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American Voices concert
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U.S. Embassy Baghdad will sponsor a concert at the Al-Rashid Hotel at 2 p.m. Saturday, February 17. This, first of its kind concert, will include an American singer/dancer and pianist performing along with two U.S. military ensembles and celebrate African-American History Month.
The concert will feature spirituals, ragtime, jazz and selections from Broadway. Music by Scott Joplin, Eubie Blake, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, William Bolcom, Jerome Kern, Zez Confrey, Lieber and Stoller and other American composers will be presented. The concert will also include a multi-national choir and poet's circle around the theme of African American culture with a focus on poet James Weldon Johnson.
Featured performers will be vocalist, dancer, choreographer and director Michael Parks Masterson and pianist and American Voices Executive Director John Ferguson, working alongside the orchestra.
An additional post-concert segment of the project will highlight a series of workshops with a prominent dance group, the orchestra performing American music, including Copland, Bernstein and Gershwin and the folk dance ensemble learning Broadway and jazz dance styles.
This will be the first U.S. Embassy sponsored concert of its kind in Iraq since the beginning of the current conflict. Despite the concert’s location in the National Zone, the concert will aim to reach a broader Iraqi audience through television rebroadcast of the performance nationwide.
American Voices was founded in 1992 to further appreciation and understanding of American music and culture, especially in developing countries or those lacking opportunities for cultural exchange and dialogue with the United States.
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