To mark the 50th anniversary of Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life, CSSD is organizing a full-day symposium and accompanying concert.

The symposium and accompanying concert will reflect on the groundbreaking album’s insights into life in the wake of civil rights and decolonial movements across the African world, and on the legacies of Wonder’s hopeful vision of a future grounded in love and shared humanity. They will kick off a yearlong series of public events and study sessions that respond to the U.S. semiquincentennial and offer a critical counternarrative to officially sanctioned accounts of the country’s past by focusing on works with alternative anniversaries which illuminate the conditions and experiences of minoritized communities.

The symposium features four panels, each focusing on one side of Wonder’s four-sided album. Panels will bring together scholars and musicians for conversations that incorporate close listening and improvisational demonstrations. Themes broached in discussions will range from urban Black and brown impoverishment and jazz as a form of Black resistance to Black familial love and Global South solidarities. Panelists include Marcus J. Moore, LaFrae Sci, Samora Pinderhughes, Naomi Extra, Naima Cochrane, Immanuel Wilkins, Toshi Reagon, and Shana L. Redmond. The symposium will end with a jam session building off of the album’s bonus tracks, led by Dr. Guthrie Ramsey’s Musiqology, and a reception.

The symposium is held in partnership with The People’s Forum and co-sponsored by the Institute for Research in African American Studies/African American and African Diaspora Studies Department (IRAAS/AAADS) Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University.

Register for the symposium here.

As the grand finale, CSSD is proud to co-present, along with music incubator Pique-nique and live music events organizer Boom Collective and The Radio in the Orchard, a concert featuring musician Elliott Skinner. Organized as part of Pique-nique’s respected “Take Two” series, the concert will feature a listening session of Wonder’s album followed by a reinterpretation by Skinner. Blending soul, blues, folk, and rock, singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Elliott Skinner creates music that combines atmospheric vocals and rich instrumentation with an emphasis on personal storytelling. His work draws from the Black Radical Music Tradition, a lineage of Black artists who have used music to explore identity, confront social realities, and imagine new possibilities for freedom. Skinner’s music seeks to liberate minds, explore the many dimensions of love, and question the forces that divide us, ideas that make his reinterpretation of Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life particularly resonant. His debut EP, How Far We’ve Come, similarly explores life, struggle, growth, and self-reflection. Skinner has performed alongside artists including Chaka Khan, Jon Batiste, Chance the Rapper, and Leon Bridges