Berklee celebrates black music and history in word and song

February 03, 2007|Marc Hirsh, Globe Correspondent

"Black music matters," declared Princeton University professor and public intellectual Cornel West Thursday not long after he took the stage at the Berklee Performance Center. And even though that was the title of the evening's program, which also featured veteran a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, his delivery of those words -- as if he were speaking in boldface type -- was testament to his unwavering faith in their fundamental truth.

Falling on the first night of Black History Month, the event celebrated the launch of Berklee's Africana Studies program. West didn't give a talk so much as a performance as he thundered about the importance of music, equated the violence of racism with that of terrorism, and briefly retreated from the microphone to move as though possessed by the spirit of James Brown.

Sweet Honey in the Rock continued in a similarly academic vein, structuring the set list like a musicological survey of the black American experience from Africa through the modern day. The group started with "Denko," a Malian song of praise and thanks that began with layered vocals before more complex harmonies and an abundance of hand percussion brought the song to its ecstatically joyful second half.

Impossibly deep-voiced Ysaye Maria Barnwell then declared, "This evening's journey, though short, will be intense," and the statement had the same authority as West's earlier comments. The vocals of fugue-like spiritual "Wade in the Water" rippled back and forth like the surface of a moving river, while the shout song "In the Morning When I Rise" brought the six women of Sweet Honey (and several audience members) out of their chairs.

There was a recurring theme of music as community, with blues (identified as the music of migration and the individual) offering up the lone contrast. Jazz ( featuring a solo by American Sign Language interpreter Shirley Childress Saxton ), gospel (represented by the slow, almost doo-wop sway of Sister Rosetta Tharpe's "Precious Memories"), and protest songs all got their due. The only flat note was "Young and Positive," a youth-power rap with all the depth of a middle-school assembly. It felt like false uplift. The preceding two hours were the real thing.