Corvid Ensemble: Say It Loud! Songs of Protest & Uprising (broadcast on-demand until 12/26/2020)
$11.50 suggested donation
Sergio Ortega — ¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido! ("The People United Will Never be Defeated")
J. Rosamond Johnson — Lift Every Voice and Sing
Traditional — Oh Freedom!
Stephen Bray / Brenda Russell / Allee Willis — "I'm Here" from The Color Purple
Stephen Flaherty — "Back to Before" from Ragtime
Traditional — This Little Light of Mine
Windafire — Seeing
Jesse Hutchinson Jr. — Get Off the Track!
Windafire — Given the Circumstances
Marjorie Bunday, voice
Christine Friday, voice
Leslie Nero, treble viol
Adam Parnell, voice
Lark Powers, piano
Korland Simmons, voice
Akal Solomon, voice
Windafire, voice, keyboards, synthesizer
Francis Scott Key – The Star Spangled Banner (sung to the lyrics of Lift Every Voice and Sing)
Brenda Russell, Stephen Bray, & Allee Willis – "I'm Here" from The Color Purple
Jesse Hutchinson, Jr. – Get Off the Track!
Traditional – Oh, Freedom!
Christina Springer (music by Windafire) – Given the Circumstances, a short film
Traditional – This Little Light of Mine
Stephen Flaherty – "Back to Before" from Ragtime
Windafire – Seeing
Sergio Ortega – ¡El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido! ("The People United Will Never be Defeated")
J. Rosamond Johnson – Lift Every Voice and Sing
Photography & discussion throughout the video by Eric Bass.
“Say It Loud! Songs of Protest and Uprising” is a video donate-per-view concert project by the Corvid Ensemble which consists of songs, photography, and a short film incorporating poetry and music. We are responding to current events of racial injustice and police brutality in the United States using the power of music and art, and will explore some historical context around the songs. We hope that the video will encourage people to exercise their First Amendment rights through peaceable assemblies, petitioning the government, and speaking out against injustices. Each artist has submitted a video for the compilation.
About the Corvid Ensemble: Like the crows of Seattle, we’re smart, we do what we want, and we like shiny things! The Corvid Ensemble of Seattle, Washington, USA was founded in 2019 by vocalist Marjorie Bunday with the intent of providing professional performance opportunities for Seattle musicians (and other artists) to present their shiny things. We’ve all worked so hard for other people and their visions, while keeping our dream pieces of music close to our hearts. Things we’ve always wanted to perform but never got asked to, or performed once and yearn to get closer, or couldn’t afford to put the band together, or just couldn’t find the time in our busy musical lives. Marjorie loves to see the spark when someone is performing something they truly love and connect with and wants to help to facilitate that.
Marjorie, who serves as both producer and performer, likes to build concert programs around themes, but she doesn’t like boxes. A professional classical singer for 30 years, her lifetime musical creative endeavors have also included folk and rock music. The Corvid Ensemble strives to present concerts that have a thematic thread but straddle musical genres and historical eras, in a cohesive manner that always keeps the story line going. A concert might have a mix of medieval, Broadway, and J. S. Bach, for example, as long as the story is unbroken.
The video will be available for online viewing from September 26 through December 26, 2020, and a link to the video will be provided for a donation of any amount. To keep this accessible to all, those whose circumstances do not allow them to donate will be sent a viewing link upon request. The total donations will be split evenly among the artists.