Downtown | Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. | St. Luke's Steel Band | Arts & Culture | Music Haven | Arts & Anti-racism
Top: Kenneth Joseph, who has directed the St. Luke's Steel Band since 2011. Bottom: Adina Salahuddin, who is a violin student at Music Haven and a junior at ESUMS. Lucy Gellman Photos.
At first, it was hard to put a finger on exactly what the song was, the strings purring to life between the pulpit and the front row. There was a suggestion from the violins, a murmur of assent from the cellos. The smell of incense still hung low and holy in the air, as if it was blessing the space.Then the steel drums came in, bell-like and undulating, and the lyrics clicked.
Wake up, everybody No more sleepin' in bed, the pan and strings sang out, no need for words at all. No more backward thinking, Time for thinking ahead! Attendees bobbed in their seats. It was the sound of how to get through the next four, and ten, and 50 years, note by note.
Monday afternoon, members of Music Haven and St. Luke's Steel Band played in a stunning commitment to community with their annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Day concert, a tradition that has been running almost every year for over a decade. Held just hours before two downtown protests advocating for human rights, the event became a musical roadmap for building solidarity, a powerful reminder that artists, healers, activists and families belong to each other—and to the people and places they call home.
"This year, as we chose the music, we were very intentional about what we were playing," said Kenneth Joseph, who has directed the steel band since 2011. "We have different songs like 'One Love,' and that is the goal for the next four years and beyond. We just have to do more loving each other and just coming together."
“Whatever side is your view, you need to be awake and see what's happening,” he added of Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes’ “Wake Up Everybody,” which became popular when it was released just months after the end of the Vietnam War. “Don't just receive the info without checking in to see what's happening.”
As the church filled with families Monday, Joseph focused on that vision for unity, checking in with students as he looked over the setup. At the front of the space, a few pan players milled about, weaving in and out of the instruments as they checked for their mallets, placed sheet music on stands, and scanned the crowd for siblings and family members. Among them, Joseph looked at ease; he only later admitted that he’d been doing his best not to focus on the presidential inauguration unfolding in Washington, D.C.
Along one side of the church, Music Haven students filed in, milling around the front for a moment before they took their seats. In the violin section, Adina Salahuddin slid into the first chair, and ran through the concert one last time in her mind. Student readers checked and double checked their scripts, across which King’s words bloomed from the past into the present. Conversations rose and fell around her, students holding their instruments anxiously as they waited to begin.
And then, as if there was an invisible sign, Joseph stepped up, raised his hands, and coaxed the sound slowly forward. In the audience, hugs and hellos stilled to silence; half a dozen phones came out and started to record, then half a dozen more. For a moment, it sounded as if the strings were simply warming up, the notes low and trembling. Violin swooped in, a suggestion of life, and then fell back to a hum just as quickly.
At the end of his row, Mathias Nuñez sat bolt upright, so fused to his cello that it seemed as though they existed as two parts of a whole. Something was shifting underfoot, and he could hear it. He later stood to read part of the Black Eyed Peas “Where Is The Love,” trading strings briefly for the lyrical swerve of the song.
The mood changed: it was suddenly as though the whole group had found its bearings. To Joseph’s left, steel pan came in, the sound full enough to raise the roof. Strings began to build toward the hook, pan responding with a sort of rolling tremolo. From somewhere in the back, a drum kit entered the fray. It was officially a call to action, and the audience seemed to take note.
A rainbow flag suspended from the second story balcony rippled in bands of brilliant color, as if even it was listening. Something in the room shifted again, and the audience burst into applause.
“Personally, I have a lot of complicated feelings today,” said resident musician and Haven String Quartet member Philip Boulanger, taking the mic as applause died down, and students turned their attention to Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good.” When he reflects on the work of Dr. King, “I’ve been thinking about what it means to me, and … it’s not yelling into the void online,” he said to murmurs of agreement.
Instead, it’s asking “what are you doing for others,” a question that was fundamental to King’s crusade against poverty and his warnings that capitalism, militarism, classism and racism were all interconnected and insidious forms of violence. Almost 70 years after King first posed that question, “it’s that sense of service and connection … that gives me joy and that gives me hope,” Boulanger said.
His words echoed as Salahuddin rose from her chair, brows knitted in concentration. She looked at the floor, and took a breath. For years, she’s loved to sing—but has only just been getting back to it recently, after stopping during the first years of the Covid-19 pandemic. Several weeks ago, she asked her violin teacher, Haven String Quartet artistic director Yaira Matyakubova, if she could sing the first verse of “Feeling Good” at the concert, which she’s played for almost as long as she can remember.
It was an easy yes. The song, which Simone recorded a version of in 1965, became part of the soundtrack to Civil Rights and Black liberation. Six decades later, Salahuddin feels like she’s known it for her whole life. “I wanted to mirror Nina Simone” in tribute to the singer and to the song’s spirit, she said after the concert. But she also wanted to make it her own. As a junior in high school, she can feel chaos swelling all around her—particularly when she thinks of her dreams of studying obstetrics and gynecology. The song helps steady her.
“To be honest, I just want to focus on moving forward,” she said. “As a community, we have the power to make change in our own ways.”
Back in the church, a honeyed afternoon light had begun to pour through the windows. Salahuddin looked up, and seemed certain of the ground on which she stood, the ebb and flow of breath all around her. With a knowing nod from Joseph, she began to sing—Birds flying high, you know how I feel—and let herself ease into the music. She gave Simone’s trademark hum, a soulful string of notes that needed no words at all. As pan rolled in beneath her voice, strings gave a deep, breathy response, wrapping the front rows in their sound.
That momentum carried over as students wove in King’s own words, placing them amidst strings and steel, song and speech. Between “Feeling Good” and Bill Withers’ “Lean On Me,” Nia Antoine and Jasmine King brought it back to the principles of nonviolence, part of King’s philosophy and practice that he referred to as a form of resistance and “a way of life for courageous people.” In less than two minutes, the two had conjured the civil rights leader himself, reminding the room how much his words—and his fight—still apply today.
“The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community,” King said 68 years ago, delivering a speech at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., and the words' legacy came to life in the quiet downtown church. “The aftermath of nonviolence is redemption. The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation. The aftermath of violence are emptiness and bitterness.
“This is the thing I’m concerned about. Let us fight passionately and unrelentingly for the goals of justice and peace. But let’s be sure that our hands are clean in this struggle. Let us never fight with falsehood and violence and hate and malice, but always fight with love, so that when the day comes that the walls of segregation have completely crumbled in Montgomery, that we will be able to live with people as their brothers and sisters.”
As readers returned to their seats, that message of love came through the music. In Bill Withers’ “Lean On Me,” a listener could feel a pull toward redemption as strings took the lead, soaring toward the high ceiling. In “Nature Song,” featuring Harmony In Action and some of St. Luke’s youngest pan players, it was a reminder of the kinship humans have with the earth, a recognition of the planet from the generation that may be most affected by its precipitous warming.
By “Where Is The Love,” it was a vision for what New Haven is and what it could be: a city knitted back together one relationship, one interaction, one step toward mutual aid at a time. Or as Joseph said after he had gotten the audience to clap along, “Let’s love each other, and we’ll be fine.”
The setting could not be more fitting: First and Summerfield has long been a hub for union organizing and progressive politics, including as a sanctuary congregation during Donald Trump’s first term as president. Its former pastor, Vicki Flippin, has been at the forefront of actions for women’s, LGBTQ+ and immigrant rights; she spoke passionately on the steps of the city’s federal courthouse on the day the Supreme Court of the United States struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022.
It lent the musicians an energy that flowed right into an arrangement of David Rudder’s 1998 “High Mas,” a piece of Calypso music that lets the steel pan shine as it calls its listeners to get up and dance. From the front row to the back of the church, people began to move in place, some bobbing as others bounced their kids on their knees and laps.
As a wood block inched in from the back, the sound suddenly seemed as if it was everywhere, wrapping the audience in its infectious, effusive joy and insistent march forward.
The song, which celebrates the custom of Mas or masquerade—part of the Carnival tradition that comes before Lent in the West Indies and across the Caribbean—has in New Haven become a symbol of the breadth of diaspora, played beneath the scorching summer sun and in Soca and Calypso medleys meant to ring in the holiday season. This year, Joseph said, the band brought it back by popular demand.
Top: Amiel "AJ" Johnson, a sixth grader at Nathan Hale School, said he was excited to see his hard work show off: Monday marked his first MLK Day concert.
With spirits high, Joseph asked the audience to stand for one more long-standing concert tradition: the singing of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” recognized as the Black National Anthem (listen to the performance here). At first, there was just one voice: Music Haven violinist Wesley McBride, an eighth grader at Worthington Hooker School who studies with Matyakubova.
But as the young musician finished a verse, Joseph turned to attendees, cuing them in. Where there had been a single voice there were dozens, then hundreds, all carried by the instruments beneath them.
Several students held onto that momentum after the concert, as they zipped up their instruments and prepared to head back out into the icy cold. As he helped clean up, eighth grader Blake Adorno took a moment to reflect on the show, looking around a church that had been full of hundreds of people. While he grew up around the steel pan—his cousin, Logan Foreman, has played for over a decade and is still in the band—Monday marked his first MLK Day concert.
“I feel like it's a day that everybody should come together,” he said, adding that he’s been thinking about what it means to honor Martin Luther King in his own life. “Not just African Americans, but everybody should be together … all different colors. [This year], I feel like we all know what we have to do. It's a matter of, are we gonna do it or not? I, as myself, I feel like I can spread togetherness, happiness, and peace.”