ADDITIONAL PERFORMANCE
February 25, 7:30PM
Live/Reserved Seating
Priority Seating: $35
General Seating: $25
Part IV: MUSIC
Max Roach’s We Insist! Freedom Now Suite Reimagined feat. Michela Marino Lerman
As part IV of the Harlem Stage series Black Arts Movement: Examined, Harlem Stage presents tap dancer, Michela Marino Lerman’s Love Movement, who will perform and re-imagine Max Roach’s groundbreaking 1960 album, We Insist! Freedom Now Suite.
In 1959, acclaimed jazz musician, Max Roach, embarked upon a collaboration with singer and poet, Oscar Brown, Jr., on a suite of songs commissioned by the youth movement of the NAACP to commemorate the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. What resulted, We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, marked a decisive shift challenging jazz music conventions, as its sentiments conveyed a growing impatience with the lagging pace of the American civil rights movement, and demanded a turn toward global anti-colonialism. Released on Candid Records in 1960, featuring Roach, and singer Abbey Lincoln, and a host of noted musicians, the music quickly became a global phenomenon.
Winner of the 2019 Hoofer Award, Michela Marino Lerman is a globally sought after tap dance artist, performer, choreographer, bandleader, educator, and all-around creative spirit. The Huffington Post has called her a “hurricane of rhythm” and The New York Times has called her a “prodigy” and has described her dancing as “flashes of brilliance.” Quincy Jones has said she is an “absolute tap dancing star who knows her roots.” She was proudly mentored by some of the masters of tap dance including Gregory Hines, Buster Brown, Leroy Myers, Peg Leg Bates, Marion Coles, and Mable Lee. Love Movement, Marino Lerman’s ensemble, is a hybrid of the highest levels of musicianship and hoofing. At Harlem Stage, Marino Lerman pays tribute to this groundbreaking album, selected in 2022 by the Library of Congress as being“culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Artists:
Michela Marino Lerman, Tap
Orlando Hernández. Tap
Roxanne King, Tap
Russell Hall, Bass/Music Director
Charenee Wade, Vocals
Ebban Dorsey, Saxophone
Jeff “Tain” Watts, Drums
Miki Yamanaka, Piano
Preceding the Performance
Interdisciplinary poet and playwright, Ishmael Reed, joins Harlem Stage Associate Artistic Director and Curator in Residence, Carl Hancock Rux, to discuss Max Roach’s We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, ahead of the electrifying performance. Reed, a member of the Umbra Writers Workshop in the early 1960s, some of whose members went on to establish the Black Arts Movement, has written about the work
Black Arts Movement: Examined is supported by the Mellon Foundation.
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Photo by Kwame Brathwaite
Photo by Martina DaSilva
Ishmael Reed (photo by Jason Henry)