Over the last decade, Solange Knowles has cultivated a deft curatorial voice, with an influence to match that of her other career as a forward-thinking and ever-evolving singer and performer. Through her work with Saint Heron, the multidisciplinary creative house she founded in 2013, the R&B auteur has left her imprint on a wide range of mediums, from tone-setting music compilations to advertising to glassware collections.
In 2023, she launched Eldorado Ballroom, an innovative and ambitious event series exploring the breadth of Black music through experimental live performances and intergenerational collaborations, at New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). Borrowing its name and spirit from a historic—and, after fifty years of dormancy, now-revived—Black-owned venue in Houston’s Third Ward, where Solange grew up, the series platformed acts from Res to the Clark Sisters to alto saxophonist Angélla Christie, across three evenings bridging gospel, jazz, R&B, and opera, among other expressions.
For its second edition, Solange has partnered with the Los Angeles Philharmonic to bring Eldorado Ballroom to L.A.’s Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Music Hall, with its 6,134-pipe organ, across three nights of similarly ambitious programming. The series opens Oct. 10 with “On Dissonance,” a celebration of Black women’s contributions to classical music and opera featuring performances of pieces by Patrice Rushen and the unsung Ohio composer Julia Perry, as well as the U.S. debut of Solange’s “Not Necessarily In Arms Reach,” a composition for tubas which she debuted at last year’s Volume Festival in Australia.
“Contrapuntal Counterpoints (Experimentation In Funk, Soul and Jazz),” on Oct. 12, brings Bilal, J*Davey, and Liv.e together with jazz pianist and instrument inventor Cooper-Moore, double bassist William Parker, and drummer/percussionist Michael Wimberly. The series closes Oct. 13, a Sunday, with “Glory To Glory,” a program celebrating artists who have reimagined Black devotional and praise music. Performers include the GMWA Women of Worship Choir (known for 1991’s “Order My Steps”), Hammond organist Dominique Johnson, and Moses Sumney; Malcolm J. Merriweather, choral director for the New York Philharmonic, will guide a performance of the spiritual works of late jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams.
In an exclusive interview with Wax Poetics, Solange goes deep on her curatorial inspirations and aspirations, shares the ways the physical Eldorado Ballroom and the Third Ward community at large have shaped her creative journey, and explains why tuba-led Southern marching bands and chopped-and-screwed mixes speak to her on the same frequency.
What is the significance of the Eldorado Ballroom to Houston, and your own career? Can you elaborate on how that venue’s history and legacy informs the approach to programming this series?
Solange: Well, the Eldorado Ballroom was a pillar for live Black music and culture from 1939 until the early ’70s in my neighborhood: Third Ward, Houston. As I get older and continue to deepen the quest of getting to the core of how I became the artist I am, and the world I want to build, the answer almost always goes back to Third Ward.
To know there was this mecca that provided safety for Black people to experiment in so many avenues of performance, from jazz to zydeco to even snake dancers—during a time [when] we didn’t have many sacred and safe spaces—gives me such a sense of purpose and drive in my own walk of what I’m setting out to build through Saint Heron. I feel a real sadness that the avant-garde and experimental worlds of Black music have been so co-opted, lifted, and programmed by whiteness.
Through Eldorado Ballroom, I really want to celebrate the width and the breadth, the nuances and the multiplicity, of Black music and performance. And to know that was happening right in my backyard for thirty years, owned and programmed by a beautiful Black couple [Anna and Charles Dupree], gives me the roots to really know that this is possible.
I love that Duke Ellington and James Brown performed there, but I also love that the ballroom hosted Houston’s Black Muslim community meetings while they were saving to buy their first mosque. The Eldorado roots go far beyond just music but knowing that music was the foundation, and just how transformative that can be, keeps me looking to the light.
How did you go about selecting and evolving the programming for this L.A. edition of the series? To what degree did the venue, physically speaking, inform the choices?
Solange: Whenever I am activating a space, I always do my best to listen to what the architecture or the space is telling me. There’s always a voice there, and it’s really helpful in informing performance to lean into it. I've [been] going to Walt Disney Hall for quite some time, and I always paid a lot of attention to the design of the pipe organ, and how integrated it is in the architecture of the building. I later read up on how important it was to Frank Gehry to devote himself to both the design and the sound. He worked with two organ builders, Manuel J. Rosales and Caspar Glatter-Götz, to build it, and it’s insanely made up of 6,134 pipes, and we plan to bring sound to all of them.
I immediately thought of the organist Dominique Johnson, who I had been watching on YouTube for the last year. You can just feel the anointing radiating off of her fingertips. I've been dreaming about what an experience it would be to have her bless that organ, and I can just feel that it’s gonna be one of those moments we collectively all hold really close as an audience together.
You’ll be presenting your own tuba composition, “Not Necessarily In Arms Reach,” which you recently debuted in Australia. Can you describe how the tuba has shaped your current approach to music? What is the tuba’s place in Black music, in your view?
Solange: I grew up hearing [Texas Southern University’s] “Ocean Of Soul” marching band at football games, and the tuba section always did something very guttural to me. I guess most of my association of the tuba is really with Black men who played in Southern marching bands, or with New Orleans brass bands, and I have always felt like tuba players are channeling and breathing a certain weight to the music no [other] instrument can. The sound of the tuba itself for me feels very of the soil, of the mud—almost like it can reach the center core of the earth. As a composer, I feel like the low end touches on something I can't really emote through the voice, or really through any other instrument, and so it's been really special to tap into my limitations through this other sound. There’s a visceral feeling I get from the tuba that feels very similar to listening to Screw. It feels like I’m writing screwed up music through brass but without needing to slow it down. It’s already screwed.
Why was it important for you to highlight the music of Julia Perry, and what was it about this particular composition of hers, “Homunculus C.F.,” that you think will resonate today?
Solange: Man, the Julia Perry show has been like four years in the making. I heard “Homunculus C.F.” like five years ago, and, honestly, I felt robbed that I hadn’t heard it sooner.
I love me some Terry Riley, and I’m a huge fan and honestly would love to work with him one day, but knowing this brilliant woman made this before “In C,” and that she’s completely been left out of the conversation of minimalist music is not okay. I do connect with minimalist music so deeply sonically and spiritually, but the reality is the face of the music is very white, and very male, and there’s an intellectual lens that doesn’t really seem to consider us.
When I listen to “Homunculus C.F.,” and I hear the textures, and the landscape she is creating with percussion and harp, I feel both her Blackness and her womanness in such a profound way, and I feel so very seen and spoken to. The possibilities of channeling that become very real. I can only hope to create work that embodies what she has left behind.
It’s been beautiful to see her work added to the conversation more and more over these past few years—though it’s way overdue!
In Brooklyn, you platformed Res, an artist who was ahead of her time in reaching beyond the parameters of traditional R&B and, as a result, was widely overlooked. Would you say that J*Davey is occupying a similar role in this edition?
Solange: Definitely! Listen: Jack [Davey, JDavey’s frontwoman and songwriter], Res, Julia Perry, Patrice Rushen—these were all women who have given me the permission to be the thirteen-year-old I wanted to be, the twenty-year-old I wanted to be, the woman I’m still becoming. There are facets of all of these women in the tapestry of the music I make, the way I show up in the world, and I'm so so honored and humbled that these women are open to sharing space with me.
J*Davey is Los Angeles royalty, and I can't wait for this homecoming and to feel the energy in the room when they perform. Wayyy back when, DJ Rashida would bring a gang of us all together, and we would go to Prince’s house parties together. It was such a surreal time. These were artists who also created true tribe and community and, no matter on what scale, the impact was felt and still is.
Bilal is appearing on the same evening, as part of a performance called “Contrapuntal Counterpoints (Experimentation In Funk, Soul and Jazz).” How did Bilal’s expansive approach to R&B inspire you in younger days?
Solange: Vocally, when I heard Bilal, I felt such a piercing, almost lightning effect, by his voice. A lot of people talk the whole “the voice is an instrument” lingo, but then you listen to the horn sounds he makes on “Sometimes” and his falsetto, and it’s like, “Nah, some people are just singers.” [laughs] His first album [2001’s 1st Born Second] really impacted me so deeply, and then I later asked him to duet with me on a song called “Cosmic Journey” on my second album, Hadley Street Dreams. I added this weird, dark, German trance electronic moment at the end of the song—in 2008, that was not really what people were widely gravitating to in an R&B/soul context—but Bilal was all the way with it and expanded on it in such a unique pocket. Watching him in the studio emote such extreme highs and lows over that part of the song was something I’ll never forget.
I knew for this show I wanted Cooper-Moore and William Parker as a band on board, and was brainstorming on a vocalist who I felt could really channel something that aligned with their landscape, and immediately was like, “Duh, it’s Bilal!” I feel so appreciative we can now be in conversation sixteen years later in this way.
We know Patrice Rushen’s accomplishments in jazz, and her R&B songs are beloved. Who knew she also wrote classical symphonies, though! How did this piece by her (“Sinfonia”) come to your attention?
Solange: PatriceRushen.com. I love an artist who still values the art of a website, and I'm a research nerd, so I will go through every crevice of your digital imprint, and there I saw it! She has a whole section dedicated to her symphonic works. “Sinfonia” immediately grabbed me. It is so adventurous, with so many twists and turns, and again I felt so seen.
Ms. Patrice is someone I really idolize in terms of that line between pop star, academia, experimentation, symphonic music, and hair icon! There is no greater blueprint for me. She’s the one!
Gospel tends to keep within its bubble, to the point that it’s almost “underground,” as far as the rest of the music world noting its developments. What responsibility comes with platforming it for broader consumption? What did you learn about staging gospel from the previous edition of Eldorado Ballroom in Brooklyn?
Solange: One of the things that really connects with me about the “Glory To Glory” show is how many different pathways that praise and worship music can take—and how many forms of expression spiritual music can embody. To think about the genius experimentation of Mary Lou Williams’s “Black Christ of the Andes,” and how those compositions were a response to basically her Catholic Church peers being like “Ma’am, what about the amendments to the Constitution of Sacred Liturgy, can you make music in devotion to these liturgical texts?” And she just goes, “Bam: Twenty-seven chord changes in sixteen bars, that's how I praise him!” But then also to think about “Order My Steps” performed by the GMWA Women of Worship, which was written by Glenn Edward Burleigh in Houston of all places, where he drew melodies from opera and classical with Black blues and hymns.
The Eldorado Ballroom series is really about finding the width of these stories but then micro honing in on them, and the impact they have had on Black music. “Order My Steps” is iconic—it stayed on the Billboard gospel charts for ninety-four weeks—and I could play that at a house party and it will go UP. The spirit lives on forever and deep when that comes on.
It’s so cool to watch everyone become a thespian—we all want to hit those notes with such reverence and conviction. Lyrically and melodically, “While you are working, help me be still, Though Satan is busy, God is real” is such a bar. Not many people are touching that. It’s a masterpiece and I'm really excited to hear that live by the GMWA Women of Worship with some of the original members from the Birmingham chapter.
The “Glory To Glory” night in Brooklyn was truly one of my favorites because we had the eighty-five-year-old elders, and the nineteen-year-old babies in their best fashions, bringing all the divinity. That intergenerational moment is so special to me. And, honestly, Twinkie Clark is my G.O.A.T. Like, I'll never get over that moment.
I read that the same week the original Eldorado Ballroom series took place in Brooklyn, the actual Eldorado Ballroom theater in Houston reopened after fifty years. What is your relationship with, and hope for, this new incarnation of the venue?
Solange: Well, first off: Project Row Houses [the Third Ward non-profit organization which restored and now operates the Eldorado Ballroom] completely changed the trajectory of my life. I got to experience what the seeds of arts education can be. I had one of my first performances as a teenager right on the lawn [of Project Row Houses’ original 1990s-era redevelopment site], and recorded parts of When I Get Home in one of the row houses, so this is all full circle. To see the care and intention they have given in restoring the Eldorado Ballroom is truly so inspirational. I’m really in awe! I got to visit the last time I was in Houston, and couldn’t have been more proud—and just moved—by the work.
I’m ‘bout to give such an annoying-ass answer to the latter part of your question but: Stay tuned, stay tuned, stay tuned. We are only just beginning the journey.