BmoreArt

Adashi hated the idea that Freddie Gray would be forgotten to most people, especially in Baltimore. Through music and art, he wanted to change that. “I noticed that nothing was happening on the 19th, the day that Freddie Gray died,” Adashi said. “That’s why I hold Rise Bmore on that day. It’s not on the 12th, when he was brutally beaten. It’s not on the 27th, which is when some people identify the Baltimore Uprising as having started. It’s about a human being who should be 35 this year, who should be here.”

Two days before the 2025 Rise Bmore, music wafted through the open window of Adashi’s Federal Hill rowhome. Under bookcases with titles including The New Jim Crow and works by Angela Davis and Toni Morrison, vocalist Sanahara Ama Chandra sat in front of a music stand while Adashi played an upright piano, the music from the keys a blend of jazz, soul, and classical. 

For this year’s concert, Adashi stripped down Rise’s instrumentation to include only piano and cello, played by LAVENA, who is Adashi’s wife. The choral movements became songs. “I really value things that can feel intimate and epic at the same time,” Adashi said. He included local performers who have a certain storytelling quality to their performance. Who, when “you’re looking at their face when they’re performing, you feel like you’re alone in a room with them,” Adashi said. 

Chandra had the unenviable task of turning a work for many voices into one for a soloist, and the sheet music she read from had eight staves. In “Alpha & Omega,” one of the portions that she prepared to perform, Cage Conley’s sparse words allude to the bridge in Selma, Alabama and the bodies of the marchers that crossed there on March 7, 1965. Coupled with the notes in a minor key that illuminate the words legs, ribs, fingers, is the repetition of barack. In this instance, the word is used as the Arabic and Swahili translation of “blessing,” but its reference to Barack Obama, the first Black president of the United States, cannot be ignored. 

Over post-rehearsal coffee, Chandra recalled the days after Freddie Gray’s death, when thousands took to the intersection of Pennsylvania and North avenues, near where Gray was taken into custody. Chandra was part of a group that practiced capoeira, a Brazilian martial art and form of dance created by enslaved people as self-defense, during the protest. In Baltimore, she said, “we have self-definition. They wanted to call it a riot. We called it an uprising. They wanted to say he was one thing, but we knew the truth.” The “they” Chandra referred to included leaders and media outlets who portray Baltimore as crime-filled and murderous (despite the declining murder rate) and who refuse to acknowledge the complicated, multi-faceted totality of Gray’s story.    

For Chandra, Rise Bmore is a ritual. “Rise creates a space for people who want to know, who want to stay connected, who want to remember,” she said. “That’s what artists do. We hold on, we stop time.”

Chandra and Adashi agreed that remembering is itself an act of protest. “Right now, major figures are being erased from government websites,” Adashi said, alluding to the redacting of information the Trump administration deemed related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). “It’s a scary time, but it doesn’t have to be as scary if you have faith in the community. We’re not going anywhere. We’re not forgetting.”

That sense of community is one stoked each year at Rise Bmore, Adashi said. “I’ve never witnessed any clout chasing at Rise Bmore. It’s a very communal, familial vibe. It’s not just a room full of activists—you get different kinds of people who are looking to put a hand on the experience of remembering his death.”        

On Saturday, April 19, people gathered at 2640 Space, a former church sanctuary that is not afraid to show the effects of time. Peeling paint pock marks the plaster walls. In some places, plaster has fallen away in large swaths, revealing wood planks and stone of the exterior walls. 

Rise Bmore has moved locations—from its first iteration at the Mount Vernon United Methodist Church to West Baltimore’s Union Baptist Church, where Frederick Douglass once spoke—and took place virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic. For the past few years, 2640 Space has become its home.

What was once the altar at 2640 Space is now a black-curtained stage. On April 19, the wood floor in front of it held the performers’ chairs, microphones, and music stands. On stage, a video screen displayed an image of a mural of the crinkled face of a young Black man—Gray. In the mural by the artist Nether that overlooks where Gray was taken into custody, protestors flank either side of Gray’s face. On the left, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and others who would have marched on Selma; on the right, protesters from the 2015 Baltimore Uprising. 

Audience members took seats in the lines of metal folding chairs or drifted through the space. Some were students or colleagues of the performers or had heard about the concert from neighbors. Others had marched earlier during the 50501 protests or are members of West Wednesdays, a group that has protested for 600 consecutive weeks in memory of Tyrone West, who was killed by Baltimore and Morgan State police a year before Gray. West’s art was on display in the back of the church.

Stacey MacFarlane chose Rise Bmore over her tickets to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra that evening. “It was the heart of what this event was about that did it for me,” MacFarlane said. “Now more than ever, I want to be hand-in-hand, arm-in-arm. We need to look at who is sitting next to us or across the aisle, who’s there with us. I don’t want to feel isolated. I don’t want to feel alone.” 

Erricka Bridgeford, co-organizer of the Baltimore Peace Movement, whose letter to Baltimore is the invocation that begins each Rise Bmore, said that the concert serves as a reminder of why she loves her home city. “Baltimore looks broken, Baltimore is misunderstood. Baltimore is pitied and told what it can’t do,” she said. “We are always rising ourselves. I love that we have not forgotten [Freddie Gray], and we keep saying his name.”

One hundred audience members quickly overflowed the metal chairs encircling the performance area. People pulled extra chairs from racks, filling in the archways that lined the sanctuary.  

During the panel discussion that began the evening, activist Aaron Maybin spoke about the challenges, new and old, that exist in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death and urged the crowd to stay involved. Maybin is chair of the Baltimore Citizen Review Board, a community-led oversight panel that reviews police misconduct, has the power to subpoena documents, and carries out independent investigations. The city is shutting down the board in the wake of Baltimore regaining control of its police department. “I am an example, as much as I hate to say this, of token representations of progress,” Maybin said. “We’re in a war, and it was foolish of us to think that there was a peace treaty.”

Moderator Brittani McNeill asked the audience, “How many of you didn’t know this was happening?” A vast majority raised their hands.  

When the discussion finished, overhead lights dimmed. Adashi took his place at a keyboard facing the audience, instead of tucked into the corner as is typical of a pianist. Bridgeford read the invocation from a scroll. Each of the vocalists rose to take their place.

During the first sung portion of Rise, Chandra’s voice sprang from the depths of her range—“Rise back up.” The audience began to snap in rhythm as Chandra repeated the words. 

Audience members stayed connected with the performers, breathing with vocalists as they began to sing, letting out exhalations and murmurs before clapping when each movement finished. After a movement in which the soloist inhabited the persona of John Lewis, someone called out, “Yes!” Vocalist J Pope rose from her heels as her voice soared into the rafters, expressing the grief of a mother who lost her child to police violence. Some leaned forward, chins in their hands.  

When the work concluded and Adashi lifted his hands from the keyboard, the audience sprang to its feet, cheering. The performers placed hands over their hearts and bowed. A sweating Adashi stepped to the microphone. “Thank you all,” he said. “We’ll see you next year.”