Saturday, December 20
Town Hall Seattle, 7:30pm

Ellington called his Sacred Music, written in the latter, most liturgical stage of his life, the most important music he’d ever written. His recitative paraphrases the Holy text and is a performance that connects with the audience in a dialogue typical of African American community music.

This year, the Northwest Chamber Chorus, under Director Mark Kloepper, performs the Duke Ellington Sacred Concert alongside the impressive Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra, co-directed by Michael Brockman and Clarence Acox. Guest tap-dancer Alex Dugdale joins, as do guest vocalists Nichol Venee Eskridge, featured on SRJO’s Sacred Music of Duke Ellington CD, and Seattle’s gospel virtuoso, Dr. Stephen Newby.

Dr. Newby connects with Ellington’s sense of community in spaces both sacred and secular. He is the regular leader of the National Anthem before each Seattle Sounders game, where he involves the filled stadium in singing his musical arrangement and celebrating “something positive.”

“All come together in one accord,” Newby said of the mixed audience that mirrors modern Ellington tributes.

The spirit behind the culmination of Ellington’s last, liturgical phase-of-life work was one that extended optimistically to all humanity. “Every man prays in his own language,” Ellington says, “and there is no language that God does not understand.”

With his creative hands, Ellington theologized to the masses with prayer lines and musical fire-and-brimstone sermonettes. “Ellington understood God’s presence,” Newby comments. In response to this communal “offering to God,” Ellington’s audience found themselves with rhythmic toes and bobbing necks, habits still in present-day listeners consumed by the sacred repertoire.

Newby offers input concerning what to expect of his own artistic construal on five pieces in the program. He sees his opportunity as a vessel to re-enact Ellington’s music and he approaches his interpretations of Ellington’s vocal music from a place of reverence. Newby understands Ellington “as an African American brother…both in theologizing through scripture and composing.”

This concert will feature blues, jazz and gospel pieces drawn from Ellington’s three Sacred Concerts, from which Newby also hears the composite of “music of the negro-spiritual and Harlem Renaissance.” Regarding Ellington’s theologizing on the “In the Beginning God” recitative, specifically of the alluded eschatology of what will be in the end, Newby adds: “He was more familiar with the text than we think.”

Tickets are $14-$36 at www.brownpapertickets.com or 800-838-3006.

This Saturday night concert, which sold out the previous four years, brings this new local guest artist’s energy to an outstanding holiday performance of classic works by Duke Ellington.