Friday Night Live partners with Neighborly Need, Inc., a non-profit committed to strengthening urban communities and developing projects that address urgent problems and needs.

This performance features a commissioned work, Fighting for the Children, by saxophonist/clarinetist Wendell Harrison. The work features Wendell Harrison leading a large ensemble of rhythm section, horns, and a string orchestra of young artists.  

Black History Month programs are generously supported by the Arn and Nancy Tellem Foundation.

Detroit Chamber Winds & Strings starts 2023 with a presentation of Igor Stravinsky’s masterpiece The Soldier’s Tale, presented in collaboration with Eisenhower Dance Detroit.

The concert includes choreography by Eisenhower Dance Detroit’s dancers, as well as music and narration provided by Detroit Chamber Winds and Strings. These talents will merge to tell the tale of a soldier who returns from the army and makes a deal with the Devil, trading his old violin for a magic book that can tell the future and make him rich. 

When Stravinsky wrote the The Soldier’s Tale in 1918, he was already revered for his great ballets that brought dance and music together so seamlessly, but World War 1 and the Russian Revolution brought extraordinary financial hardship. Stravinsky’s genius was to create the The Soldier’s Tale as a masterpiece in miniature, with dancers and narration accompanied by only 7 instrumentalists – two strings, two winds, two brass and percussion.

The performance will include three narrators. Singer, award-winning songwriter and actor Lulu Fall, will narrate the role of the soldier. Soprano Jocelyn Zelasko will portray the role of the Devil and Carl Grapentine, long-time host of the morning program on WFMT/ 98.7 FM, Chicago's Classical music station, will take on the role of a narrator.

The concert also includes Bach’s Partita No. 1 with music played by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s associate concertmaster, Kimberly Kaloyanides Kennedy, and the world premiere of a new piece for reed quintet by Nathalie Joachim called Radical Revelations. 
 

Join us for a dramatic reading of Van Gogh’s Letters presented in conjunction with the Van Gogh in America exhibition now on view at the DIA. The DIA has selected several of Van Gogh’s letters to friends and family that help paint a picture of the artist’s life through his own words.

To bring the letters to life the DIA has partnered with Shakespeare in Detroit, a nonprofit organization that enhances and supports the cultural growth of Detroit with professional theatre created through a conscious lens of equity, diversity and inclusion. The letters will be performed by actors of various backgrounds enhancing the appreciation and interpretation of the correspondences.

This evening of intimate performance will be presented in the DIA’s Lecture Hall. 

Virtuoso violinist and Juilliard Instrument Curator, Eric Grossman (violin) is joined by Lida Lopez Mancheva (piano) and Cecelia Grossman (cello) for this musical journey.

The performance will feature time travel through the world of classical music, which takes us from Italy to France, England, Germany, Spain, Poland, Ukraine, Cuba, the United States, and beyond.

In celebration of the opening of a new performance space in Midtown Detroit’s Carr Center, the DIA will participate in New Standards Jazz Crawl, a series of performances by women composers curated by Terri Lyne Carrington.

When Grammy-nominated recording artist, composer, and bandleader Tia Fuller picks up her saxophone, amazing things happen. Blending technical brilliance, melodic creativity, and the performing precision drawn from both her academic and stage experience, Fuller is a force within the worlds of jazz, pop and R&B, and balances the roles of a touring and recording artist with that of a full-time professor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

An accomplished solo artist, she has recorded five full-length projects with her quartet, and her most recent album Diamond Cut, produced by Terri Lyne Carrington, received a Grammy nomination in the Best Instrumental Jazz category.  Fuller can be seen touring regularly with several bands. She has appeared with Carrington to perform her Grammy-winning Mosaic Project and Money Jungle: Provocative in Blue; served as assistant musical director for Esperanza Spalding’s Radio Music Society tour, and recorded and toured with Dianne Reeves for her Grammy-winning Beautiful Life album.  
 

Music For Interesting Times is the sobering new pandemic-era program by bassist-composer Rick Robinson (Mr. CutTime), exploring existential themes of drastic collective and personal changes, newfound love, and the bittersweet challenge of enjoying life around increasing climate devastation.

Written for his soulful ensemble of strings and drums, CutTime Simfonica, the program includes deep insights into the lives of Sandy Hook shooting families, and a farewell from beloved WSU Ecumenical professor Dr. Percy Licardo Moore, who passed away in 2018.

This program will conclude with Chaconne: For Interesting Times, its own film by Kresge Artist, filmmaker Brandon Walley.

This program may not be suitable for children under 12. 

Susie Ibarra is a Filipinx composer, percussionist, and sound artist. Her interdisciplinary practice spans formats, including performance, mobile sound-mapping applications, multi-channel audio installations, recording, and documentary.

Her compositions have been described as “calling up the movements of the human body; elsewhere it’s a landscape vanishing in the last light, or the path a waterway might trace” (New York Times). Her sound is “like no other’s, incorporating the unique percussion and musical approach of her Filipino heritage with her flowing jazz drum set style” (Modern Drummer Magazine). 

Commissioned by DIA for Asian American Heritage month and performed for Filipino American Heritage Month.

In celebration of the opening of a new performance space in Midtown Detroit’s Carr Center, the DIA will participate in New Standards Jazz Crawl, a series of performances by women composers curated by Terri Lyne Carrington.

Camille Thurman is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and unique interpreter of the jazz tradition. Fluid and powerful on the tenor saxophone and highly inventive as a vocalist, she also plays bass clarinet, flute, and piccolo. Her rich sax sound has been compared to Dexter Gordon, while her vocal approach—including an impressive scatting ability—has been classified alongside those of Ella Fitzgerald and Betty Carter. Thurman has shared stages with such jazz luminaries as George Coleman, Wynton Marsalis, Jack DeJohnette, Jon Batiste and Diana Krall among others.  

The Carr Center @ The Park Shelton, Suite 104

15 E. Kirby Street, Detroit

The BASSment, co-led by bassists Marion Hayden and Jaribu Shahid- presents a concert in celebration of the centennial of bassist/ composer Charles Mingus.

Born in 1922 in Nogales, Arizona and raised in Watts, California, Mingus studied classical bass and composition, eventually turning his creativity to jazz-working with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and his own group the Jazz Workshop- a pivotal group in composition and improvisation. Mingus recorded over 100 albums and wrote over 300 scores, expressing his deep love and understanding of vernacular music and brilliant compositional technique.

The BASSment, an ensemble of four string basses, piano and drums, will perform Mingus arranged for the voice of the string bass.

Featuring: Marion Hayden-Bass, Jaribu Shahid, Jeff Pedraz, Jonathan Muir-Cotton, Buddy Budson (piano) and Djallo Djakete Keita (drums).