A powerful concert to honor Black History Month

 Move over, Carnegie Hall, because Freeport Memorial Library had Napoleon Revels-Bey and his troupe of consummate musicians give a rich concert in its auditorium last Sunday afternoon.

Revels-Bey on drums, Bryan Carrott on vibraphone, Iman Pascal on steel pan, Bret Brentler on bass, and Marcus Perciani on keyboard carried the audience on a rollicking tour of musical genres, from the driving rhythms of the rhumba, to Louis Armstrong’s classic jazz version of “When the saints go marching in,” to the low-slung romance of “Bésame mucho” – just for starters.

 The five performers rolled effortlessly through multiple musical styles and kept the audience nodding, foot-tapping, and for several selections, dancing. The hour-and-a-half program glided by as if time had suspended itself.

 Revels-Bey made it clear that the program honored Black History Month. He explained that the mix of Spanish with African rhythms in several of the selections predated Christopher Columbus’s landing in 1492, because long before that, Africans migrated into the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula and inhabited Toledo, Córdoba, and Seville.

“We were called Moors then,” Revels-Bey explained. The Moors’ exciting blend of musical forms crossed the Atlantic Ocean with the European explorers, who brought with them Black people, both slave and free.

 Revels-Bey’s explanations between pieces imparted essential information – that today’s full drum set with tom-tom and snare drums originated among Black musicians in New Orleans; that Louis Armstrong got his start when he was adopted out of a reform school and given cornet lessons; that “Soul Burst” was recorded by Latin jazz vibraphonist Cal Tjader; that Stevie Wonder’s first name was a carryover from his early start as a performer at age 12; that Revels-Bey got his first Broadway gig playing drums for the musical “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”

 But the explanations were kept short. The afternoon was about music, music, music, and it seemed utterly natural that impromptu dances broke out during several of the pieces. Late in the concert, a conga line formed during a dynamic rendition of Bill Withers’ “Just the Two of Us.” A seven-year-old student of Revels-Bey’s named Abraham Hepburn leaped into the line behind the conga leader, adding claps and dips to the movement and capping off the piece with a high-energy solo full of leaps and twists, surrounded by admiring adults.

 After “Just the Two of Us,” Revels-Bey commended his fellow musicians on their capacity to read off of each other and improvise as needed to cover unexpected moments in the music. Then the group threw themselves into a rousing final piece that Revels-Bey called “Calypso in the Style of South Freeport.”

 It was an afternoon of complete musical satisfaction.

 After it was done, while the band musicians packed up, Abraham Hepburn’s smiling mother, Michelle, explained that the Hepburns live in Hempstead and that Abraham is a first-grader at Whispering Pines Seventh-Day Adventist School in Old Westbury.

The audience members went to hug the band members, and then drifted out of the auditorium in relaxed, chatty clusters, taking with them the smooth glow of the pieces they had enjoyed.

Revels-Bey has a musical education program based in Uniondale called Nassau Performing Arts (see box). The four musicians who performed with Revels-Bey on Sunday are independent area musicians.