Billy Childs:Kindred
Pricing: $20 Student, $29 Advance, $39 Week of, $59 Preferred
Grammy Award-winning composer, jazz pianist, arranger and conductor Billy Childs, with writer and librettist Sarah LaBrie, adapts Octavia Butler’s best-selling novel Kindred into an opera.
In Kindred, Dana time-travels back and forth between 1970s Los Angeles and the pre-Civil War south, where she meets her ancestors. Each visit to the past from the “present” time becomes progressively longer, and her relationships with her family and their enslavers become more complicated. During these visits Dana tries to help her people in antebellum slavery, while still ensuring her safe return to her own time. The musical score is rooted in the historical traditions of opera, while at the same time representative of Black American music.
About the Artist:
Billy Childs has emerged as one of the foremost American composers of his era, perhaps the most distinctly American composer since Aaron Copland — for like Copland, he has successfully married the musical products of his heritage with the Western neoclassical traditions of the twentieth century in a powerful symbiosis of style, range, and dynamism.
Childs’ jazz career began in 1977 when he joined the band of trombonist J.J. Johnson. Soon thereafter trumpet legend Freddie Hubbard recognized the 21-year-old’s prodigious talents, and invited Childs to join his star-studded ensemble. Childs later launched his recording career as a jazz solo artist in 1988. He has garnered seventeen Grammy nominations and six awards, received numerous commissions, and performed internationally.
Commissioned by Apollo New Works In Process Series