Program Book - Gateways Festival Orchestra featuring Take 6

NINETY-THIRD SEASON

Friday, April 19, 2024, at 7:30

Gateways Festival Orchestra

Anthony Parnther Conductor

Take 6

Claude McKnight Vocals

Mark Kibble Vocals

Joel Kibble Vocals

Dave Thomas Vocals

Alvin Chea Vocals

Khristian Dentley Vocals

PERKINSON Worship: A Concert Overture

ELGAR

Variations on an Original Theme, Op. 36 (Enigma) Theme (Andante)

1. C.A.E. (Andante)

2. H.D.S.-P. (Allegro)

3. R.B.T. (Allegretto)

4. W.M.B. (Allegro di molto)

5. R.P.A. (Moderato)

6. Ysobel (Andantino)

7. Troyte (Presto)

8. W.N. (Allegretto)

9. Nimrod (Adagio)

10. Intermezzo (Dorabella). (Allegretto)

11. G.R.S. (Allegro di molto)

12. B.G.N. (Andante)

13. *** Romanza (Moderato)

14. Finale. E.D.U. (Allegro)

BONDS Montgomery Variations

Decision

Prayer Meeting

March

Dawn in Dixie

One Sunday in the South

Lament

Benediction Selections featuring Take 6

THOMAS Come On

LENNON AND MCCARTNEY Got to Get You Into My Life

CHAPLIN, TURNER, AND PARSONS Smile

CHEA, LINS Lullaby

CHEA, DENT

Over The Hill Is Home

STYNE, COMDEN, AND GREEN Just In Time

JARREAU, GRAYDON, CANNING Roof Garden

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.

COMMENTS by Richard E. Rodda and Phillip Huscher

COLERIDGE-TAYLOR PERKINSON

Born June 14, 1932; New York City

Died March 9, 2004; Chicago, Illinois

Worship: A Concert Overture

COMPOSED 2001

FIRST PERFORMANCE Unknown

INSTRUMENTATION

two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME 6 minutes

Coleridge-Taylor

Perkinson was born in 1932 into a musical family in New York City—his mother was a professional pianist, organist, and director of a local theater—and he seemed destined to musical prominence by his very name, given after the London-born composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912), the son of a white English woman and a physician from Sierra Leone, who became a cultural hero to American audiences. (Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was encouraged in his career by Edward Elgar, whose Enigma Variations is also featured on this program.)

Perkinson early demonstrated musical gifts, and he was admitted to New York’s prestigious High School of Music and Art in 1945; his mentor there, Hugh Ross, once introduced him to Igor Stravinsky. Perkinson began composing while still a teenager, and he received the LaGuardia Prize from the school for his choral work And Behold on his graduation in 1949. He entered New York University as an education major in 1949, but transferred to the Manhattan School of Music two years later to study composition with Charles Mills and Vittorio Giannini and conducting with Jonel Perlea; he received his baccalaureate in 1953 and his master’s degree the following year.

The life-long influence of jazz on Perkinson’s musical personality was nurtured at Manhattan by his classmates Julius Watkins, Herbie Mann, Donald Byrd, and Max Roach—in 1964–65 he played piano in the Max Roach Quartet and at various times served as arranger and music director for such eminent popular artists as Marvin Gaye, Lou Rawls, Barbara McNair, Melvin Van Peebles, and Harry Belafonte. Perkinson took further advanced training in conducting at the Berkshire Music Center (1954), Netherlands Radio

above: Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, photo by Cedille Records

Union in Hilversum (1960–63), and Mozarteum in Salzburg (1960); and privately with Dimitri Mitropoulos, Lovro von Matačić, Franco Ferrara, and Dean Dixon; and in composition with Earl Kim at Princeton University (1959–62).

He went on to teach at Brooklyn College and Indiana University, hold conducting positions with the Dessoff Choirs and Brooklyn Community Symphony Orchestra, serve as music director for Jerome Robbins’s American Theater Lab, Dance Theatre of Harlem and Alvin Ailey’s American Dance Theater, and co-found the Symphony of the New World, the first integrated symphony orchestra in the United States, and serve as both its associate conductor (1965–70) and music director (1972–73). In 1998 Perkinson was appointed artistic director of the performance program at the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia

College Chicago. At the time of his death, in 2004, Perkinson was also serving as composer-in-residence for the Ritz Chamber Players of Jacksonville, Florida.

Perkinson’s Worship: A Concert Overture is a two-part orchestral fantasia based on the Doxology, one of Christianity’s best-loved hymns— “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow.” The familiar hymn tune is not heard complete and intact anywhere in the piece, though its phrasing and melodic leadings are embedded in the texture throughout, just a handful of notes at first in the moderately paced opening section but becoming more evident in the faster music that follows, notably in a powerful statement by the low brass shortly before the end.

—Richard E. Rodda

EDWARD ELGAR

Born June 2, 1857; Broadheath, near Worcester, England

Died February 23, 1934; Broadheath, England

Variations on an Original Theme (Enigma), Op. 36

COMPOSED

October 1898–February 19, 1899

FIRST PERFORMANCE

June 19, 1899; London, England. Hans Richter conducting

INSTRUMENTATION

two flutes with piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, side drum, triangle, bass drum, cymbals, organ, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME

29 minutes

The temptation to improvise at the piano after a hard day’s work surely never produced greater results than on an October evening in the Worcestershire countryside in 1898. Tired out from hours of teaching violin and writing music that would never make him famous, Edward Elgar began to play a tune that caught his wife’s ear. Alice asked what it was. “Nothing,” he replied, “but something might be made of it.” And then, to prove—or perhaps, test—his point, he began to play with it. “Powell would have done this, or

Nevinson would have looked at it like this,” he commented as he went, drawing on the names of their friends. Alice said, “Surely you are doing something that has never been done before!”

The work went well. On November 1, Elgar played at least six variations for Dora Penny, now known as Dorabella, or variation 10. On January 5, Elgar wrote to Jaeger: “I say—those variations—I like ’em.” By February 22, he told Dorabella that the variations were done, “and yours is the most cheerful.

.

.

.

I have orchestrated you well.” The orchestration of the piece took the two weeks from February 5 to 19, 1899. Elgar then sent the score off to Hans Richter, the great German conductor known for championing both Wagner and Brahms. Elgar waited a long, nervous month for a response, but Richter recognized the quality of this music and agreed to give the premiere in London. For Elgar, already in his forties and not yet a household name, even in England, Richter’s advocacy was decisive.

The first performance was a great success for both Elgar and for British music. The critics recognized the work as a landmark, and although one was aggravated that the dedication “To my

above: Edward Elgar, ca. 1900

friends pictured within” didn’t name names, he was at least honest enough to admit that the music stood handsomely on its own. The friends have long ago been identified, but a greater question still remains. At the time of the premiere, Elgar wrote:

The enigma I will not explain—its “dark saying” must be left unguessed, and I warn you that the apparent connection between the Variations and the Theme is often of the slightest texture; further, through and over the whole set another and larger theme “goes,” but is not played—so the principal Theme never appears, even as in some late dramas—e.g., Maeterlinck’s L’intruse and Les sept princesses—the chief character is never on the stage.

Those are words Elgar later came to regret, for the public’s curiosity often overshadowed the music. For full descriptions of the “friends pictured

within,” we are indebted to the invention of the piano roll; when the Aeolian Company later issued the Enigma Variations in this newfangled format, Elgar contributed his own comments on this circle of men and women in his life. Here, then, follows the portrait gallery, with some of Elgar’s remarks.

Theme. This is an original melody, as Elgar’s title boasts, born that October night in 1898 and without connections to anyone in the composer’s life.

1. (C.A.E.) Caroline Alice Elgar was the composer’s wife. “The variation,” Elgar writes, “is really a prolongation of the theme with what I wished to be romantic and delicate additions; those who knew C.A.E. will understand this reference to one whose life was a romantic and delicate inspiration.” She was his muse; after Alice died in 1920, Elgar never really worked again. The little triplet figure in the oboe and the

top: Edward and Caroline Alice Elgar just after their marriage | bottom, left to right: Hew David Steuart-Powell, Variation 2; Richard Baxter Townshend, Variation 3; William Meath Baker, Variation 4; Richard Penrose Arnold, Variation 5

bassoon at the very beginning mimics the whistle with which Elgar signaled Alice whenever he came home.

2. (H.D.S.-P.) Hew David SteuartPowell played chamber music with Elgar. “His characteristic diatonic run over the keys before beginning to play is here humorously travestied in the semiquaver [sixteenth note] passages; these should suggest a toccata, but chromatic beyond H.D.S.-P.’s liking.” (Their frequent partner was Basil Nevinson, variation 12.)

3. (R.B.T.) Richard Baxter Townshend, who regularly rode through the streets of Oxford on his bicycle with the bell constantly ringing, is here remembered for his “presentation of an old man in some amateur theatricals—the low voice flying off occasionally in ‘soprano’ timbre.” (Dorabella also recognized the bicycle bell in the pizzicato strings.)

4. (W.M.B.) William Meath Baker was “a country squire, gentleman, and scholar. In the days of horses and carriages, it was more difficult than in these days of petrol to arrange the carriages for the day to suit a large number of guests. This variation was written after the host had, with a slip of paper in his hand, forcibly read out the arrangements for the day and hurriedly left the music room with an inadvertent bang of the door.”

5. (R.P.A.) Richard Penrose Arnold was a son of Matthew Arnold and “a great lover of music which he played (on the pianoforte) in a self-taught manner, evading difficulties but suggesting in a mysterious way the real feeling.” In the middle section we learn that

“his serious conversation was continually broken up by whimsical and witty remarks.”

6. (Ysobel) Isabel Fitton was an amateur violist. “The opening bar, a phrase made use of throughout the variation, is an ‘exercise’ for crossing strings—a difficulty for beginners; on this is built a pensive, and for a moment, romantic movement.”

7. (Troyte) Arthur Troyte Griffith, an architect, was one of Elgar’s closest friends. “The uncouth rhythm of the drums and lower strings was really suggested by some maladroit essays to play the pianoforte; later the strong rhythm suggests the attempts of the instructor (E.E.) to make something like order out of chaos, and the final despairing ‘slam’ records that the effort proved to be in vain.”

8. (W.N.) Winifred Norbury lived at Sherridge, a country house, with her sister Florence. The music was “really suggested by an eighteenth-century house. The gracious personalities of the ladies are sedately shown”—especially Winifred’s characteristic laugh.

9. (Nimrod) Nimrod is the “mighty hunter” named in Genesis 10; August Jaeger (“Jaeger” is German for “hunter”) was Elgar’s greatest and dearest friend. That is apparent from this extraordinary music, which is about the strength of ties and the depth of human feelings. These forty-three bars of music have come to mean a great deal to many people; they are, for that reason, often played in memoriam, when common words fail and virtually all other music falls short. The variation records “a long

summer evening talk, when my friend discoursed eloquently on the slow movements of Beethoven.” The music hints at the slow movement of the Pathétique Sonata, though it reaches the more rarefied heights of Beethoven’s last works. Dorabella remembered that Jaeger also spoke of the hardships Beethoven endured, and he urged Elgar not to give up. Elgar later wrote to him: “I have omitted your outside manner and have only seen the good lovable honest SOUL in the middle of you. The music’s not good enough: nevertheless it was an attempt of your E.E.” Jaeger died young, in 1909. Twenty years later

Elgar wrote: “His place has been occupied but never filled.”

10. (Dorabella) Dora Penny, later Mrs. Richard Powell, and to the Elgars, always Dorabella, from Mozart’s Così fan tutte. Her variation, entitled Intermezzo, is shaded throughout by “a dancelike lightness,” and delicately suggests the stammer with which she spoke in her youth.

11. (G.R.S.) Dr. George R. Sinclair was the organist of Hereford Cathedral, though it’s his beloved bulldog Dan who carries the music, first falling down a steep bank into the River Wye, then paddling upstream to a safe landing. Anticipating the skeptics, Elgar writes “Dan” in bar five of the manuscript, where Dr. Sinclair’s dog barks reassuringly (low strings and winds, fortissimo).

12. (B.G.N.) Basil G. Nevinson was a fine cellist who regularly joined Elgar and Hew David Steuart-Powell (variation 2) in chamber music. The soaring cello melody is “a tribute to a very dear friend whose scientific and artistic attainments, and the whole-hearted way they were put at the disposal of his friends, particularly endeared him to the writer.”

13. (***) The only enigma among the portraits: just asterisks in place of initials, and “Romanza” at the top of the page. The clarinet quoting from Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage midway through points to Lady

this page. top, left to right: Isabel Fitton, Variation 6; Arthur Troyte Griffith, Variation 7 | bottom, left to right: Winifred Norbury, Variation 8; August Jaeger, Variation 9 | opposite page, left to right: Dora Penny, Variation 10; Dr. George R. Sinclair and his dog Dan, Variation 11; Basil G. Nevinson, Variation 12; Lady Mary Lygon, Variation 13

Mary Lygon, who supposedly was crossing the sea to Australia as Elgar wrote this music (she wasn’t). “The drums suggest the distant throb of a liner,” Elgar writes. Although Elgar eventually confirmed the attribution, it has never entirely satisfied a suspicious public. Dorabella claimed that in the composer’s mind, the asterisks stood for “My sweet Mary.”

14. (E.D.U.) Edu was Alice’s nickname for her husband. This is his self-portrait, written “at a time when friends were dubious and generally discouraging as to the composer’s musical future.” Alice and Jaeger, two who never lost their faith in him, make brief appearances. The music is forceful, even bold. It’s delivered with an unusual strength

known best to late bloomers, the defiance of an outsider intent on finding an audience, and the confidence of a man who has always wished to be more than another variation on a theme.

A parting word about the title. The work wasn’t at first called Enigma. Elgar used the word for the first time in a letter to Jaeger written at the end of May 1899, three months after the score was finished. Enigma is written on the title page of the autograph manuscript, but it’s written in pencil and not by Elgar. When the Chicago Symphony introduced this music to the United States in 1902, the program page listed it only as “Variations, op. 36.”

—Phillip Huscher

MARGARET ALLISON BONDS

Born March 3, 1913; Chicago, Illinois

Died April 26, 1972; Los Angeles, California

Montgomery Variations

COMPOSED

1963–64

FIRST PERFORMANCE

December 6, 2018, by the University of Connecticut Symphony Orchestra, Paul McShee conducting

INSTRUMENTATION

three flutes with piccolo and alto flute, two oboes with english horn, three clarinets, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, strings

APPROXIMATE PERFORMANCE TIME

22 minutes

The remarkable Margaret Bonds, born in Chicago in 1913, was the daughter of physician Dr. Monroe Alpheus Majors and organist and music teacher Estelle C. Bonds. (When she was divorced four years later, Estelle reclaimed her maiden name, and Margaret kept it for the rest of her life.) Margaret was immersed in music from an early age not just by her mother but also by the household’s many artistic visitors, including Florence Price, whose Symphony in E minor became the first

large-scale orchestral work by a Black female composer to be performed by a major American orchestra when Frederick Stock led its premiere with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on June 15, 1933, at the Auditorium Theatre, presented in conjunction with the Century of Progress International Exposition (or World’s Fair).

Bonds studied composition with Price and with William Dawson while still in high school, and subsequently won a scholarship to Northwestern University, where she earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees by the age of twenty-one. She won the Wanamaker Foundation Prize for her song “Sea Ghost” while still an undergraduate and became the first Black woman to appear as soloist with the Chicago Symphony when she performed John Alden Carpenter’s jazzy Concertino on the same program as the premiere of Price’s symphony in 1933.

Bonds concertized and founded the Allied Arts Academy in Chicago before moving in 1939 to New York, where she studied piano and composition at Juilliard (and privately with Roy Harris), served as music director of the Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Harlem and for several theaters, worked as a music

above: Margaret Bonds, ca. 1956

editor, organized a chamber society to foster the work of Black musicians and composers, and performed. She also composed prolifically—works for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensembles, piano, and theater, as well as art and popular songs and arrangements of spirituals (some of which were commissioned and recorded by Leontyne Price)—in a style that enriched the classical genres with the influences of jazz, blues, spirituals, and her own social awareness.

In 1967 Bonds moved to Los Angeles to work at the Inner City Institute and Cultural Center. A month after she died unexpectedly, on April 26, 1972, Zubin Mehta conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic in her last major composition, Credo for soloists, chorus, and orchestra set to a text by W.E.B. DuBois, whose movements are titled: I believe in God . . . in the Negro race . . . in pride of race . . . in the devil and his angels . . . in the prince of peace . . . in liberty . . . in patience. Margaret Bonds’s work was recognized with awards from the National Association of Negro Musicians; National Council of Negro Women; Northwestern University Alumni Association; and American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers.

Margaret Bonds’s Montgomery Variations, considered by many to be her masterpiece, was composed in the wake of the 1963 firebombing of Birmingham, Alabama’s 16th Street Baptist Church, a center for Black civil rights organizing and a target

for white nationalists, in which four young girls at Sunday school were killed and dozens of parishioners injured. In the preface to the first publication of the score of the Montgomery Variations, in 2020, editor John Michael Cooper, professor of music at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, wrote that the work’s vision went far beyond that one horrific event to encompass “the Montgomery bus boycott and other racial rights actions against Jim Crow segregation, as well as the backlash against them.”

Bonds dedicated the score to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who delivered a forceful eulogy five days after the bombing that called it “one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.” There was a performance of the Variations in 1967, probably in Los Angeles, conducted by Albert McNeil, though details have not been discovered; it would have been the only time Bonds heard her piece. The “official” premiere was given by the University of Connecticut Symphony Orchestra on December 6, 2018, conducted by Paul McShee.

—Richard E. Rodda

Margaret Bonds on Montgomery Variations

The Montgomery Variations is a group of freestyle variations based on the Negro Spiritual theme I Want Jesus to Walk with Me. The treatment suggests the manner in which Bach constructed his partitas—a

bold statement of the theme, followed by variations of the theme in the same key—major and minor.

The words are as follows:

I want Jesus to walk with me.

All along my pilgrim journey, Lord, I want Jesus to walk with me.

In my trials, Lord, walk with me.

When my heart is almost breaking, Lord, I want Jesus to walk with me.

When I’m in trouble, Lord, walk with me.

When my head is bowed in sorrow, Lord, I want Jesus to walk with me.

Because of the personal meanings of the Negro spiritual themes, over-development of the melodies is avoided.

Decision. Under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., and SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference], Negroes in Montgomery decided to boycott the bus company and to fight for their rights as citizens.

Prayer Meeting. True to custom, prayer meetings precede their action. Prayer meetings start quietly with humble petitions to God. During the course of the meeting, members seized with religious fervor shout and dance. Oblivious to their fellow worshippers, they exhibit their love of God and their Faith in Deliverance by gesticulation, clapping, and beating their feet.

March. The Spirit of the Nazarene marching with them, the Negroes of Montgomery walked to their work rather than be segregated on the buses. The entire world, symbolically with them, marches.

Dawn in Dixie. Dixie, the home of the Camellias known as “pink perfection,” magnolias, jasmine, and Spanish moss, awakened to the fact that something new was happening in the South.

One Sunday in the South. Children were in Sunday School learning about Jesus, the Prince of Peace. Southern “die-hards” planted a bomb and several children were killed.

Lament. The world was shaken by the cruelty of the Sunday School bombing. Negroes, as usual, leaned on their Jesus to carry them through this crisis of grief and humiliation.

Benediction. A benign God, Father, and Mother to all people, pours forth Love to His children—the good and the bad alike.

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Richard E. Rodda, a former faculty member at Case Western University and the Cleveland Institute of Music, provides program notes for many American orchestras, concert series, and festivals.

PROFILES

Gateways Festival Orchestra

Members of the Gateways Festival Orchestra, all of African descent, come from a variety of professional backgrounds: top symphony orchestras, faculty from renowned music schools and conservatories, and freelance artists. They hail from the United States, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia, South Africa, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Colombia, and the Caribbean. The orchestra is a signature element of the concerts and programs that define the Gateways Music Festival each year. Michael Morgan served as music director and conductor from its inception in 1993 until his untimely passing in 2021. For its 2022 Carnegie

Hall debut, renowned Hollywood-based conductor Anthony Parnther led the orchestra for the first time, including the world premiere of Jon Batiste’s I Can to a sold-out audience. Panther continues to lead the orchestra in 2023–24 and 2024–25 with performances in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall and New York’s Carnegie Hall. Repertoire covers major works from the classical, romantic, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, emphasizing large-scale works by composers of African descent, including Michael Abels; Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges; James V. Cockerham; Samuel ColeridgeTaylor; William Levi Dawson; Adolphus Hailstork; Florence Price; ColeridgeTaylor Perkinson; Carlos Simon; George Walker; and Olly Wilson. Renowned musicians have performed with the orchestra, including pianists Paul Badura-Skoda, Stewart Goodyear, Awadagin Pratt, and Terrence Wilson; clarinetist Anthony McGill; horn players Jerome Ashby and Robert Lee Watt; violinists Brendon Elliott, Kelly HallTompkins, and Tai Murray; cellists Donald White and Owen Young; harpist Ann Hobson Pilot; and singers Denyce Graves, George Shirley, and William Warfield, among others.

PHOTO BY CHRIS LEE

Anthony Parnther Conductor

Anthony Parnther is the music director of the San Bernardino Symphony Orchestra and most recently led the Gateways Festival Orchestra in its sold-out Carnegie Hall debut, a performance that included Jon Batiste’s world premiere of I Can. Parnther has conducted artists of many genres—from Joshua Bell, Jessye Norman, and Frederica von Stade to Imagine Dragons, Wu-Tang Clan, John Legend, Metro Boomin, and Rihanna. Engagements include the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, LA Opera, National Symphony, and other orchestras in other American cities—including Baltimore, Cincinnati, Atlanta, San Francisco, Detroit, Buffalo, and Rochester—as well as in Canada, Australia, and Europe, including the Chineke! at the 2023 BBC Proms in London. Amplifying underrepresented voices, and recognized by LA’s KCET/

TV as a “Local Hero,” he has reconstructed and performed orchestral works by Margaret Bonds, Duke Ellington, Zenobia Powell Perry, Florence Price, William Grant Still, and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor; led LA Opera’s world premiere of Tamar-kali Brown’s oratorio We Hold These Truths and Long Beach Opera’s revival of Anthony Davis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Central Park Five in addition to premiering and recording works by Kris Bowers, Chanda Dancy, Adolphus Hailstork, Marian Harrison, Phillip Herbert, Daniel Kidane, Gary Powell Nash, James Newton, George Walker, Errollyn Wallen, James Wilson, and John Wineglass. Parnther has also helmed recordings for feature films and television, including Avatar: The Way of Water, Oppenheimer, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Encanto, Star Wars: The Mandalorian, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Nope, Creed III, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Diaries of a Wimpy Kid: Roderick Rules, Ice Age: Adventures of Buck Wild, Tenet, American Dad, Turning Red, PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie, and League of Legends.

PHOTO BY DARIO ACOSTA

Take 6

Take 6—comprising Claude McKnight, Mark Kibble, Joel Kibble, Dave Thomas, Alvin Chea, and Khristian Dentley—is the quintessential a cappella group. With ten Grammy and Dove awards, respectively, a Soul Train Award, and membership in the Gospel Music Hall of Fame, this musical phenomenon is six virtuosic voices united in harmony against a backdrop of syncopated rhythms, innovative arrangements, and funky grooves that bubble into an intoxicating brew of gospel, jazz, R&B, and pop.

With the release of a new single in the spring and a new project, Rhapsody, in the fall, in addition to being honored by Yamaha in January, Take 6 started the year with the promise of great things. The year also brings another recording and a new show by the group as it takes on songs first associated with jazz that

transcended the genre: “Rhapsody in Blue,” “Mood Indigo,” “Giant Steps,” “Blue Skies,” and more.

On CBS’s Homeward Bound: A Grammy Salute to the Songs of Paul Simon, Take 6 thrilled with a rendition of “Homeless!” A few months later, the group did it again with friend Michael McDonald and “Don’t Worry Baby” on A Grammy Salute to The Beach Boys.

In November 2023 the group announced a partnership with St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital’s Music Gives program to raise funds to fight childhood cancer and more.

With its most recent recording, Iconic, Take 6 emerged on seven Billboard charts simultaneously, had a chart-topping song on SiriusXM, and have seen their music played all over the world. In April 2022, the group took to Capitol Hill for Grammys on The Hill to advocate for musicians’ rights and work.

Take 6 has come far since its days at Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama, where the group, named the Gentleman’s Estate Quartet, was formed by McKnight in 1980 and renamed Alliance, and then Take 6, after signing with Reprise Records in 1987 and discovering another group with the same name. Its self-titled debut CD was released in 1988 and won over both jazz and pop critics alike.

PHOTO BY JOHN ABBOTT

2024 GATEWAYS MUSIC FESTIVAL | MUSICIANS ROSTER

Anthony Parnther Conductor

Donald Lee III Assistant Conductor

Take 6 Guest Artist

VIOLINS I

Melissa White Concertmaster

Cleveland Chandler

Daniel Constant

Epongue Ekille

Mellesanah Edwards

Mariana Green-Hill

Wynton Grant

Alexandria Hill

Raniel Joubert

Sylvia de La Cerna

Emilia Mettenbrink

Phyllis Sanders Griffin

Chelsea Sharpe

Edith Yokley

VIOLINS II

Meredith Riley Principal

Lucinda Ali-Landing

Charlene Bishop

David Burnett

Mary Corbett

Caitlin Edwards

Amyr Joyner

James Keene

Booker Rowe

Edward Sanford

Melanie Sarapa

Roslyn Story

Lionel Thomas

Dana Wilson

VIOLAS

Amadi Azikiwe Principal

Jennifer Arnold

Wilfred Farquharson

Andrew Francois

Linda Green

Caroline Jones

Aundrey Mitchell

Michelle Pellay-Walker

Seth Pae

Derek Reeves

George Taylor

Dorthy White-Okpebholo

CELLOS

Britton Riley Principal

Ifetayo Ali-Landing

Cremaine Booker

Timothy Holley

Thapelo Masita

Ryan Murphy

Edward Moore

Derek Menchan

Esther Mellon

Lindsey Sharpe

Joy Payton Stevens

Cole Randolph

DOUBLE BASSES

Kevin Mauldin Principal

Marco Alexander

Kebra-Seyoun Charles

Christian Dillingham

Tiffany Freeman

Michael Martin

Anthony Morris

Joy Rowland

FLUTES

Judith Dines Principal

Dennis Carter

Patricia Reeves

OBOES

Hassan Anderson Principal

Geoffrey Johnson

Lani Kelly

CLARINETS

Shaquille Southwell Principal

Robert Davis

Olivia Hamilton

BASSOONS

Maya Stone Principal

Sandra Bailey

Shawn Jones

FRENCH HORNS

Amanda Collins Principal

Adedeji Ogunfolu

Kyra Sims

Shanyse Strickland

Larry Williams

TRUMPETS

Herbert Smith Principal

Leonard Foy

Courtney Jones

TROMBONES

Kenneth Tompkins Principal

Isrea Butler

Burt Mason

Martin McCain (Bass)

TUBA

Richard White Principal

TIMPANI

Alana Wiesing Principal

PERCUSSION

Joshua Jones Principal

Raynor Carroll

Terry McKinney

HARP

Angelica Hairston Principal

PIANO

Damien Sneed Principal

Scan here to see the Gateways Music Festival Spring 2024 program guide. Visit gatewaysmusicfestival.org for more information about our artists and programs.