Our Courier of Culture
Wonderful sums up these past few days for me hanging with Mr. Ronn Bunn, the man who shall be henceforth christened Our Courier of Culture! The Dance Theatre of Harlem provided a gentle launch Saturday with its New York premiere of Vessels by Darrell Grand Moultrie, a company premiere of Coming Together by Nacho Duato, and the precision perfect Tchaikovsky Pas De Deux by George Balanchine at City Center in Midtown Manhattan.
Stevie Wonder revved it up and closed the weekend Sunday night in full throttle with his national tour, Songs in the Key of Life, at the Barclay Center in downtown Brooklyn. Stevie’s guests included Grammy Award Winner songwriter/singer India Arie, harmonica player extraordinaire Frédéric Yonnet, more than a dozen violins, violas, and cellos provided strings for the classic “Village Ghetto Land” and other tunes, and a mini-choir harmonized “We Shall Overcome” that delivered a nostalgic punch reminding us that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Yet he reminded us that that we don’t have to carry the load alone; “When you feel your life’s too hard, just go have a talk with God.” Besides singing and playing a variety of instruments, Stevie Wonder regaled the audience with comedic quips, mock New York accents and multi-lingual musings in Spanish and Amharic (Ethiopian). He left the audience full of “wonder” with his dynamic and indefatigable performance that had us singing along and dancing, in our seats and in the aisles, for four hours!
Monday evening was the perfect cap to the weekend and opener for this new week with the sultry and sophisticated India Arie. Ms. Arie took us on a journey of enlightenment at Ginny’s Supper Club located in the cellar of The Red Rooster in the bosom of Harlem (owner Marcus Samuelsson – Food Network Master Chef). She shared intimate stories from her debut book SongVersation: I Am Light (RECEIVE A FREE DIGITAL COPY OF INDIA’S NEW BOOK “SONGERSATION: I AM LIGHT” when you subscribe to the Soulbird Newsletter at soulbird.com). And she blessed us with spiritually healing melodies from her latest CD SongVersation (available in stores and iTunes now).
Afterwards with a small group of close friends and musicians, India shared a story, not in her book, about how she and Our Courier of Culture first met in Cologne, Germany. At the close of her final, 2003 or 2004, concert, India asked her then manager to go fetch Ronn from the audience and bring him backstage. “Among a 2,000+ audience, Ronn seemed to be glowing-I couldn’t take my eyes off of him,” reminisced India. But his standing out was more profound than his color or age in that youthful, pale-skinned crowd. It’s never just surface with India. Just listen to the message in her recording “I am not my hair, I am not this skin, I am a soul that lives within.”
India was performing in Oregon in 2009. Ronn happened to be spending that summer in nearby Ashland, and so he went to see her. India gleefully related to her mother how she and Ronn met in Germany. When Ronn and India said their goodbyes, she extended to him an open backstage invitation—anytime, anywhere. Last evening, they were able to reaffirm their friendship.
ROUTES, A Guide to African American Culture, collects and chronicles our cultural connections throughout the African diaspora. These connections are the ties that bind us all together and make us family. How Wonderful is that!