HOUSTON…Are you ready to Jazz June during Black Music Month? Sunday, June 8th, 2025 from 5:00-7:00 PM, celebrate the power of Black music traditions with Community Music Center of Houston (CMCH). CMCH returns a second year to the historic Eldorado Ballroom at 2310 Elgin St., for its 10th Annual Legacy Project, in collaboration with Community Artists’ Collective to honor its visionary co-founder the late Ron Scales.
Legacy’s soulful concert lineup will feature Houston’s popular innovative Hip-Hop violinist Michael Prince, Musical Truth Choir, a professional development ensemble created by Tweed Smith, Too Laid Back plus Eddiev’s Band, and the Scott Joplin Chamber Orchestra founded by Dr. Anne Lundy, the second oldest Black chamber orchestra currently performing in the United States.
Additionally, the Legacy Project’s month-long art installation “Musical Scales: Balancing Black Music Practice, Lineage, and Sonic Inheritance,” will be on view in the Eldorado Ballroom’s Dupree Room. Featured artists include: Kaima Marie Akarue, Kanika Blair, Carolyn Crump, Marsha Dorsey-Outlaw and Charles Washington. On view June 8th through June 28, 2025.
The Legacy Project coincides with Solange Knowles’ Saint Heron project which curates, “Eldorado Ballroom Houston” series. The Houston native reimagines the possibilities of performance through music, movement, film, and cultural memory.
“Black Music Month was nationally recognized on June 7, 1979 and created by pioneering songwriter and record producer Kenny Gamble, one half of The Sound of Philadelphia, on-air radio personality and music activist Dyana Williams (then Gamble’s spouse), and Cleveland radio DJ Ed Wright. They met with President Jimmy Carter to declare June as “Black Music Month.” In 2000, Congress made that declaration law.”
Tweed Smith, director of Musical Truth says, “This event is a living archive created by Ron Scales, taught, remembered, and passed on by Dr. Anne Lundy and myself and those we are honoring.”
This year’s Legacy honorees were foundational to the creation of “The Society for the Preservation of Negro Spirituals” which was later rebranded as CMCH. Recipients are CMCH co-founders Ron Scales, and Patricia Johnson, Reverend Dr. William A. Lawson and his wife Audrey, and Dr. Clyde Owen Jackson. Each honoree will receive posthumous official recognition for their remarkable contributions.
The Legacy Project is funded in part by a grant from Texas Commission on the Arts, the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance and BIPOC Network & Fund. Admission is free and open to the entire community.
For more information: PH: 713-523-9710,
Email: cmch1@live.com Web: cmchouston.org
