Celebrating the inseparable link between the jazz and classical idioms, the Detroit-based Akropolis Reed Quintet presents jazz-influenced music with Harlem roots. Even from the other side of the world, classical composers have long sought to make the co-evolution of classical music and American jazz clear to their audiences, including this concert’s opening work by Dmitri Shostakovich. Infusing each arrangement with their award-winning, mini-big band style dynamism, Akropolis transforms Gershwin’s massive An American in Paris into an intimate, café-style romp and Leonard Bernstein’s Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs into a Dixieland style celebration. Two Harlem natives, Jeff Scott and Arthur Cunningham, bring elements of gospel, blues, and jump jazz to the classical stage, letting loose Akropolis’ award-winning, tour-de-force spirit.

Akropolis believes that music reaches its height when it is driven by spontaneity and organically developed relationships with community members. Supported by consecutive grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Akropolis has collected projects from its Together We Sound festival in Detroit into one concert program, featuring percussion and spoken word collaborators from the community in which the program is performed. Optional video by filmmaker XUAN is available to accompany Annika Socolofsky’s so much more, a touching composition including interviews with 7 small business owners from Detroit, Kansas, Colorado, and North Carolina. Opening the concert, Homage to Paradise Valley tours Detroit’s now-lost Black Bottom and Paradise Valley neighborhoods accompanied by poetry by Detroit author Marsha Music, while Sprocket, originally composed for Akropolis and a rideable percussion bicycle designed and built by Detroit metal artist, Juan Martinez, celebrates Detroit’s long standing “slow ride” cycling culture.

About his famous Le Tombeau de Couperin and why the composer wrote uplifting music to memorialize his friends lost during the first World War, Ravel stated, “the dead are sad enough, in their eternal silence.” Inspired by Ravel’s courage, and facing a modern world changing so quickly, Akropolis provides an opportunity to remember, tribute, and memorialize things we have lost, and acknowledge loss for its pain and beauty. Accompanying an arrangement of Le Tombeau by Raaf Hekkema of the Dutch reed Quintet, Calefax, Akropolis tributes the funk, gospel, blues, struts, and church collections of Harlem through an equally upbeat series of vignettes by Harlem native, Arthur Cunningham, entitled, Harlem Suite. Akropolis commissions by composers Stacy Garrop of Chicago and Jeff Scott (also a Harlem native), which highlight their Billboard charting 4^th album, Ghost Light, bring forth the dead for consideration in two works which celebrate the ghosts and spirits of our past and our present—Rites for the Afterlife, a 4-movement work walking the listener through the harrowing journey of the soul in Egypian afterlife, and Homage to Paradise Valley, honoring Detroit’s lost Black neighborhoods of the early 1900s.

Making Akropolis the first reed quintet to ever grace the Classical Billboard Charts, Ghost Light, their fourth full-length album, was born out of Akropolis’ mission to create new music that connects their audience to one another and the world we share. An “exceptional outfit audibly driven by real excitement and a sense of adventure,” (The Wire) the album features a diverse collection of world premiere works which shine a light on the ghosts all around us and grapples with the issues of mortality and our personal and collective history. The concert program includes selections of each work, including 2018 Pulitzer Prize finalist, Michael Gilbertson, and 2019 Academy of Arts and Letters Award recipient, Stacy Garrop. A masterwork by Jeff Scott telling the history of 3 razed Black Detroit neighborhoods is accompanied by new poetry written by Detroit historian and author, Marsha Music.