Wednesday, June 12, 2019

African American Composer Initiative News



African American Composer Initiative

We hope your summer is off to a lovely start! We are pleased to share good news with you. We have a new Spirituals CD available on Amazon, video from our 2019 concert is now available on YouTube, and the 2020 concert dates are set. Please read further for details.

Our website has been updated to include links to our 2019 Tenth Anniversary concert – in its entirety
with narration– and individually indexed pieces. Information about how to obtain scores is
given on the Composers tab, organized alphabetically by composer, with dropdown menus for each
composition. We are eager to encourage others to perform this music and to share these
online recordings with family, friends, and students.

In mid-April, our third CD on Cambria, The Angels Bowed Down, African American Spirituals, was
officially released and is now available on Amazon. For our San Francisco Bay Area audience, all three
AACI CD’s are in stock for purchase at “Letter Perfect” in downtown Palo Alto, 384 University Ave.

The new CD of spirituals features the exceptional artistry of soprano Yolanda Rhodes, recorded in live
performance by Mark Dalrymple at AACI concerts. Those of you who have been at these Eastside
concerts will understand why producer Jeannie Pool wanted to preserve and share the immediacy and
emotional depth of these live performances. The CD includes settings by eight outstanding composers:
Margaret Bonds, Charles Brown, Jacqueline Hairston, Betty Jackson King, Lena McLin, Undine Smith Moore, Zenobia Powell Perry, and Dolores White. Accompanists are pianists LaDoris Cordell, Jodi Gandolfi, and Deanne Tucker, violinist Susan C. Brown, and cellist Victoria Ehrlich.

Summertime is the season when we select music for the January concerts – library research,
correspondence, and reading sessions, always an exciting part of our work. We look forward to updating
you regularly about our 2020 plans. The dates are set: Saturday and Sunday, January 25 and 26, 2020.

More good news: every member of the 2019 graduating class of Eastside College Preparatory School will be attending a four-year college or university in the fall! As always, we will donate all our concert ticket sales to this outstanding school. To cover our production, commissioning, and guest artist expenses we will be grateful for your tax-deductible donations to AACI, made through our sponsoring organization, InterMusic SF.

With best wishes and appreciation for your partnership in our musical journey,
LaDoris Cordell, Jodi Gandolfi, Deanne Tucker, co-founders, AACI
For more information on the African American Composer Initiative, please visit:
www.aacinitiative.org.

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