Edges of Ailey | Art & Artists

Sept 25, 2024–Feb 9, 2025

Black Music

A vibrant painting depicts a bustling nighttime street scene of an African American community in an urban setting. A glowing street lamp casts a blue hue over the scene, in which a diverse group of musicians play brass instruments and tambourines, people dance, and others converse. A tall man with exaggerated features stands on a pedestal that reads "Jesus Saves," playing a trumpet. To the right, a woman in a green dress and red stilettos walks a small white dog past an elderly man with a cane. In the background, buildings with lighted windows reveal more onlookers, including a market storefront with meat hanging in the window, a house with a front porch where a woman and a child observe the scene, and an apartment building with residents peering out.

Black Music

For Alvin Ailey, dance and music were art forms of and for the people, originating and enduring in homes, the streets, and other everyday spaces. Rather than see dance as merely a response to music, he saw that both allowed an artist to express the spectrum of their feelings and experiences—a pillar of Ailey’s creative philosophy.

The foundations of Ailey’s dances often stemmed from the rich history of Black musical traditions, from the stirring harmonies of gospel and spirituals, to the existential tenor of blues and soul, and to the improvisations and discordant rhythms of jazz. In one notebook he wrote: “One must discover what the music is about and visualize it if possible.” Dance was his way of meeting this dual imperative: to embody music’s energy and to enhance its possibilities of meaning through movement. Beyond setting his dances to specific songs, Ailey often relied on their melodies and percussive beats to dictate his initial choreographic steps and patterns. He also frequently turned to the lives of singers and musicians as his subjects, including Duke Ellington, Donny Hathaway, Hugh Masekela, Jay McShann, Charlie Parker, Nina Simone, and Bessie Smith, among others.