- I'm Satori Shakoor, and here's what's ahead this week on One Detroit Arts and Culture.

A Ukrainian band with a Detroit connection.

This year's Kresge Eminent Artist tells the story of how beads became his medium of choice.

And a symphony orchestra, plus a performance from the DSO Civic Youth Ensemble.

(classical music) - [Announcer] From Delta faucets to Behr Paint, MASCO Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

MASCO, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

- [Announcer] Support for this program is provided by The Cynthia and Edsel Ford Fund for Journalism at Detroit Public TV, The Kresge Foundation.

- [Announcer] The DTE Foundation is a proud sponsor of Detroit Public TV.

Among the state's largest foundations committed to Michigan-focused giving, we support organizations that are doing exceptional work in our state.

Visit DTEFoundation.com to learn more.

- [Announcer] Business Leaders For Michigan, dedicated to making Michigan a top 10 state for jobs, personal income and a healthy economy, Nissan Foundation and viewers like you.

(exciting music) - Hi, I'm Satori Shakoor.

Welcome to One Detroit Arts and Culture.

Happy to have you with me.

I'm at the Gallery at Brewery Park, where artist Dionne Tripp is showing her wall sculpture exhibit through April 1st.

Coming up, we hear from Ukrainian band Dakha Brakha during this traumatic time.

Then, Olayami Dabls is the 2022 Kresge Eminent Artist.

We catch up with him on how he created the Mbad African Bead Museum.

Plus, we check in with the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra during their search for a new music director.

And later on in the show, we'll get to see the DSO Civic Youth Ensemble perform.

But first, the war in Ukraine connects to us in Detroit in so many ways.

Ukrainians and Ukrainian Americans number in the tens of thousands here and around the state.

Their culture touches all of us, including music.

One of Ukraine's leading bands has found its way to Detroit as part of the Concert of Color Series in recent years, seen on Detroit Public TV.

The group is called Dakha Brakha.

Concert of Colors founder Ismael Ahmed checked in with them in their homeland.

One Detroit's Bill Kubota has the story.

- [Bill] Dakha Brakha liken to Russia's Pussy Riot, persecuted for their fight against political oppression, but Dakha Brakha, they're Ukrainian with a Detroit connection.

- The music is out there.

It has a Ukrainian traditional base, but goes every which way.

They're big into jazz.

They're big into rock.

They even do a little bit of Ukrainian rap, but it also has a very classical sound.

It's really hard to pinpoint the style because it's their own style.

(singing foreign language) - [Bill] Dakha Brakha's made appearances in the local Concert of Colors music series, seen here on Detroit Public TV, thanks to Ismael Ahmed.

Ahmed created the series.

He got to know the band through his public radio program.

- Given that I work at WDET and do This Island Earth, which is I guess a world music show, but a show that is allowed to go everywhere.

That's unusual for radio.

It's a good fit, and so I play that quite a bit.

(upbeat music) - [Bill] Performances like these, perhaps at risk.

Part of the culture many Ukrainians believe the Russians would like to do away with.

Ahmed's talking with the band's artistic director, on the line from Ukraine.

- Yes, have you been affected by the bombing?

- [Iryna] We can hear it all the time.

Sometimes it's close and sometimes it's far, but my house is still safe.

- I was talking to Iryna Gorban.

She's very much part of the band.

She travels with them.

She faces everything they face.

- [Iryna] We sleep in the bathroom or in the basement because we have the air alarms all the time.

- [Bill] Dakha Brakha has been protesting war in the Putin regime during their shows for years.

The band members are hunkered down in undisclosed locations.

They're okay for now.

(upbeat music) - It's a mainly women's group, and so I don't think men could make that kind of music.

They conquer their audiences over and over and the word spreads.

They're now a major world performing group.

Turns out that their agent Bill Smith is an old friend of mine, and he is a, I don't know, a discoverer.

He finds some of the best music on the planet, and not your normal music.

So he's the one that turned me on to them.

(singing foreign language) - [Bill] Dakha Brakha first toured North America in 2013, returning often until COVID hit.

There were plans to come to the US again in late March, but then came war.

- They are literally shelling right now, and one of the things I was warned is that they might have to duck for cover in the middle of the interview, or maybe it wouldn't come off.

The Russian authorities are trying to take down internet and all possibility of communications, so this was done under duress, but they are brave and Iryna is brave.

They want the world to know what's going on.

- [Iryna] I don't know how to explain this, but people get used to it.

So now we are all in this kind of stress when we try to be united, try to be calm, try to help each other.

We really believe that as long as we can stay here we will stay here.

I tell this now, because now I'm like calm and confident, but in several hours, I don't know what will be, so maybe I change my mind in several hours and we'll keep here this night or tomorrow.

So nobody knows.

(singing foreign language) - Whether it's Concert of Colors or This Island Earth on WDET, we're living in a world where this music is being made where horrible things are going on and people are struggling, but they're also struggling to tell us, and they do that through their music.

Music is a powerful force.

I'm happy that I'm able to help get out the word through these musicians.

We have to understand what kind of world we live in, and we can't stay numb to things like starvation and refugees and immigration problems and war.

I mean, literally there is war happening all over the planet, some smaller wars, some huge wars like this one.

We've got to be involved, and the music helps us to do that.

(singing foreign language) Do you think that you will ever be playing music again?

- [Iryna] For sure.

Not any doubts, and I think we will do it even sooner than it's expected, because I'm sure now the world needs Ukrainian culture to understand the difference between Ukrainian and Russian people and to see the deepness of Ukraine and Ukrainian culture.

- They are a direct target, and they've been told that.

They are one of the most powerful voices in Ukraine against what is happening both culturally and politically, and so they do these interviews at a great, great risk.

Well, we'd love to have you back in Detroit.

- [Iryna] Thank you, thank you.

We are really also just, we miss the US so much because of these two years of break.

It's really very moving and very, very great to hear this.

(exciting music) (audience cheering) - Let's head to Mbad African Bead Museum, where the 2022 Kresge Eminent Artist Olaymi Dabls dives into the meaning behind the African symbols, artwork and mirrors covering the houses that make up the museum on the corner of Grand River Avenue and Grand Boulevard.

- I'm a storyteller, which is a title that comes out of Africa and most cultures who lived close to the land.

They had people who told stories.

The concept of being an artist is relatively new within the last maybe 500 years.

Prior to that, each culture had people that were there and their responsibility was to communicate through what that particular culture group called its symbols, their colors.

And now today, all of that has just been thrown into one big pot and referred to as art, but that term is deceptive because it's not art.

It's more material culture than it is art.

But when you talk about material culture, you're actually talking about the culture group, the group itself, what they have left behind.

And most cultures that would be defined as art is destroyed if it does not serve the purpose, because it's made to solicit and engage an ideal art concept, and if that's not achieved, no one would just keep it around because of the aesthetics of it.

It's my responsibility to remind people from which they came, and since I'm dealing with the African experience, it meant that for a period of let's say 500 years, our history, our culture has been deliberately ignored, destroyed or claimed by others.

It was only when I discovered African bead culture and I had to figure out what will I be able to talk about without getting sidetracked with the people being afraid of what I'm trying to introduce them to.

And that's what the beads came in.

There's no difference in the use of beads, textiles, carving, sculpture, mask and utilitarian items in Africa.

They all served the same purpose.

So that's why I gravitated towards beads.

Now that I got these beads, how do I get people to take note?

Even the displaying of the beads, I have to go through it and uneducate myself because we based everything we are doing based on the European model.

The European model says that if you got a museum, things have to be presented in a certain way.

You gotta have captions.

You gotta have a staff to research the caption.

So I had to deal with this ideal, do I want to meet European museum standards or do I want to display these beads so my people could see them?

So I had to manufacture it so others could see it without me saying a word, and yet communicating with them.

Then it dawned on me that the Europeans who traveled throughout Africa, all the things they deemed to be significant that they collected and stole were given to them.

There was no captions on these items.

So once I got over that hurdle, then I'm able to display the beads and where people can come in here and just enjoy the energy of having them around.

It's still me, but I'm displaying who I am to people so they can see what I know.

So I said okay, I need some curb appeal.

So I gotta put stuff on these buildings that would appeal to the palate of African people.

So now I'm still using symbols.

I'm using images that have been in our cultures for thousands of years.

When I began to put these images on the building, I was attracting anyone who saw them.

So I said okay, now I have all this information in me.

I've spent 15 years at the African American Museum studying the history of Africans in this country and I spent another 15 years studying the history of Africans on the continent.

I'm not so much concerned about legacy as impacting, influencing people during my own lifetime.

My concern is to make sense out of the nonsense stuff that I am in and I'm beginning to figure my way out of, and I know that someone else will be able to unwrap some other information.

It is a continuation.

It took us about 400 years to get here, but each generation moves us even closer back to from which we came, 'cause there's nothing else around here like this.

That means that it found the place in the community and it coexists with everything around it.

- To learn more about Kresge Arts, go to OneDetroitPBS.org.

Next up, the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra has got a few performances left this season and they're on the search for a new music director.

WRCJ's Peter Whorf caught up with the executive director of the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra to talk about the exciting changes to come.

(classical music) - Sarah Calderini is the new executive director of the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra.

You know, I've really noticed the growth of the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra in this past decade, especially the increased outreach and the many places that the orchestra has taken its its music and its culture beyond even the beautiful concert stages at Hill Auditorium and the Michigan Theater.

What's in the plans in that area?

- I think we are all kind of chomping at the bit to be back at the farmer's markets for one thing, and I think these gifts that we can give back to the community of sort of these free and serendipitous moments of happening upon an ensemble while you're buying your produce.

We've started to expand a new program into the Ann Arbor public schools called MY Song.

It's a way to reach kids in a much more intimate way in terms of the groups are smaller, but teaching kids sort of the principles of music as a compliment to their music education in the classroom and helping them realize that they can be musicians and they can be creators, and we're really looking forward to expanding that, and that's a whole new program.

But when we can get the kids back in Hill Auditorium, sitting there with the Ann Arbor Symphony with these incredible musicians, inspiring and reaching and interacting and engaging with them in that way, we can't wait for that.

We're so honored and privileged to have these opportunities for touch points beyond the stage, as you say, and engaging with people in such meaningful ways, and we're continuing to explore some new program offerings in that avenue, and we'll have to leave it at that for now and stay tuned for some exciting stuff.

- Now it is a very important period in the history of the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra when you're in the midst of a new music director search.

What's kind of the talk, if you can kind of pull the curtain back a little bit and let us have a peek inside of your view and maybe others you're talking with of what makes a great music director for the A2SO?

- It has forced us to do a lot of soul searching about who we are, where we've been, who we want to be moving forward and how do we identify that in a music director.

It's gotta be someone who is willing to perhaps broaden the repertoire to new artists, to underrepresented composers, continue to make the investment in the old masters but helping to broaden our audience by introducing some new complimentary works.

We really believe rising tides lifts all ships, and as an organization and an entity, we've got to be committed to being more accessible, to creating impact in meaningful ways, and that includes our current audience as well, as new audience members that don't yet even know about us.

- How large a part in the music and the program planning process do you think your new music director will be able to have, because you're auditioning during these concerts during the season and presumably somewhere towards the end of the season, it'll be time to decide.

So where does the music director then jump on that speeding train?

- Next season will be mostly planned, and already mostly is.

I'm really excited about it.

So whoever ends up joining us in the fall will have some impact.

We're leaving enough room for them to put enough of their stamp on it, but we can't possibly wait, just from a production standpoint, a planning standpoint.

Moving forward, that of course will be one of their primary responsibilities, is to continue to propel the repertoire forward, again, I say in meaningful and inclusive ways.

So I'm really excited.

I'm so long on a bright future for this orchestra.

It's a really magical group of people doing really wonderful things.

- We're always in a mood of excitement to hear what's gonna be on next, so what's next?

- We have a really exciting spring plan.

April brings a music director candidate Earl Lee for Tchaikovsky's Four and a fabulous piece by Carlos Simon.

We can't get enough of him, speaking of contemporary composers.

And then all the way into May, which is a long, long season for the Ann Arbor Symphony typically, is Andreas Delfs with Beethoven's Violin Concerto featuring our own concert master, and Dvorak Number Six, which will be really fabulous.

I don't know anybody who doesn't love Dvorak, and it's a wonderful way to end the season.

So we're looking forward to it and I hope people will join us.

- Sarah Calderini is executive director of the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra.

Sarah, best of luck in the music director search and best of luck in your role leading the orchestra through the rest of the season and into next year.

- Thank you so much.

It's so exciting, and I hope to see you all at the symphony.

(classical music) - Thank you for joining me on One Detroit Arts and Culture.

I'd like to give a special shout out to the Gallery at Brewery Park for having me here.

I'm telling you, come check this place out.

You will love it.

Also, as a Kresge fellow myself, I'm excited to say they have a special coming up tonight at 9:00 p.m.

It's Spotlight Detroit: Short Films Featuring Kresge Artist Fellows in Literary and Visual Arts.

Stay tuned for a sneak peek, followed by a marvelous performance by the DSO Civic Youth Ensemble from Detroit Performs: Live From Marygrove.

Sit back and let the music fill your soul.

See you next week.

(exciting music) (bright classical music) - [Announcer] You can find more at OneDetroitPBS.org or subscribe to our social media channels and sign up for our One Detroit newsletter.

- [Announcer] From Delta faucets to Behr paint, MASCO Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world experience and enjoy their living spaces.

MASCO, serving Michigan communities since 1929.

- [Announcer] Support for this program is provided by The Cynthia and Edsel Ford Fund for Journalism and Detroit Public TV, The Kresge Foundation.

- [Announcer] The DTE Foundation is a proud sponsor of Detroit Public TV.

Among the state's largest foundations committed to Michigan-focused giving, we support organizations that are doing exceptional work in our state.

Visit DTEFoundation.com to learn more.

- [Announcer] Business Leaders For Michigan, dedicated to making Michigan a top 10 state for jobs, personal income and a healthy economy, Nissan Foundation and viewers like you.

(exciting music) (gentle tones)