Since 1973, the a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock has celebrated the full range of human experience through the power of the voice. It’s more than just the physical activity of singing, says core member Aisha Kahlil. She has come to believe that the most important work any of us can undertake is to “harness your own expression.”
“The best thing I can do is to expand my own consciousness,” she says by phone shortly after arriving in Boston for two sold-out 50th-anniversary performances this weekend at the Institute of Contemporary Art. “I try to work on that every day.”
“We’ve had healings, interactions, and conflicts since the dawn of time,” says Kahlil, who joined the group in 1981 after studying theater at Northeastern University and voice at the New England Conservatory of Music. “As long as we’re all vibrating on the same dimension, that’s when things can change.”
Founded by Bernice Johnson Reagon, who retired from the group in 2004, Sweet Honey in the Rock has welcomed 20 or so members through various personnel changes over time. The current group features original members Carol Lynn Maillard and Louise Robinson, both back in the fold after some years away; Nitanju Bolade Casel, Kahlil’s sister — they shared a dorm room at Northeastern — who joined Sweet Honey in 1985; and relative newcomer Romeir Mendez, a bassist, and the sole male in the group.
Kahlil says she was invited to join by former member Evelyn Harris, who spotted her while she was clearing tables in a vegetarian restaurant.
“This beautiful woman asked if I was a singer,” Kahlil says. To this day, she’s not sure how Harris knew.
As part of an ongoing series of 50th-anniversary performances that extends into next year, Sweet Honey will open its two shows in Boston this weekend with “Affirmations for a New World,” a 30-minute symphony written in collaboration with Dr. Bill Banfield in the mid-2000s. A composer, musician, and lifelong educator who was recently honored with the prestigious President’s Call to Service Award at Bethel AME Church in Jamaica Plain, he founded the Africana Studies department at Berklee College of Music.
Under Banfield’s leadership, the team behind the Jazz Urbane Cafe is preparing to begin construction on a new jazz club in Roxbury’s Nubian Square. In the meantime, Jazz Urbane has presented a series of concerts at the ICA, including this weekend’s shows.
Banfield says he first met the women of Sweet Honey in the Rock in the late 1990s, when Duke University commissioned him to compose an opera called “Luyala.” Ambitious plans for “Affirmations,” for which Sweet Honey wrote the lyrics, were postponed by the financial crisis of the late 2000s, he says. They eventually performed it a few times in 2012 and 2013, but not since.
“We talked about creating a piece that spoke to the needs of the times,” Banfield recalls. “That’s their mantra — songs that deal with the triumphs and trials of the times.
“That’s what artists do,” he says. “They’re called upon to lift up the central themes of the living condition. The African notion is ‘the spirit will descend with a good song.’ When the people are connected with that collaborative spiritual notion, that’s when the spirit hits and truth happens.”
A native of Buffalo, Kahlil grew up not so much on the social-protest music of the Freedom Singers, Reagon’s original group, as with the jazz of John Coltrane and Miles Davis. During her second stint in Boston, while studying at NEC, she worked with Stan Strickland’s group Sundance and the Art of Black Dance and Music.
She also experienced some blatant racism after joining a local soul group as its only Black member. Despite drawing an enthusiastic audience to a club with the group’s covers of songs by Tina Turner and others, she was told by the owner that he’d been receiving complaints about the Black singer. He’d continue to pay her if she agreed not to show up, she recalls. To their credit, the rest of the band quit in solidarity.
As the world convulses with man-made crises, she says, Sweet Honey in the Rock has no choice but to carry on the business of uplifting their audiences. Their latest song, “Retribution,” is a funky, “Ball of Confusion”-style litany of contemporary troubles, from rancor to disease.
“It’s such a heavy period in humanity,” Kahlil says. “It’s like, ‘Can we have a break?’ ”
But growing weary is not an option, she says: “Heaven is now, in the present.”
Every day she reminds herself that we’re all just trying to do the best we can.
“It’s incredible to me.”
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com. Follow him @sullivanjames.