Solange and Saint Heron Are Honoring Black Innovation at BAM

Solange and Saint Heron Are Honoring Black Innovation at BAM,Solange and Saint Heron’s BAM Eldorado Ballroom series, which kicks off in April, will bring together Kelela, KeiyaA, the Clark Sisters, and more.

Solange and Saint Heron Are Honoring Black Innovation at BAM

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Solange is a bridge builder, a nexus connecting creative mediums. Old traditions blend into new ones in her catalogue. Her 2016 studio album, A Seat at the Table, home to the yearning and ephemeral Grammy winner “Cranes in the Sky,” served limber soul music played by personnel with backgrounds in indie rock, hip-hop, and electronic music: The simmering “Mad” brought Lil Wayne, R&B trailblazer Raphael Saadiq, and Dirty Projectors front man Dave Longstreth together. 2019’s kaleidoscopic synth odyssey When I Get Home featured both Gucci Mane and Animal Collective’s Panda Bear. Performance pieces like “Witness!” and “Bridge-s” juxtaposed ballet, jazz, R&B, and the stark, imposing architecture of museums. Her craft is studious, and her art offers just as much subtle, careful historiography as plush, sticky melodies. You can dance to it, or you can pry apart the threads she’s weaving and trace them back to the wise progenitors of the arts she studied in her youth.

BAM Spring 2023

Eldorado Ballroom

Curated by Solange Knowles for Saint Heron

March 30: Kelela, KeiyaA, and Res
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
7:30 p.m.

March 31 and April 1: Type of Guest
Fishman Space, BAM Fisher, 7:30 p.m.
Featuring Autumn Knight, and an installation by Maren Hassinger

April 4: Unseen Nuyorican Pictures
BAM Rose Cinemas, 7:30 p.m.

April 5: Coeval Dance Films
BAM Rose Cinemas, 7:30 p.m.

April 7: Glory to Glory (A Revival For Devotional Art)
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, 7:30 p.m.
Featuring Twinkie Clark & The Clark Sisters; the piano and choral works of Mary Lou Williams performed by Artina McCain, and Malcolm J. Merriweather with Voices of Harlem; Angella Christie

April 8: The Cry of My People
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, 7:30 p.m.
Featuring Archie Shepp, Linda Sharrock & Claudia Rankine

September 22: On Dissonance: An Evening of Classical and Opera Works by Julia Perry and Patrice Rushen
BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, 7:30 p.m.
Featuring Davóne Tines

This year, Solange, the interdisciplinary studio and creative agency Saint Heron, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music will host Eldorado Ballroom. Named in honor of the venerable performance space in Houston, the music series will feature and honor Solange’s predecessors and peers across genres, platforms, and generations. The first night, March 30, unites R&B polymaths Res, KeiyaA, and Kelela in celebration of Res’s 2001 debut, How I Do, and Kelela’s watery, immersive Raven. (That same evening, Houston community group Project Row Houses will host the grand reopening of the real Eldorado Ballroom following a $9.7 million renovation effort.) In April, there’s “Glory to Glory (A Revival for Devotional Art),” a gospel night featuring the titanic talents of the Clark Sisters and the seminal choral and piano works of underappreciated pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams, and “The Cry of My People,” a free jazz show starring boundary-breaking saxophonist Archie Shepp, New York Times best-selling poet Claudia Rankine, and jazz vocal giant Linda Sharrock in her first Stateside gig since the ’70s. The program also includes “On Dissonance,” a celebration of the classical works of vocalist and jazz pianist Patrice Rushen and composer Julia Perry; a new installment of Standing on the Corner figurehead Gio Escobar’s film series “Unseen Nuyorican Pictures”; “Type of Guest,” an evening of installations and performance-art presentations from multidisciplinary artists Autumn Knight and Maren Hassinger; and “Coeval Dance Films,” an appreciation of the gifts of pioneering Black dancers including Matt Turney and Carmen de Lavallade.

I spoke to Solange over the phone this week about her inspirations for Eldorado Ballroom, her passion for shining a light on impactful Black women innovating in creative fields, and the experiences in her Texas upbringing that have prepared her for an undertaking like this.

Something that I appreciated about the visual component of When I Get Home was the lens, the way that it observed Black style and inner-city luxury as we do fine art. On the tour for A Seat at the Table, you set a sort of second line on a stage that resembled a museum. It feels like you’re communicating that our art should be viewed in venerable spaces the way pieces in the Met and the Louvre are. I’m curious about your mission as a curator and whether it differs from what you’re trying to do as an artist.
Well, I feel like the work that I’m trying to do right now with Saint Heron is really just an extension of the work that I’ve always done, which is basically preserving the stories of Black innovation and practitioners. Whether that’s through visual work or performance or even creating printed matter through books and zines, the idea is just to centralize and build a really strong archive that in 20 years or 30 years can be accessible by future generations to be a guiding light in the same way that so many of my blueprints guided me.

I approach my work as an artist and my reentering the curatorial space through Saint Heron as someone who wants to make historical moments and experiences. I’m trying to build an experience from top to bottom, to build a world, to build our own institutions and celebrate our own. That’s what Saint Heron is and what it really strives to do. I feel like this series gave me an opportunity to celebrate the true spiritual act of performance, which is something that I hold really sacred, to really just be able to create a powerful archive of these moments from these incredible artists and performers. It’s going to be really special.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music lineup is incredible, covering opera, jazz, R&B, electronic music, gospel, and so much more. What I see as a through-line is versatility of the Black voice. Talk about your hopes for Eldorado Ballroom and how studying the arts in Houston shaped your work and this undertaking.
Thank you. It means a lot that you dig it. The Black voice is a sacred vessel. Being able to have an opportunity to honor it through all of these different conventions is just a dream job. This is such fulfilling work. And I feel like bringing it back to Houston, bringing it back to my childhood. The Eldorado Ballroom was a historic music venue in Third Ward, and that’s where my love for performance really started. As a child growing up in a neighborhood so rich with Black history and Black artistic history, I was immersed in that. I got to live, eat, and breathe that through the ways that my parents really nurtured my interest for arts. So I feel like each night of the series is building off an offering that has informed my own practices, whether that’s through an R&B night or an artist like Autumn Knight, who’s from Houston, who’s challenging the lines between audience and artist through performance art. I love being able to celebrate my love for Black contemporary dance through that. The whole series is just about honoring voices that I think should be taking up more space in the conversation, specifically about Black women in music. I’ve been thinking about Mary Lou Williams and how she was this genius pianist and composer who mentored Miles Davis and Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, but she’s not mentioned in those conversations.

I was excited to see Linda Sharrock on the bill. As you were saying about Mary Lou Williams, I feel like there’s not enough scholarship and literature about her out there. She could do soul singing, and she could handle really experimental noise. I feel like your last album was something of an attempt to get free from singing straight through from verse to chorus and being straightforward about the feelings a song is expressing.
Yeah. I saw this video of Linda performing with Wolfgang Puschnig some years ago, and I was just stopped dead in my tracks. Like, I want to be like this woman. Whoever this is, she embodies the spirit of what it is that I want to embody. She’s just electric and majestic, and she’s just bad. She’s so poppin’. I feel like there’s a lot that I’ve yet to lean into with my voice just as an instrument, and she just makes me want to go off. There’s times that she reminds me a lot of Jeanne Lee in the experimentation that they’re able to create using their voice as an instrument. I love how she’s had different lives in her artistry throughout the decades. She makes me feel like I have time to express all these different facets of myself. She has such a unique trajectory in her career. That’s why Saint Heron exists. That’s our mission, to just create that kind of studying surrounding artists like her, because I feel like we should all be studying her musical trajectory. This is actually her first performance in New York since the ’70s. So we have to make it really special for her. To have her, Archie Shepp, and Claudia Rankine on the same lineup is a dream.

Kelela.Photo: Justin French

Me and Kels go way back. She was actually on the first Saint Heron compilation. That’ll be ten years ago this year. That moment in music was a really powerful shift in the R&B conversation. Kelela was a huge part of that. I feel honored that Saint Heron has gotten to be a place for her in her journey. I saw her Fallon performance. Her vocals were literal perfection, so to hear her perform this album live is going to be such an amazing moment.
KeiyaA is such a phenomenal producer. I appreciate her putting a spotlight on Black women as producers and what we really have all been capable of. I feel like she brings a lot of that technicality to her live show. All of these women have brought so much innovation to the genre, and it’s going to be real cool to create a timestamp of that through these performances.

I’m sure people will be fighting to get in that one. You’ve had a unique career journey from young R&B star to curator, composer, producer, all the many hats you wear. You haven’t done anything predictable in forever. Are you ever unsure of your path?
Definitely!

You hide it well.
I mean, I feel like I’ve been living my life very similarly to my childhood, which is from the ages of 5 to 15. I was a dancer. I studied ballet. I was writing songs for Destiny’s Child. I was a part of this theater in Houston in Third Ward called the Ensemble Theater. I was writing monologues and studying stage production. I feel like all of these mediums have been a part of me for so long that I literally can’t imagine life without them. The work I do now is sort of an extension of that yearning, I guess, to express parts of myself that I physically or spiritually can’t emote through the other. But there are doubts for sure. I think mainly about time. Have I devoted enough time to this one expression? Have I taken enough time to master this one thing? I feel like that’s why I take so much time between projects. I’m developing a tempo now. I also feel like there’s a guiding light, like something is always leading me to the next phase of what I seek to achieve. So doubts for sure, but I feel called, I guess, to do these things as an extension of my younger self. This is a dream job and one that I feel really honored and humbled by.

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