Christian McBride and Joe Sealy double bill mixes Black history with the music

Four powerfully influential U.S. figures and one Canadian tragedy.

That’s what’s in store when a potent Black History Month jazz double bill takes to the Meridian Hall stage on Feb. 17.

For the recreation of his 2020 album “The Movement Revisited: A Musical Portrait of Four Icons,” eight-time Grammy-winning jazz bassist Christian McBride focuses on a quartet of highly influential Black civil rights activists: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali.

Closer to home, local pianist Joe Sealy keeps alive the memory of a tragic blemish on Black Canadian freedom through his Juno Award-winning “Africville Suite.” It’s about a tiny Afro-Canadian community that was obliterated by the city of Halifax; the last building of the community razed in 1970.

Sealy’s production will be the more modest of the two: accompanying him onstage will be singer Jackie Richardson, bass player Paul Novotny, drummer Daniel Barnes and saxophonist Alison Young as he performs an abbreviated version of his compositional suite, warming up for headliner McBride.

It’s the music for which Sealy is best known: a tribute to his father, Joseph Maurice Sealy, who was born in Africville, which Sealy described as “a community that consisted of about 400 residents scattered over 80 families.”

In a nutshell: Africville was established in the early 1800s on the southern shore of Bedford Basin by formerly enslaved African Americans.

“It survived for over 100 years with its own schools and post office,” remembered Sealy, 83. who visited the area as a teenager.

“It was a thriving community. There was very little unemployment and most of the residents owned their own homes. Very few were ever on welfare and yet they were treated so badly.

“During the First World War they built a hospital for infectious diseases right beside it. I actually visited the community as a teenager with my dad in 1956, I think. At that time, there was a burning garbage dump right next door.

“The city did everything they could to discourage the community.”

Sealy said the city promised municipal water and sewage to the residents of Africville in the 1950s. “These people were paying taxes on their property and the city promised them city water and sewer systems. So a number of citizens built bathrooms with pipes ready to be hooked up to the city only to be disappointed once again.”

In 1964, Halifax City Council decided to pull the plug on the area they clearly considered a slum and evicted its residents.

“They were offered so little for their homes,” Sealy said. “Some of them were able to buy homes in other areas and those who weren’t able to were relocated into houses which were already slated for demolition.

“Those who were reluctant to leave, the bulldozers came in and knocked their houses down. They were scrambling out the back door with their belongings as the bulldozers were coming in the front.”

Sealy said his father’s parents relocated to Montreal for better opportunities in 1919 when his father was nine, but his dad always hoped to return to Africville one day.

“He always said that when he’d retire, he’d love to live in Africville: buy a house and live there,” said Sealy. “Of course, by the time he died, the community was no longer in existence. So, as a tribute to him, I wrote a piece called ‘Africville,’ a piece of music in three movements, the beginnings and the life of the community, and the demise of it.”

It was first performed at Halifax’s Saint Mary’s University in 1993, and Sealy was implored by community leaders at the time to extend the piece.

He eventually honoured their request and, in his research, discovered that jazz bandleader Duke Ellington’s long-time companion, Mildred Dixon, had Africville ties and that, after his boxing career, Joe Louis stayed there with the Dixons.

“The show is an updated version of the album,” Sealy said. “I recorded the album in 1996 and so many people asked so many questions that I ended up writing a libretto, because every piece on the album is based on either an event or a personality, or something that occurred within the community.”

Although Sealy and company will perform abridged versions of “Africville” at Meridian Hall, as well as the Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts on Feb. 15, the Montreal native says audiences won’t be shortchanged on the historical significance.

“What the audience will see will be well represented of what I wrote.”

Sealy remembers Africville’s “inviting, hospitable good community spirit” from his visit as a teen and still feels gutted about its extinction.

“It’s still a wound. I’m not directly related to the community except through my father, but I have a warm spot in my heart for it and a sense of the tragic loss of that community,” he said.

The fact that Canadians probably know less about Africville than the four Americans depicted in McBride’s “The Movement Revisited” speaks volumes about the pervasive cultural influence of the U.S. on our nation, but Philadelphia native McBride hopes to introduce some revelations of his own about Ali, MLK, Parks and Malcolm X when he headlines the show with his big band jazz outfit, a choir and a quartet of narrators.

“With someone like Dr. King, there’s so much text of his that exists,” McBride said during an interview. “You can find any book, any video, any speech that he ever made in his career …

“Same thing with Malcolm X but, with Malcolm X, I specifically wanted to focus on the last year of his life, which would have been when he changed his ideology from what he had been taught at the Nation of Islam. So, after his pilgrimage to Mecca, I felt that his outlook on life and race had a much broader outlook and understanding.”

McBride said finding fresh information about Rosa Parks was a challenge.

“You don’t see as much of her work — or as many of her quotes — as you do King or Malcolm X, but I found numerous books, did my due diligence and found a lot of good quotes.

“Same thing with Muhammed Ali; here’s a person, who in many ways, like Malcolm X, in the throes of his religious ideology, changed once he got older.”

Like Sealy’s “Africville,” McBride’s “The Movement Revisited” has been frequently updated.

McBride, 50, said he first became fascinated with each individual “when I was a kid and I started to read about Black history and learn about American history.”

“Something about the story of those four people really just captured me as a kid, probably because they were four of the most celebrated, four of the most popular. So it’s kind of difficult to read anything about Black history and not come across ample examples of their speeches and work and legacies.”

In an era when misinformation seems to receive ever greater amplification, McBride said it’s important to remind people of the truth.

“I feel in today’s sort of sensory overload period, you now have people who like to challenge things and literally make up stories because they know that somebody out there will listen to them. So I find that the importance of these stories is greater now than ever,” he said.

“When people quote Malcolm X, they love quoting his ‘by any means necessary’ snippet, but they don’t really know the context of what he was talking about. They really don’t know how he changed and when he was basically ousted from the Nation of Islam.

“A lot of people don’t know Rosa Parks’ story. They know she was arrested for not giving up her seat on a bus, but that’s about the extent. They don’t know about what she thought about life and struggle. They don’t know a lot about how Dr. King’s ideology almost got … more radical, in a sense, toward the last year of his life.

“So when people hear this piece, I hope they become curious about looking up some things they may or may not have known about the people represented here. Obviously, I also hope they enjoy it and are inspired by it,” McBride said.

CORRECTION — FEB. 13, 2023: This story has been edited from an earlier version that said Joe Sealy was a Toronto native. He was born in Montreal.

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