Wednesday Evening, February 24, 2016, at 8:30 m a r g Swimming in Dark Waters— o r Other Voices of the American P Experience e h T Featuring Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla McCalla & Bhi Bhiman This evening’s program is approximately 75 minutes long and will be performed without intermission. Please make certain all your electronic devices are switched off. Major support for Lincoln Center’s American Songbook is provided by Amy & Joseph Perella. Endowment support provided by Bank of America This performance is made possible in part by the Josie Robertson Fund for Lincoln Center. The Appel Room Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall American Songbook Additional support for Lincoln Center’s American Songbook is provided by The DuBose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund, The Shubert Foundation, Jill and Irwin B. Cohen, The G & A Foundation, Inc., Great Performers Circle, Chairman’s Council, and Friends of Lincoln Center. Public support is provided by the New York State Council on the Arts. Artist catering provided by Zabar’s and zabars.com MetLife is the National Sponsor of Lincoln Center UPCOMING AMERICAN SONGBOOK EVENTS IN THE APPEL ROOM: Thursday Evening, February 25, at 8:30 La Santa Cecilia Friday Evening, February 26, at 8:30 Charles Busch: The Lady at the Mic A cabaret tribute to Elaine Stritch, Polly Bergen, Mary Cleere Haran, Julie Wilson & Joan Rivers Saturday Evening, February 27, at 8:30 Terri Lyne Carrington’s Mosaic Project: Love & Soul featuring Valerie Simpson & Oleta Adams IN THE STANLEY H. KAPLAN PENTHOUSE: Wednesday Evening, March 16, at 8:00 Luluc Thursday Evening, March 17, at 8:00 Anaïs Mitchell Friday Evening, March 18, at 8:00 The Cooper Clan All Together The Appel Room is located in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall. The Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse is located in the Samuel B. and David Rose Building at 165 West 65th Street, 10th floor. For tickets, call (212) 721-6500 or visit AmericanSongbook.org. Call the Lincoln Center Info Request Line at (212) 875-5766 or visit AmericanSongbook.org for complete program information. Join the conversation: #LCSongbook We would like to remind you that the sound of coughing and rustling paper might distract the performers and your fellow audience members. In consideration of the performing artists and members of the audience, those who must leave before the end of the performance are asked to do so between pieces . Flash photography and the use of recording equipment are not allowed in the building. American Songbook I Note on the Program The Rallying Cry of Protest Songs By James Reed m a There is just one thing r I can’t understand, my friend. g Why some folk think freedom o Was not designed for all men. r P When Pops Staples wrote those words in 1965, he could never have known that they would remain relevant some 50 years later. He likely hoped they e wouldn’t. Recorded by the Staple Singers, live in a church and with the quak - h ing fervor of a tent revival, “Freedom Highway” rang out as a missive shot t straight from the heart of the civil rights movement. n The song was inspired by 1965’s freedom marches from Selma to o Montgomery, Alabama, during which hundreds made the 50-mile trek to rally for voting rights for African Americans. Enduring deadly clashes with police, e troopers, and angry mobs, they completed their journey on the third attempt. t “Freedom Highway” has since become not just an anthem of that historic o moment, but rather a testament to the power of music to document and pre - serve our culture from disparate perspectives. N Swimming in Dark Waters—Other Voices of the American Experience is firmly aligned with that mission. The performance’s title evokes the notion of survival, of keeping one’s head above water at uncertain times when that seems impossible. It presents songs—of resistance, of uplift, of heartache— that don’t merely advocate for change: They celebrate it. Bolstered by her acclaimed debut solo album, last year’s Tomorrow Is My Turn , Rhiannon Giddens casts a curatorial eye on slavery narratives and brings them into the 21st century with a fresh perspective. Cellist Leyla McCalla burrows into the history of Louisiana’s musical traditions and, in a direct link to her lineage, Haitian protest songs. And Bhi Bhiman, raised in St. Louis as the son of Sri Lankan immigrants, infuses his topical songs with caustic wit reminiscent of Randy Newman. Together, this evening’s artists connect the dots across genres and genera - tions, revealing that songs of freedom have deep roots that extend to mod - ern times. Assembled by Giddens, who first made her name with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the performers are hell-bent on challenging our common assumption of who’s a singer-songwriter and what a protest song should accomplish. Be honest: Who comes to mind when you think of a singer-songwriter? Is it Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, or perhaps James Taylor and Neil Young? Why don’t we consider Bob Marley, Buffy Sainte-Marie, or even Stevie Wonder American Songbook I Note on the Program as such? They, too, reflected their times, but through the prism of their expe - rience, their own skin color. “The idea was to put a show together to talk about the American voice—what is it and who represents it,” Giddens says. “Well, it’s everybody in America, but we tend to focus on one slice. So this is an attempt to put the focus on a different slice. There are a lot of great singer-songwriters of color who don’t get thought about as much as they should.”And what about the protest song? It’s Pete Seeger or Joan Baez leading the masses in a chorus of “We Shall Overcome” or Phil Ochs declaring, “I ain’t marching anymore,” right? (Ochs once famously quipped, “A protest song is a song that’s so specific that you cannot mistake it for BS.”) Sure, but it’s also Billie Holiday startling audiences with “Strange Fruit”: “Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze/Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees.” It’s also Sam Cooke promising that “A Change Is Gonna Come” in 1964, and Marvin Gaye offering proof with “What’s Going On?” that, in fact, hadn’t come by the early 1970s. We’re living in a fertile time for protest music. Last year alone ignited a wave of artists dissecting bitter truths learned in places such as Ferguson, Missouri, Baltimore, and Charleston, South Carolina. With jarring frequency, headlines tell of grim realities across the country: police brutality (almost always against black Americans), mass shootings, the rise of a presidential candidate who openly calls for banning Muslims from entering the U.S. Musicians responded the only way they could—in song. Taken from his widely praised album “To Pimp a Butterfly,” rapper Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” became a battle cry of the Black Lives Matter movement. “We gon’ be alright,” he assured us, and we believed him. In “Hell You Talmbout,” it took R&B superstar Janelle Monáe more than six harrowing minutes to recite the names and thereby honor all the African Americans who were killed or wounded by police last year. Heartsick about a racially motivated shooting at a South Carolina church, singer-songwriter Peter Mulvey wrote “Take Down Your Flag,” urging the state to lower the Confederate flag flying at its capitol building; it eventually did. Giddens was so devastated in the wake of that same massacre that she also composed a call to action. With just a hand drum, her resonant voice, and a choir echoing her words, “Cry No More” rattled the rafters of the North Carolina church where she filmed the video. “I think we all have something to say,” Giddens says, “and it’s our responsibility to say it.” James Reed, a former music critic at the Boston Globe, writes about the arts and lives in Boston. —Copyright © 2016 by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc. American Songbook I Meet the Artists s t s i t r A e B O R T N h I E t W L E A H t C I M e e Rhiannon Giddens M Best known as a member of the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops (CCDs), Rhiannon Giddens stole the show at a 2013 concert curated by T Bone Burnett at New York’s Town Hall. Afterward, Burnett produced her 2015 solo debut record, Tomorrow Is My Turn , which deftly incorporates folk, jazz, gospel, and the blues. Reviving, interpreting, and recasting traditional material from a variety of sources has been central to Ms. Giddens’s career, especially in her groundbreaking work with the CCDs. With their two Nonesuch albums, Genuine Negro Jig (2010, Grammy winner) and Leaving Eden (2012), the CCDs have shared the role African-American performers and songwriters played in U.S. folk-music history, while making recordings that are vital, contemporary, and exuberant. Iconic choreographer Twyla Tharp was so entranced by their work that she created Cornbread Duet , a dance piece set to a suite of songs by the CCDs that had its world premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Ms. Giddens’s journey, in a larger sense, began in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, where she was raised—an area with a rich legacy of old- time music, black and white, that she would explore in depth after college. While studying opera at Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Ms.