Black music meets symphonic sound

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Operatic baritone Tunde is among the scheduled performers for the Black Notes Project Jan. 26-27 at Knight Theater.

Black music will get classical treatment at Knight Theater.

The inaugural Black Notes Project, a two-day musical festival Jan. 26-27, is a collaboration between the Sol Kitchen and Blumenthal Performing Arts. The initiative celebrates contemporary Black music alongside orchestral traditions. Knight Theater is located at 430 S. Tryon St. and individual tickets as well as VIP packages, which include a pre-festival reception at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art are on sale at www.blumenthalarts.org.

The concerts will include local and national performers like Grammy-nominated harpist Brandee Younger, opera singer Tunde, Igmar Thomas and Revive Big Band, DJ Mad Skillz and Charlotte Strings Collective.

“We want to make it seem cool,” said Michael Kitchen, founder of the Sol Kitchen and Black Notes Project’s organizer. “I didn’t come from the orchestral background. James Brown was playing in my house when I was growing up and Marvin Gaye and everything else. So just imagine some of these arrangements with a huge orchestra sounds great.

“People tend to forget a lot of Motown sound had strings, had horn sections had violins and stuff like that. Fast forward to now, you see some hip-hop artists, like Nas and Common and they’re performing with symphony orchestras.”

The Jan. 26 show will debut of the Black Notes Project Ensemble led by conductor Phillip Biedenbender with local instrumentalists including the Charlotte Strings Collective and DJ Mad Skillz. On Jan. 27, opera baritone Tunde, who has earned a large following for “Hip Hopera” that combines classic opera and hip hop, will perform. Tunde’s performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Detroit Opera.

Trumpeter Igmar Thomas,  musical director for D-Nice and Busta Rhymes will lead the Revive Big Band in a set of original compositions and orchestrations of jazz standards and contemporary classics from Oliver Nelson, Wayne Shorter and Freddie Hubbard to A Tribe Called Quest, Gangstarr and Bilal.

The initiative’s goal is to show the universal appeal of music and creative tapestry of Black artists across generations.

“When we’re talking about classical music writ large … I think that historically genre groupings were a form of musical segregation,” said Amy Carleton, the festival’s co-organizer. “It’s like, ‘OK, you can play jazz’ or ‘you can play hip hop’ or ‘you can do R&B’ without recognizing the full breadth of musical achievement.  

“In many ways, genres have been a form of musical gatekeeping, so this is a way to open the door and really pull back the curtain and say, there’s achievement in all of these areas.”

 
The festival will also feature daytime family-friendly programming on Jan. 27 with a youth concert at Booth Theatre and interactive education sections.  

“This is a family affair,” Carleton said. “We want to see families coming out, a multi-generational audience. The emphasis is absolutely and very much emphatically on celebrating the Black American Songbook.”  

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