I was onstage with pianist Aaron Diehl, his trio, and the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra when the New York Amsterdam News reached out and asked me to pen a piece celebrating classical music for June’s special Black Music Month issue. We were rehearsing the vocal solo in Mary Lou Williams’s “Zodiac Suite” and I could not turn down an opportunity to highlight the music Williams herself had worked so hard to wrangle. Classical music offered her an expanded palette with which to create!

A Harlem resident like me, Williams’s famous performances at Café Society and Minton’s Playhouse and the salon she hosted in her apartment on Hamilton Terrace motivated and inspired the likes of Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. She invited the world in and made it all her stage. In her honor, I celebrate Black Music Month with you as I explore Black music that embraces the notion of this classical palette.

I spoke with composer George Lewis, artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble, professor of American music and chair in composition at Columbia University, and co-editor of the upcoming ”Composing While Black.”  

“Classical music today is undergoing a stylistic explosion in which nobody really knows where the music is going…but you don’t have to check your culture at the door when you enter the classical realm.”  

Lewis, also a sage historian, pioneered the real-time improvisation of computer programs with humans, engaging the past and tempting the future. Lewis’s classic composition “North Star Boogaloo” placed a live “classical” percussionist into pre-recorded samples of basketball legends “rapping” and poetry read by Quincy Troupe, in his take on hip-hop.  

As composer Tania León has said, “Who gets to be on the stage?” is part of the story of Black classical music. Lewis and musicians like Olly Wilson who created electronically expanded the mediums through which an invitation could be extended.  

“It’s time to celebrate the Black classical composer as part of Black music,” Lewis said, especially those “living and breathing: Nkeiru Okoye, Carlos Simon, Tania León, Marcos Balter, Trevor Weston, Alvin Singleton, Jeffrey Mumford, T. J. Anderson, Allison Loggins-Hull, Anthony Davis, Jonathan Bailey Holland, Andile Khumalo, Renée Baker, Anthony R. Green, Camae Ayewa, Shelley Washington, Kennedy Dixon, Yaz Lancaster, Leila Adu-Gilmore, Brittany J. Green, Alyssa Regent, Nyokabi Kariuki, Daijana Wallace, Nathalie Joachim, Corie Rose Soumah, Darian Donovan Thomas, Njuabulo Phungula, Tyondai Braxton, Elliott Reed, Mikhail Johnson, and many others, blazing new and influential trails.”

I asked Tania León about this moment. She is a composer, conductor, professor emeritus of Brooklyn College, Pulitzer Prize winner; an advisor to arts organizations; and the founder of Composers Now, a nonprofit uplifting “creatives making an impact in all styles of music right now.” 

She won a Kennedy Center Honor last year and honorary doctorates from Brooklyn College, New Jersey City University, and Columbia University, as well as NYU’s Dorothy Height Award this year.  

“There is a piece in my catalog from the 1980s that is now a classic. That piece is now a grandmother. But this act of discovery? This story is an act of repetition: who gets the stage.”

Going back in the archives—hers are now housed at Columbia University—is to observe a natural history of classical music in New York City. Flashback to the 1970s and a young hip trio of composers—Tania León, Julius Eastman, and Talib Hakim—are staging classical music concerts with the Brooklyn Philharmonic in hospitals, public parks, and churches. Guest stars include seminal artists and torchbearers such as Eubie Blake, Tito Puente, and Betty Carter, and the group is pivotal in launching the U.S. careers of Chinese composers like Bright Sheng and Tan Dun.  

It’s bittersweet to contemplate the recent renaissance of the late Eastman, the avant-garde composer, pianist, vocalist and performer, when “in 1977, he was just walking the streets of New York,” León said. In a process of making without fear, experimental music does often become, over time, the next classical expression. Perhaps for this reason, visionaries flock to León’s inexhaustive talents. Extraordinary collaborations—with the choreographers Arthur Mitchell and  Geoffrey Holder, writers Rita Dove and Wole Soyinka, the composers she’s mentored over a lifetime as an educator, and—of course—institutions including Los Angeles Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic, and hundreds of others.  

“What is the difference between the waltz and the mambo?” she asks, and means it. “These kinds of demarcations are being challenged, erased. These are just dances; these represent the different cultures of the world.”  

She told NPR in 2022, “If you are compelled [to compose], it’s because you feel that you have something to say in the world of sound. When you study the early works of any composer, there are traces that grow into the later composition —you find the seeds there. So if you as a student want to get into this…pay attention to what you’re doing from the very beginning.”  

The sumptuous, rhythmic compositions that emanate from her nimble pencil (she writes by hand) graft color and culture into virtuosic musical lines, but every player has to bring their own humanity to the table.

Alison Buchanan’s voice towered inside my television and caught me off guard. 

I thought my Netflix had skipped to PBS as “Dido’s Lament” by 17th-century’s Purcell poured forth, but it was the international soprano and artistic director of UK’s Pegasus Opera singing to Queen Charlotte in “Bridgerton.”  

Buchanan’s scene in the Shonda Rhimes series, was filmed at London’s historic Hackney Empire theater in a neighborhood with a large Black population and the programming—including this filming—reflects that.  

“Classical music is the pathway to my soul,” said Buchanan, who now mentors young Black singers and provides opportunities through her opera company. “I grew up inside that West Indian [context of] ‘children should be seen and not heard.’ When I was at school, I never felt I had a voice, but when I started to sing, I suddenly felt able to express what I could not verbalize” in speaking. 

And I can relate. After spending my early childhood years in New York City, we moved to quiet Connecticut when I was ready for grade school, and birds and locusts were the loudest players. I was constantly urged not to be so loud. Summer stock theater and chorus became my acoustic safe zone.When I went to college in Harlem, I began a slow process of unlocking my natural, fuller voice, which led me down pathways I still travel. The opening of Voice creates its own sonic boom.

We discussed the impact of Buchanan’s televised, regal poise, “a noble posture, we call it,” she said. Shoulders alive, ribcage gently lifted, eyes lit from within, cheekbones radiating, breastbone proud. 

“I enjoy the feeling within me, the way the high voice vibrates inside when it’s balanced and open.” 

Singing asks us to be the bell of our own horn, the body of our own cello. We know the stereotype: “Opera singer shatters glass with astronomically high note!” The laser power of a vibrating head-voice is necessary to the image of the Black singer as a trumpet for freedom.  Think Marian Anderson on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, in concert with the United States of America. Think Mahalia Jackson live at the Newport Jazz Festival, singing the songs of former slaves to Duke Ellington’s horns. Think voices facing into the headwinds.

Next week: Part 2.

Alicia Hall Moran is a Harlem resident, classical mezzo soprano, and conceptual vocal artist, and former AmNews classical music columnist for “Suite Sounds.”

*Dedicated in loving memory of Raul Abdul.

The post Classical conversations, Part 1 appeared first on New York Amsterdam News.

* This article was originally published here

William Wallace IV is the fourth in his family to take the name and the third to hail from Harlem. He almost inherited his father’s lifelong legal career, too. The son of a judge, Wallace went to law school and initially started as a Brooklyn Supreme Court clerk, but quickly realized the field wasn’t for him. 

“It was so depressing,” Wallace told the Amsterdam News. “What I discovered was that everyone that comes before the court is poor, uneducated, and unemployed…so I informed my father that I would probably not follow in his footsteps—the plan was to be a Supreme Court law clerk and go to Legal Aid and [then] become a DA.” 

Deviating from the blueprint set for him, he focused on economic development. He saw creating employment opportunities as the solution to keeping the same folks he regularly saw arraigned out of the carceral system. Lucky for Wallace, his career change coincided with the resurgence of downtown Brooklyn spurred by the Brooklyn Commons—then known as the MetroTech Center. He ended up a senior vice president at Forest City Ratner, an investment trust behind the Barclays Center. 

Today, he serves as the Senior Finance and Acquisitions Officer for real estate developer Continuum Company. His work involves obtaining property for development.  

He’s well-aware of the correlation between his line of work and gentrification. But Wallace sees development as the key to rebuilding the same Black middle class it traditionally displaces. Specifically, he identified a void between lower-income NYCHA housing and the rapidly-ballooning rental “fair market” now reserved for higher and higher incomes, the latter which serves as the main vehicle for gentrification. Ultimately, the game plan is to craft a modern day Mitchell-Lama program, aka affordable housing for moderate-to-middle income households. 

“We have a tendency to be petrified at the sight of the crane,” said Wallace. “But we have to recognize that buildings, like anything else that ages, begin to fall to pieces. You can’t preserve, protect, defend, retain every brick of existing housing, because pretty soon it’s going to be [un]inhabitable. You’ve got to build and if we don’t incentivize middle class construction for affordable and middle class folks, you’re going to end up with just ‘fair market’ developments, which is why you have the fear of gentrification.”

Wallace is also a fierce proponent of union labor—and subsequent union wages—which he sees as the second half of the equation of reviving the Black middle class. Earlier this year, he spoke to the Amsterdam News for the multipart labor series, arguing that Black and brown participation in skilled construction trades was key to workforce development. 

Ultimately, he says he enjoys taking his grandkids to Universal Studios and all the other finer things in life. But there’s a bigger purpose. 

“I can’t lose sight of the fact that I’m a third generation Harlemite whose father was baptized by Adam Clayton Powell [and] used to take me to hear Malcolm X on the corner,” said Wallace.
“That’s who I am. That’s in my DNA. I can’t be happy just vanishing to a luxurious suburb in Rockland County. Not me.”
Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member and writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.

The post Third generation Harlemite wants to rebuild development’s reputation in Black communities appeared first on New York Amsterdam News.

* This article was originally published here

Democrats and Republicans continue to scrimmage in Congress over the debt ceiling as the debate nears the default line. On Tuesday, a solid step occurred when the Rules Committee voted 7 to 6 to pass a procedural hurdle. Now the bill needs a simple majority vote, but that means getting over an impasse established by both parties.

The bill will be delivered on Wednesday to a full house, where it will be greeted by rejection—the Democrats expressing concerns about food for the elderly and the gas pipeline across Virginia and West Virginia; the Republicans, particularly some 30 of them, opposed because they have lost trust in Rep. Kevin McCarthy, Speaker of the House.

RELATED: VP Harris talks debt ceiling, maternal health, and small biz in exclusive Black Press interview

McCarthy conceded that the Republicans had been “outsmarted by the Democrats.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said she was inclined to support the bipartisan proposal, insisting on a commitment from GOP leaders to move several other future proposals, including impeachment of President Biden.

As the evening vote nears, there appear to be 150 votes on both sides of the aisle, which means Biden must get all the Democratic votes to offset the Republican vote. If the bill makes it through the House by some stroke of good luck, the challenge remains in the Senate.  

At press time on Wednesday afternoon, the scrimmage continued.

The post Dems and GOP scrimmage continues appeared first on New York Amsterdam News.

* This article was originally published here

WASHINGTON (AP) — Veering away from a default crisis, the House approved a debt ceiling and budget cuts package late Wednesday, as President Joe Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy assembled a bipartisan coalition of centrist Democrats and Republicans against fierce conservative blowback and progressive dissent.

The hard-fought deal pleased few, but lawmakers assessed it was better than the alternative — a devastating economic upheaval if Congress failed to act. Tensions ran high throughout the day as hard-right Republicans refused the deal, while Democrats said “extremist” GOP views were risking a debt default as soon as next week.

With the House vote of 314-117, the bill now heads to the Senate with passage expected by week’s end.

McCarthy insisted his party was working to “give America hope” as he launched into a late evening speech extolling the bill’s budget cuts, which he said were needed to curb Washington’s “runaway spending.”

But amid discontent from Republicans who said the spending restrictions did not go far enough, McCarthy said it is only a “first step.”

Earlier, Biden expressed optimism that the agreement he negotiated with McCarthy to lift the nation’s borrowing limit would pass the chamber and avoid an economically disastrous default on America’s debts.

The president departed Washington for Colorado, where he is scheduled to deliver the commencement address Thursday at the U.S. Air Force Academy.

“God willing by the time I land, Congress will have acted, the House will have acted, and we’ll be one step closer,” he said. That wasn’t quite the case — the vote began about an hour and a half after Biden arrived in Colorado.

Biden sent top White House officials to the Capitol to shore up backing. McCarthy worked to sell skeptical fellow Republicans, even fending off challenges to his leadership, in the rush to avert a potentially disastrous U.S. default.

Swift later in the week by the Senate would ensure government checks will continue to go out to Social Security recipients, veterans and others and would prevent financial upheaval at home and abroad. Next Monday is when the Treasury has said the U.S. would run short of money to pay its debts.

Biden and McCarthy were counting on support from the political center, a rarity in divided Washington, testing the leadership of the Democratic president and the Republican speaker.

Overall, the 99-page bill restricts spending for the next two years, suspends the debt ceiling into January 2025 and changes some policies, including imposing new work requirements for older Americans receiving food aid and greenlighting an Appalachian natural gas line that many Democrats oppose. It bolsters funds for defense and veterans.

Raising the nation’s debt limit, now $31 trillion, ensures Treasury can borrow to pay already incurred U.S. debts.

Top GOP deal negotiator Rep. Garret Graves of Louisiana said Republicans were fighting for budget cuts after Democrats piled onto deficits with extra spending, first during the COVID-19 crisis and later with Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, with its historic investment to fight climate change.

But Republican Rep. Chip Roy, a member of the Freedom Caucus helping to lead the opposition, said, “My beef is that you cut a deal that shouldn’t have been cut.”

For weeks negotiators labored late into the night to strike the deal with the White House, and for days McCarthy has worked to build support among skeptics. At one point, aides wheeled in pizza at the Capitol the night before the vote as he walked Republicans through the details, fielded questions and encouraged them not to lose sight of the bill’s budget savings.

The speaker has faced a tough crowd. Cheered on by conservative senators and outside groups, the hard-right House Freedom Caucus lambasted the compromise as falling well short of the needed spending cuts, and they vowed to try to halt passage.

A much larger conservative faction, the Republican Study Committee, declined to take a position. Even rank-and-file centrist conservatives were unsure, leaving McCarthy searching for votes from his slim Republican majority.

Ominously, the conservatives warned of possibly trying to oust McCarthy over the compromise.

Biden spoke directly to lawmakers, making calls from the White House.

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said it was up to McCarthy to turn out at least 150 Republican votes, two-thirds of the majority, even as he assured reporters that Democrats would supply the rest to prevent a default. In the 435-member House, 218 votes are needed for approval.

As the tally faltered in the afternoon procedural vote, Jeffries stood silently and raised his green voting card, signaling that the Democrats would fill in the gap to ensure passage. They did, advancing the bill that 29 hard-right Republicans, many from the Freedom Caucus, refused to back.

“Once again, House Democrats to the rescue to avoid a dangerous default,” said Jeffries, D-N.Y.

“What does that say about this extreme MAGA Republican majority?” he said about the party aligned with Donald Trump’s ”Make America Great Again” political movement.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the spending restrictions in the package would reduce deficits by $1.5 trillion over the decade, a top goal for the Republicans trying to curb the debt load.

In a surprise that complicated Republicans’ support, however, the CBO said their drive to impose work requirements on older Americans receiving food stamps would end up boosting spending by $2.1 billion over the time period. That’s because the final deal exempts veterans and homeless people, expanding the food stamp rolls by 78,000 people monthly, the CBO said.

Liberal discontent, though, ran strong as Democrats also broke away, decrying the new work requirements for older Americans, those 50-54, in the food aid program.

Some Democrats were also incensed that the White House negotiated into the deal changes to the landmark National Environmental Policy Act and approval of the controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline natural gas project. The energy development is important to Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., but many others oppose it as unhelpful in fighting climate change.

On Wall Street, stock prices were down.

In the Senate, Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell are working for passage by week’s end.

Schumer warned there is ”no room for error.”

Senators, who have remained largely on the sidelines during much of the negotiations, are insisting on amendments to reshape the package. But making any changes at this stage seemed unlikely with so little time to spare before Monday’s deadline.

___

Associated Press White House Correspondent Zeke Miller and writers Mary Clare Jalonick and Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.

The post House OKs debt ceiling bill to avoid default, sends Biden-McCarthy deal to Senate appeared first on New York Amsterdam News.

* This article was originally published here