

And to make the concert even more accessible, radio station WUBS-FM (89.7) will broadcast part of “Lifting Our Voices” live from the park.

Music to move you

Kelly Burgét and her local African dance troupe, UZIMA, will dance to two songs as two drummers pound out the beat: “Kuku,” a West African piece that celebrates harvesting food for the community, and “Yesu Azali Awa,” or “Jesus is Here,” which is from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The orchestra’s string quartet will do selections from two Black composers: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and William Grant Still, who’s often called the “dean of African American composers.”

Curtis will conduct the choir in singing the traditional spirituals "I’ve been ‘Buked,” (‘buked is short for rebuked) and “Ain’t Got Time to Die.” The late, noted Black composer Francis Hall Johnson had done choral arrangements for both songs.

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Music and youth pastor Turrell O’Neal, who led his choir from Sweet Home Ministries in the winter concerts, has helped to select gospel songs and train the choir, and he’ll conduct one or two pieces on stage.

One of those songs, “Look and Live,” is one that his Sweet Home choir had performed for the King holiday concerts. He says the piece by Detroit area chorale director Michael Fletcher is known to both those who know classic hymns and those who know gospel music.

“I wanted to do something recognizable,” he says. “It’s an upbeat, happy-feeling song. You can clap your hands, tap your feet, nod your head.”

Another piece is “Jesus, You’re the Center of My Joy,” a slow ballad that has become a traditional worship song. It's written by Richard Smallwood, whom O’Neal describes as a “staple in gospel music.”

Curtis also credits choir member CreAnne Mwale for conducting a piece and pitching in as a soloist.

Learning experience

The King holiday concerts filled more than half of the church seats. O’Neal saw diverse audiences, including people such as SBSO Music Director Alastair Willis and other people from the community that he doesn’t normally see in church. Likewise, he recalls, it marked the first time his pastor heard the orchestra.

There are plans to repeat the church concerts for next year’s King holiday.

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Like those events, the Potawatomi concert is exposing all of the performers to diverse and different ways of doing music. Classical orchestras and choirs work from sheet music. By contrast, gospel choirs tend to learn songs orally and commit them to memory.

“It’s been a learning experience for all of those involved,” O’Neil says.

In concert

∎ Who: Community Foundation of St. Joseph County’s Performing Arts Series presents “Lifting Our Voices: A Celebration of African American Music and Dance”

∎ When: 7 p.m. Aug. 13

∎ Where: Chris Wilson Pavilion at Potawatomi Park, 500 S. Greenlawn Ave., South Bend

∎ Cost: Free

∎ Seating: Limited seating near the stage. Bring lawn chairs or blankets.

∎ Broadcast: Part of the performance will air live on radio station WUBS-FM (89.7).

∎ For more information: Call 574-232-0041 or visit cfsjc.org.

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: African roots music joins South Bend symphony choir in outdoor concert