The Fifth Annual Billie Holiday Jazz in Lafayette Square concert is a musical celebration of the rich and important legacy of Baltimore’s own jazz legend Billie Holiday. Held at Lafayette Square Park, corner of Arlington Avenue and Lafayette Street, the event will be alive with performances on Saturday, September 9, 2023, 2 – 6pm. Performances will be provided by The Nasar Abadey Jazz Quartet–Sean Jones (trumpet), Herman Burney (bass), Richard Johnson (keys) and Abadey (drums)–with special guest vocalist, recording artist Charenée Wade, professor of vocals and Jazz Studies at Peabody. Product vendors will be on hand as well as community organizations with displays and information sharing throughout the day. Additional performers this year include DJ Charles Dockins, and the Peabody Jazz Graduate Fellowship. The festival will be hosted by renowned poet, writer, and professor Kondwani Fidel and is free to the public. Guests are encouraged to bring blankets, coolers, and lounge chairs.

Community organization participants in this year’s event include Afro Charities, Baltimore Cultural Arts, Everyone’s Place, Safe Streets, Shake ‘n Bake, Baltimore Branch of the NAACP, and more.  Community leaders from Upton, Harlem Park and elected officials from the Baltimore City Council and Mayor’s Office will address the crowd. Last year’s event welcomed a diverse audience of more than 500 attendees. The concert is sponsored by the Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts, an initiative led by Baltimore native and Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Distinguished Professor Lawrence Jackson to preserve local Black history and magnify Baltimore’s role in the arts and global racial justice.

Free and open to the public, the annual event contributes to a new center of gravity in the greater Sandtown area, and the concert and the BHCLA is joining investments by the Beloved Community Corporation, the Royal Theater Heritage Corporation, and the Afro Charities Corporation in deep efforts to celebrate African American performance arts, historical recovery and preservation, and racial justice. Jazz in the Square invites three communities especially to forge new social ties: the African American church community of the square itself, the Johns Hopkins students and staff, and the contemporary residents of Sandtown, Upton Harlem Park, and Druid Heights. The goal is to provide an annual event that allows for engaging social interaction across the boundaries of racial and income-level differences, while offering the opportunity to engage a shared and challenging art-form. By taking jazz away from night clubs, theatres and symphony halls for an afternoon and returning it to its original Baltimore nesting place near Pennsylvania Avenue, we have the chance to deepen our knowledge of communal creativity and therapeutic power of the arts.

Lafayette Square is an anchor of Baltimore’s African American religious life, hosting St. James Episcopal Church, one of the city’s three black congregations dating its origins before the 1830s, St. John’s AME Church, Metropolitan Methodist Church, and Star of Bethlehem Spiritual Temple.  Two of the oldest African American Christian congregations in the United States, Bethel African Methodist Episcopal and Sharp Street United Memorial are only four blocks away.  Billie Holiday herself lived on both Fremont Street and Argyle Avenue, just off of Lafayette, and the fountainhead of the City’s jazz heritage was at the Royal Theater (1922-1971), located at Pennsylvania and Lafayette Avenue.

For more information, https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/billie-holiday-project/