CAMRA SSMF Performance: ​Immanuel Wilkins Blues Blood featuring Sonia Sanchez followed by conversation with Imani Perry

Join CAMRA for a Keynote Performance and Conversation: Immanuel Wilkins’ Blues Blood Jazz Ensemble featuring Sonia Sanchez followed by a conversation with Imani Perry

​let me be yo wil

derness let me be yo wind

blowing you all day.

- Sonia Sanchez, blues haiku 

This performance and conversation will be an offering in color, sound and transmuting the of violence state and carceral systems in ways that Black people have always embodied through relationship to community, self and spirit. The performance reflects on the idea of home places and witness, with Sonia Sanchez and Immanuel Wilkins sharing roots, inheritances and formational experiences in Philadelphia.

Immanuel Wilkins’ Blues Blood, is a meditative offering partially inspired by his childhood in the Philadelphia area. Co-produced by Meshell Ndegeocello, and featuring vocalists Ganavya, June McDoom, Yaw Agyeman and Cécile McLorin Salvant, it’s Wilkins’ it is both an album and a multimedia performance about the legacies of our ancestors and the bloodlines connecting us. 

The work navigates the spiritual and cultural landscape of Black America through long meditations, vamps, and multiple modalities. Based on the story of Daniel Hamm who was a member of the Harlem Six, also known as the Blood Brothers—a group of children falsely accused and tried for murder in 1965, Blues Blood explores blues as a symbol of how we endure in the long story of life on earth.

As Christina Sharpe has written in the liner notes for the project, “The body and its references and influences are central to Wilkins collaborations and his gathering, innovating, improvising, and extending. He is playing us into a future, bringing the past along but sounding it differently.” For Brent Hayes Edwards, “The profound achievement of Blues Blood is like a translation of the theorist Stuart Hall’s influential proposition that “race is the modality in which class is lived.” Wilkins has given us a suite that says the same thing in a different tongue. Blue is the modality in which black is lived.”

The performance is followed by a conversation with the writer and professor Imani Perry, author of the recently published and critically acclaimed Black in Blues.  
 
This event is all ages, and free and open to the public. 

Please note that parking is limited around the museum, but the museum is near the SEPTA Penn Medicine Station, several bus routes, and a short walk from 30th Street Station and University City Trolley Stops.

This event is part of CAMRA at the University of Pennsylvania's annual Screening Scholarship Media Festival (SSMF): Sound & Color.