SEATTLE — It was a performance where every note held a story.
Every voice weaved the past into the present.
The Juneteenth concert "Songs of Black Folk Music of Resistance and Hope" explored the musical genres born from the Black experience in America. The performance featured an all-Black orchestra and chorus made up of 40 voices from across the south Sound.
This musical experience is the brainchild of Leslie Braxton, senior pastor of New Beginnings Christian Fellowship.
Braxton said when he studied on the East Coast, he watched large-scale productions featuring Black performers and wanted to bring that back home.
“When I came back to the Pacific Northwest, I yearned to not have to fly to Atlanta or D.C. for something on a scale that represented for the northwest audience, for the Puget Sound audience, the best of Black folk," Braxton said.
Braxton said this kind of representation matters.
Although he was born, raised, and educated in Tacoma, Braxton recalled not having a Black academic teacher until he was 24, when he went to New York.
“When you start talking about the reality of growing up here in the Pacific Northwest, we don’t see ourselves in certain capacities like you do when you go to major urban centers for African American people like the northeast, in the southeast, in the south," Braxton said.
In order to help bring his vision to reality, Braxton knew exactly who to call.
Ramón Bryant Braxton returned as the artistic and musical director for the concert.
Bryant Braxton said he grew up in a musical family in Washington and was exposed to different types of music growing up. But he said he realized how much more was out there once he left Washington.
Now Bryant Braxton hopes he can show local youth the possibilities of music they may not see otherwise.
“As a Morehouse man that’s one of the objectives they always tell us to consider after we graduate: go home and share what you’ve learned and help your people," Bryant Braxton said.
Meanwhile, Braxton stressed that there’s a message behind the music.
“I literally believe that if you lost every book on African American history and culture and every reference to Black people in the pages of other productions of American history and you just retained the lyrics to our music, you could reconstruct our history through our songs," Braxton said. "Because our songs are the soundtrack of our existence.”
And Braxton said those songs not only serve as a record of a community’s history, but they remind us of a promise that remains unfulfilled. A federal holiday is not enough to address that, he said.
“There’s intentionality behind the songs that we chose because they come right back to the agenda," Braxton said. "The unfinished agenda of America becoming a more perfect union.”
"Songs of Black Folk" is a non-profit organization. You can watch their concerts here.