RiverArts® presents season finale of new music series, Channels, featuring Steph Davis
APRIL 3, 2024 – HASTINGS-ON-HUDSON: RiverArts presents the third installment in their brand-new Channels series, featuring Steph Davis on Saturday, April 13.
Date – Saturday, April 13, 2024
Venue – Purpl; 52 Main Street, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY
Time – 8:00pm – 9:30pm
Tickets – $30; tickets can be purchase at: https://riverarts.org/event/channels-stephdavis/
Channels is a three-concert music series that defies boundaries and celebrates the river as a means of travel, exploration, and a source of new ideas. The mission of this concert series is to bring together artists and audiences in the spirit of connectivity and discovery. This series kicked off this past fall with the duo Sky Creature, and most recently featured Evan Chapman this February.
Steph Davis presents like flower petals…, a program for marimba that combines West African gyil music, African American spirituals, and Black classical music traditions. Davis shares a bit about the inspiration behind this program, like flower petals…, “Describing Black folks’ hair…bell hooks once said, ‘our hair feels like flower petals.’ She was discussing language and its power to liberate – its power to generate narratives around Black identity that communicates beauty within a society where minstrel images and stereotypes run rampant[…]. Feeling my own kinky afro coils, I smiled when I agreed with her…Internalizing this simple, powerful description helped to shift how I view myself.”
like flower petals… aims to shift how Euro-American societies view the marimba. Davis pays homage to the marimba’s rich ancient history rooted on the African continent, presenting repertoire for the instrument through the exploration in an Africanist/African-American lens. The program will include traditional spirituals as well as works by Kakraba Lobi, J. Rosamond Johnson, Florence Price, Errollyn Wallen, L. Viola Kinney, with arrangements and adaptations by Valerie Dee Naranjo and Davis themselves.
About the Artist:
Steph Davis is a marimbist, arranger, composer, Africana studies scholar, and cultural activist. Their work engages people, traditions, and technologies of the African diaspora as means for uncovering truthful historiographies, finding creative self-actualization, and reaching for collective liberation.
Hailed by the Washington Post as a “captivating” performer who brings “bright humanity and expressive depth” to contemporary music, Steph is an active marimba soloist and chamber musician, performing in venues across the United States — including Merkin Hall (NYC) and The Broward Center for the Performing Arts (Ft. Lauderdale, FL), among others. Their repertoire spans a wide variety of musical styles, including traditional Ghanaian gyil music, African American spirituals, and Western classical, romantic, 20th-century, and contemporary music primarily by Black composers. A versatile and passionate collaborator, they have performed chamber music with noted artists, including Grammy-nominated flutist Nathalie Joachim,
PaviElle French, Mazz Swift, Michi Wiancko, and Yasmin Williams, among others. Through their arrangements, commissions, and compositions, Steph has contributed over 20 works by Black composers to the marimba’s solo and chamber repertoire. They have premiered works by Avik Chari, Christa Duggan, Damien Geter, Alissa Voth, Pamela Z, and Bilin Zheng. Steph is a Marimba One Artist.
As a composer, Steph draws inspiration from Black expressive characteristics, free forms, and natural landscapes. Their music has been performed internationally in the United States, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, and Europe. They have been commissioned by New Works Project, Douglas Anderson School of the Arts, Modern Marimba, Spectrum Ensemble, Prism Percussion, Britton-René Collins, Michael Ptacin, and Cameron Denby.
