Join the Nashville Symphony and Music Director Giancarlo Guerrero this April for the world premiere of The Jonah People: A Legacy of Struggle and Triumph by the visionary composer Hannibal Lokumbe. Few artists have conveyed the African American experience as movingly and as powerfully as Lokumbe, who started as a jazz musician with Gil Evans, Elvin Jones, Art Blakey, and other greats. Bridging the worlds of jazz and classical music, he has written more than 150 works, many of which have paid tribute to civil rights leaders and iconic historical figures including Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., abolitionist John Brown, Malcolm X, and Anne Frank.

In The Jonah People, his first fully staged opera, Lokumbe calls upon his own family’s ancestry and the parable of Jonah and the Whale, finding commonality between Jonah and those who endured the Middle Passage from Africa to enslavement in the Americas. The Jonah People takes us on that journey, culminating in a celebration of those who persevered, and against all odds, maintained hope and resilience to become artistic, intellectual, scientific, literary, and spiritual visionaries whose contributions have changed our world forever.

Duke Ellington. Maya Angelou. Toni Morrison. Miles Davis. Marian Anderson. Harriet Tubman. Medgar Evers. LeBron James. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The list goes on.

None would exist without the journey, the struggles, and the lives of The Jonah People.