10 Freedom Summers Needs Your Support

Received an email today asking for support in funding Wadada Leo Smith's ongoing "10 Freedom Summers" project.  The 4-CD set, released last year by Cuneiform Records to great critical acclaim, is but the first part of Professor Smith's project.  Here's part of the message:

Trumpeter /composer/musical innovator Wadada Leo Smith is seeking $17,000 to complete and premiere a new work for his highly acclaimed civil rights opus "Ten Freedom Summers." The new work, entitled The March on Washington D.C.- August 28, 1963, will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. This will be the 22nd composition of "Ten Freedom Summers", which the trumpeter has written over the past 34 years and calls "one of my life's defining works."

The new work-composed for quintet, along with string quartet and harp-will be performed by the Golden Quartet, the Pacific Coral Reef Ensemble, the Flux String Quartet and video artist Jesse Gilbert. Through the USA Projects funding, Smith plans to premiere this new work at Roulette in Brooklyn, NY in May 2013 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of this historic event. The funding will help Smith to improve the theatrics of the performance, which would include additional high-definition screens for video projections, and to show the Civil Rights Movement in a new light. 

To donate to the project,  log on to http://www.usaprojects.org/project/ten_freedom_summers by Monday, March 11, 2013