Last school year and over the summer, our students experienced several performance opportunities and continued private voice lessons with Eric Taylor.
Students recorded an album, Winter Greetings, released in November 2021. It features students from our in-school programs, Matrix neighborhood program, and Civic Choirs. The recording of this album was made possible through a grant received from Michigan Council for Arts & Cultural Affairs and the National Endowment for the Arts. Winter Greetings is available on Spotify, Amazon Prime Music, Apple Music, and other music platforms. It will also be available for download on our website.
Civic Choir records “Never Again” in PBS Documentary
This past summer, Keith Famie, an award-winning executive producer and owner of Visionalist Entertainment Productions, invited our Civic Choir students to record a song for his PBS documentary, Shoah Ambassadors. It pairs local Holocaust survivors with two young people from Detroit – Hailey Callahan, a graduate of Center for Creative Studies in Detroit, and Curtis Bates, a lyricist-rap artist from Detroit. The film’s theme has the Holocaust survivors share their stories with Callahan and Bates and task them with becoming “Ambassadors” of these stories to share with the young generation, educating them so that a tragedy like the Holocaust never occurs again. Bates wrote and recorded two songs for the film and included our students in the recording of “Never Again.” Famie filmed Bates performing with DCC’s Civic Choir in the film’s final scene. It aired on PBS-Detroit in November and December 2021.