Students with the Duke Ellington School of the Arts are putting on some affordable entertainment for D.C. commuters at Union Station Wednesday.
The students are scheduled to perform for free from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. as part of a concert series.
“Performances are held in the main hall — what better place than a beautiful, inspiring hall to engage with local talent and give them a platform, quite literally a stage to perform and enrich everybody’s daily commute to the station?” Doug Carr, President and C.E.O. of the Union Station Redevelopment Corporation (USRC), told WTOP.
The free concert is presented by Sing for Hope, an organization cofounded by Monica Yunus and Camille Zamora.
“Just like D.C. itself, the stage is as broad, as diverse and as vibrant as you can imagine,” Zamora told WTOP. “The Duke Ellington High School jazzers are going to be bringing all kinds of standards all the way up to modern jazz.”
The series will continue throughout the year with more free concerts multiple times a week.
“We have in regular rotation some of D.C.’s great talent trove,” Zamora said. “Our core group are all D.C. born and bred artists: Heidi Martin, a great jazz singer; Amy Domingues, who has a viola da gamba, an ancient cello that she plays in her ensemble. … We have Herb Scott, the iconic saxophone player and jazz band leader. We’re also excited because coming up in April, we’re going to feature a young operatic artist from the Denyce Graves Foundation.”
It follows a similar live concert series at the Moynihan Train Station in New York City in 2021.
“As my team and I were thinking about some near-term enhancements we could make to Union Stage … we quickly came up with the idea to work with a local entity and partner with local D.C. talent [at Duke Ellington School of the Arts], work with a known entity in Sing for Hope … to bring a similar live music series to Washington,” Carr said.
With many musicians out of work during the COVID-19 pandemic, Yunus said the organization pivoted from being volunteer-based to instead pay the artists for performances.
“This represents a full-circle moment for us and an incredible place to do it,” Yunus said. “Union Station is so incredibly historic, people know it as a place of culture and connectivity, and we are bringing musicians to do what they do best: invigorate, enliven and make people happy.”
Both Juilliard opera graduates, Yunus and Zamora cofounded Sing for Hope in New York City in 2006 in the aftermath of 9/11.
“We were desperate to connect with community and one of the ways we did that was by going to the firehouse, which actually shares a city block with Juilliard, and on that tragic day they lost 12 of their 13 men,” Yunus said. “As people were waiting in the days after for survivors to be identified, we just went and sang songs and gathered around that firehouse and many other firehouses and decided this was something we wanted to do more of.”
“We think of art as a ‘nice to have,’ but we realize in times of crisis that art is a ‘need to have,'” Zamora said.
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