Season 4, Episode 1
They are saying it’s best to by no means meet your heroes. I suppose alternatives for disappointment abound when these we admire from afar are encountered within the flesh, with out flattering lighting or accompanying strings, simply on a regular basis folks. However not so with regards to Brian Stokes Mitchell, who has been one in every of my heroes ever since I noticed him starring within the unique manufacturing of Ragtime on Broadway within the late ’90s.
Stokes, as he likes to be referred to as, was probably the most impossibly charismatic, unreasonably good-looking, insanely gifted singing, dancing, piano-playing, larger-than-life main man to finish all main males. Sitting in that darkish theater, I hoped that sometime I would be as excited and delighted in my work as he clearly was in his, up on that stage. I didn’t dream for a second that sometime we would share a stage collectively.
However that is what occurred two years in the past on the Boston Pops. We teamed up for a live performance constructed on the legacy of the inventive collaboration between Stokes’ personal hero Duke Ellington (whom he even named his son after) and the composer and pianist Billy Strayhorn, who at age 23 idolized Ellington after they first met. A few years and lots of songs later, Ellington referred to as Strayhorn “my proper arm, my left arm, all of the eyes at the back of my head, my mind waves in his head, and his in mine.”
At that live performance in Boston, when Stokes and I took the stage to carry out Strayhorn’s extraordinary tune “Lush Life,” we discovered ourselves entangled in a type of uncommon moments of musical magic when your brainwaves do, in actual fact, move proper into one another’s heads.
Stokes’ head is a superb place to be. As you will see from this dialog, he’s endlessly curious in his passionate, nearly nerdy fascination with music and the best way it brings folks collectively within the sacred house of frequent floor and shared expertise. Our dialog has since continued by telephone and textual content, within the backseats of vehicles, in rehearsal studios and dressing rooms, over lunches and dinners. Stokes remains to be very a lot a hero of mine, and now he is my buddy too, with so many concepts to share and a lot music to make collectively. As Billy Strayhorn all the time stated: “Ever up and onward.”
[Amplify with Lara Downes is a video series that highlights Black creatives as they shape art and culture. This season’s guests include country singer Brittney Spencer, saxophonist and bandleader Kamasi Washington, conductor Thomas Wilkins, poet aja monet, harpist Brandee Younger, opera star Denyce Graves and more. You can watch more episodes of Amplify here.]