Alicia Hall Moran & Jason Moran: Black Wall Street in ABQ

presented in partnership w. Opera Southwest & the African American Performing Arts Center

A staged concert created by noted mezzo soprano Alicia Hall Moran, in collaboration with her husband, jazz pianist Jason Moran, Black Wall Street is a personal-historical take on the Tulsa race riot of 1921 which depicts a history of Black American finance in New York City and beyond. The story unearths tangled roots of family, finance, legacy, violence, destruction, greed, and rebirth in a musical landscape that spans the genres (opera, art, and theater) of Ms. Moran's “transcendent” voice and “reconsiders the tragedy of the Tulsa Race Riot with in-depth history, a new gaze and a new soundtrack.” Known for her passion and flair, Hall Moran has been heralded for both her voice and her bold programmatic choices, “combining an intellectual inquisitiveness with her exquisite music-making.” Black Wall Street premiered in New York City’s historic Federal Hall, after development at the cutting-edge arts center, National Sawdust, and in concert at the Schomburg Center for Research In Black Culture/New York Public Library. With her collaborator and husband, Jason Moran (MacArthur Fellow and Artistic Director for Jazz at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts who was recently called one of the “most provocative thinkers in current jazz” by Rolling Stone magazine), and historian and collector Gene Alexander Peters (Co-Director, Slave Relic Museum, Waterboro, SC), she has created a performance piece that is a wide-ranging, many-layered exploration of the past, present, and future of money and blackness and which draws on sources like Black Enterprise Magazine from the 1980s, studies of 18th-century New York, and documents from the Tulsa Race Riot in 1921. In addition to Alicia Hall Moran and Jason Moran, featured tonight will be Brandon Ross, guitar; Thomas Flippin, guitar; and Gene Alexander Peters, narrator & archivist.