Atlanta Symphony and Ebenezer Baptist Church: Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Concert (Georgia Film Commission, Georgia Public Television, filmed January 20, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Lemon Grove Incident on Monday, January 19, KPBS showed a year-old concert from Atlanta, Georgia held at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had actually been pastor. Of course the current campus of Ebenezer Baptist is far newer, more modern, and more elaborate than the one at which Dr. King ministered! The concert was co-sponsored by Ebenezer Baptist and the Atlanta Symphony and took place on January 20, 2025 – ironically the day at which slimeball racist Donald J. Trump returned to the Presidency as well as the official date of the 2025 King Day holiday. The concert was led by a highly energetic Black conductor, Jonathan Taylor Rush, and began with an O.K. performance of the so-called “Negro National Anthem,” J. Rosamond Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” It’s long irritated he that this lame piece of music has somehow become the African-American go-to song instead of a work by Duke Ellington, one of Black America’s true musical geniuses, but we seem to be stuck with it. The version was performed by the Atlanta Symphony and a mixed-race choir blended from the Atlanta Symphony’s and Ebenezer Church’s own ones. Then came brief speeches from Raphael Warnock, who in addition to being a U.S. Senator from Georgia is also the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist and therefore has Dr. King’s old job; and the orchestra’s (white, female) executive director, Jennifer Barlamont. After that came a quite remarkable sequence of compositions by young African-Americans, two of whom, Joel Thompson and Carlos Simon, were interviewed on screen. Thompson said that he’d originally been asked to set Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to music, but he’d decided that the speech was already so “musical” he’d have nothing to add to it. Instead, he composed a tone poem called An Act of Resistance which summed up Dr. King’s life’s work and message in purely instrumental terms.

Carlos Simon’s piece was “Lively,” the first movement of a suite he calls Amen! He said the work was inspired by his own childhood in the Pentecostal Church, where his father was a minister and his mother a trombone player. Accordingly he scored the work for three trombones plus orchestra, much the way Duke Ellington had written a hot trombone solo for Lawrence Brown in his song “Goin’ Up” from the 1943 musical film Cabin in the Sky. Simon used the three trombones much the way Ellington had used Brown: to represent a Black minister preaching an ecstatic sermon. During his interview Simon wore a shirt that read, “You Must Be Born Again” – a slogan that’s become associated with a far different sort of Christianity than Dr. King’s. Then came Gregory Porter, who in the online sources for the concert is listed as a jazz singer. He’s considerably more than that: he’s basically a dramatic performer whose music mixes classical, jazz, soul, and rap. Porter’s two pieces on the program, “1960-What?” and “Take Me to the Alley,” celebrated the explosion of the civil-rights movement on white America’s consciousness and King’s Jesus-like instinct to reach out precisely to the poorest and most marginalized people in the community. There was a bit of geographic confusion in “1960-What?,” since the song referenced Dr. King’s assassination at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, but Porter also drew on John Lee Hooker’s famous blues ballad “Motor City Burning” and thus located at least part of his song in Detroit. After another brief speech, this one by Ebenezer Baptist’s minister of music, Patrice Turner, the concert continued with two movements of a suite by Margaret Bonds called The Montgomery Variations, after the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama that lasted over a year and sparked Dr. King’s emergence as a major civil-rights leader nationwide. Like Carlos Simon’s piece, Margaret Bonds’s was good enough to make me want to hear the whole work sometime (record companies, are you listening?). Then there was a piece by Scott O. Cumberbatch called “Praise the Lord.”

Afterwards gospel singer Tamika Patton came out for a version of Thomas A. Dorsey’s classic “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” which was Dr. King’s favorite song: Mahalia Jackson (who’d been instrumental in Dr. King’s most famous speech; at the 1963 March on Washington he’d been in the middle of a long, ponderous oration on the history of Southern racism and Mahalla hollered in his ear, “Give ’em the dream, Martin! Give ’em the dream!”) sang it at King’s funeral in 1968 and Aretha Franklin sang it at Mahalia Jackson’s funeral in 1972. Oddly, Patton sped up the tempo in mid-song for a gospel-rock version before slowing it down again, though when she was singing at Dorsey’s original tempo her version approached the eloquence of Mahalia’s and Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s. The next song was Alma Basel Androzzo’s “If I Can Help Somebody,” also known as “My Living Shall Not Be in Vain,” sung by Timothy Miller. Miller was officially listed as a tenor but his voice sounded more like a baritone, or even a bass-baritone, to me, and I thought it had the plangent power of the great 1930’s and 1940’s Black ballad singers like Paul Robeson and Jules Bledsoe. After that came the one misfire of the night: a rather nondescript gospel song by Kurt Carr called “For Every Mountain” that the church’s music director, Patrice Turner, made the mistake of singing herself. She started at the piano but gradually stood up and furiously went into full-blown belt mode on the song, launching high notes like heat-seeking missiles but only rarely on a recognizable pitch. I found myself thinking, “This is what Ethel Merman would have sounded like if she’d been Black.” Fortunately the concert closed with a chorus-and-orchestra arrangement of “We Shall Overcome,” arranged by Uree Brown; it took a while for the melody to emerge from Brown’s rich orchestral textures, but soon enough the choir joined in and luckily the tech people had enough skill the singers’ rendition of the familiar melody rose over Brown’s dense orchestral textures. A number of pieces ended rather abruptly because the producers were rather over-aware of audience applause and tried to edit it out crudely. But overall I was quite impressed by the concert and particularly liked the big orchestral works; indeed, I hope recordings get made of the entire multi-movement pieces Amen! and The Montgomery Variations.