ATLANTA, GA — Music in Common, the nonprofit that produces The Black Legacy Project, announces the 2023 launch of the Black LP touring band. Online auditions are open now through February 15th.  

The Black Legacy Project is a musical celebration of Black history to advance racial solidarity, equity, and belonging. The Black LP is a national project produced in partnership with community stakeholders at the local level.  As it travels the country, the Black LP brings together Black and White artists and artists of ALL backgrounds to record present day interpretations of songs central to the Black American experience and compose originals relevant to the pressing calls for change of our time. Community roundtable discussions help inform how these songs are interpreted and written. Project co-directors, Trey Carlisle and Todd Mack, were recently honored as 2022 CNN Champions for Change.

After more than a year of development in the wake of the killings of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd, The Black Legacy Project kicked off in September 2021 in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. The Project has since traveled to Los Angeles, the Ozarks of Northwest Arkansas, and Denver, and will launch in the Mississippi Delta, Atlanta, and Boise in 2023. In each community the Black LP travels to, songs addressing a theme connected to the local community are reimagined and composed.  The Project is funded by a long list of local, regional, and national partners including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships. 

To date, fifteen songs have been recorded for the project, twelve of which will be released on The Black Legacy Project, Vol. 1 on April 3, 2023 - the 55th Anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. King was assassinated the next day. A second album, The Black Legacy Project, Vol. 2, is slated for a February 2024 release. The Black Legacy Project, Vol. 1 & 2 will also be released as a double vinyl record in 2024. A docuseries of the project is being produced with a new episode from each of the initial seven communities previously mentioned.

A nationwide call for musicians is being conducted to assemble a band to tour behind the upcoming debut album and subsequent releases.  The first tour is scheduled for late May throughout the southeastern United States. Auditions opened in early January and submissions have been steamrolling in ever since. “It’s been heartening and inspiring to see the incredible response to the Black LP band,” says Music in Common executive director, Todd Mack, “and we can’t wait to bring this moving and powerful show to audiences across the country.”

Interested musicians can audition online at www.theblacklegacyproject.org/audition and are encouraged to do so sooner rather than later. Auditions will close on February 15th and final band member selections will be made by the end of the month.

The Black Legacy Project is produced by Music in Common, an Atlanta-based nonprofit that strengthens, empowers, and connects communities through the universal language of music. Since 2005, Music In Common has directly served thousands of people in nearly 400 communities across the globe and across religious, ethnic, cultural, socio-economic, and racial axes. The organization was founded by singer-songwriter and producer, Todd Mack, in response to the murder of his friend and bandmate, Daniel Pearl, the Wall St. Journal reporter abducted by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002.