Lara Downes and NPR music announce AMPLIFY with Lara Downes, a new video conversation series with leading black musicians.
Series premieres Saturday, October 17 on NPR Music.org and NPR’s YouTube and social media platforms. Click here to read the press release PDF.
OCTOBER 16, 2020 – NPR Music and Lara Downes announce the launch of AMPLIFY With Lara Downes, a new bi-weekly series of intimate and deeply personal video conversations with visionary Black musicians who are shaping the present and future of the art form, premiering Saturday, October 17 on NPRMusic.org, YouTube, and social media platforms.
Created and hosted by pianist and artist/citizen Lara Downes, and co-produced by NPR Music’s Tom Huizenga, this series invites viewers to experience raw, revealing, and open-hearted conversations reflecting on how artists are responding and creating in this time of profound
challenge and change. Downes and her guests—initially including MacArthur Fellow vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens, 2020 Avery Fisher Prize-winning clarinetist Anthony McGill, multidisciplinary artist Helga Davis, and boundary-breaking vocalist Davóne Tines, with other guests such as Sheku Kanneh-Mason and family to follow—connect and reflect on highly relevant themes ranging from music and mission, legacy and lineage, to transformation and change.
ABOUT LARA DOWNES
Pianist Lara Downes has been called “an explorer whose imagination is fired by bringing notice to the underrepresented and forgotten” (The Log Journal). An iconoclast and trailblazer, her dynamic work as a sought-after performer, a Billboard Chart-topping recording artist, a producer, curator, activist and arts advocate positions her as a cultural visionary on the national arts scene.
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