Musician Michael Mwenso leads virtual Green Music Center conversation about Black music

This year, the Black Lives Matter movement has led people of all backgrounds to seek better understanding about Black life in the U.S.

Michael Mwenso’s Black Music Series, offered virtually by Sonoma State’s Green Music Center, aims to aid that understanding by blending music and conversation for a short course in provocative topics from assimilation to education to ancestry. The three-part online series began last month and continues Oct. 22 and Nov. 19. Tickets are $10 per event.

Hosted by Mwenso, a musician rooted in jazz and leader of Mwenso and the Shakes, each program examines the experience of Black Americans to find “beauty and hope in a world that continues to strive for racial justice,” said Green Music Center Executive Director Jacob Yarrow.

For the upcoming event this month, Mwenso will interview Detroit-born jazz vocalist and pianist Johnny O’Neal about code switching, the practice of acting and speaking like those around you to fit in.

O’Neal, who played with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, portrayed virtuoso pianist Art Tatum in “Ray,” the Ray Charles biopic.

“For Black people, code switching is the essence of their lives,” said Mwenso, who came to the Green Music Center last November in a show celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance.

“You have to code switch to navigate and maneuver in the world,” he said. “Every spirit does that, but the Black spirit has had to do that on a very high level to survive.”

November’s topic is ancestry and uncovering the value of bringing the legacies of your ancestors into your daily life, Mwenso said.

On Nov. 19, Mwenso will speak with Lincoln Center photographer Frank Stewart about ancestors and how he created images of legends including Bobby Blue Bland, Count Basie and Muddy Waters.

“The reason why we are so lost is we have lost touch with the beauty of what our ancestors created, whether it’s your own family ancestors or your artistic ancestors,” he said.

It’s important for people of all backgrounds to become more informed about the heroes of our shared history, he added.

“Why are we lost? Because we don’t know what Marcus Garvey did. We don’t know who Harriet Tubman was,” he said.

Early jazz influences

Mwenso was born in Sierra Leone and moved with his mother to England when he was 10. After his mother’s husband died in a car crash about 18 months later, she and Michael were deported and settled in Nigeria.

An aspiring self-taught musician in his early teens, he discovered Ray Charles and B.B. King. “Music became my companion,” Mwenso said.

He practiced diligently and became a talented trombonist, making his way back to England in his mid-teens and performing there in reggae bands.

While still a teenager, Mwenso landed an audition with James Brown and played in his band for several years, he said. Later he connected with Wynton Marsalis. That led Mwenso to “put the trombone down” and become a singer.

His band, Mwenso and the Shakes, plays a wide variety of styles. It’s rooted in jazz and led by improvisation into funky soulful territory that few musicians visit.

For years, Mwenso’s home base was Ronnie Scott’s, a London jazz club where his band found an ardent following.

About a decade ago, Marsalis invited him to join the Jazz at Lincoln Center organization as a performer and curator.

That’s where Mwenso met New York jazz singer Charenee Wade, whom he interviewed to open the Green Music Center series last month. They spoke about the value of a musical education and how that set the course for Wade’s career.

Wade attended New York’s LaGuardia High School, which focuses on performing arts and was the model for the school in the film “Fame.”

“They cared about us. They nurtured us,” Wade said of LaGuardia’s music teachers. Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1980s, she was an “odd duckling” because she fell for jazz, she said.

“I was the only person auditioning for the jazz band,” she told Mwenso. “Everyone else was into gospel or R&B.”

Wade cited Betty Carter as a role model and said the jazz singer showed her that she could be a bandleader, arranger and composer.

“I could create an energy in my band where I am inside of the band, not out front and beyond the band,” she said. Her 2015 album, “Offering” interprets the music of Gil Scott-Heron, eschewing his best-known song, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” for quieter, more intimate pieces.

“One of the greatest things that Gil Scott-Heron was able to do was to tell the truth, the raw honest truth, about what the reality was for African American people in this country during a time when it was dangerous to do so,” Wade said in last month’s program. “There is something courageous about artists who are willing to put themselves on the line in order to empower, to uplift, to elevate, to bring freedom, spiritual freedom, to people, to a community.”

Michael Mwenso’s online conversation “The Code Switch” with Johnny O’Neal is at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 22. Mwenso will speak about ancestry at 7 p.m. on Nov. 19. To learn more and purchase tickets ($10) for the events, visit gmc.sonoma.edu.