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About
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 between 1970s Los Angeles and the pre-Civil War South, where she meets her ancestors. Each visit to the past becomes progressively longer, and her relationships with her family and their enslavers become more complicated. Dana tries to help her people in antebellum slavery while ensuring her safe return to her own time. The musical score is rooted in the historical traditions of opera and also represents 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. Like Copland, he has married the musical traditions 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 trombonist J. J. Johnson’s band. Soon afterward, trumpet legend Freddie Hubbard recognized the 21-year-old’s talents and invited him to join his ensemble. Childs launched his recording career as a jazz solo artist in 1988. He has received seventeen Grammy nominations and six awards, numerous commissions, and performed internationally.
Commissioned by Apollo New Works In Process Series