Cellist Patrice Jackson has always stood out, taking top prize at the national 2002 Sphinx Competition, performing with multiple symphonies, contributing to Broadway musicals on NBC, and accompanying top stars such as Stevie Wonder, Kanye West and Alicia Keys.
She will stand out again at the heart of two Mississippi Symphony Orchestra concerts this fall – the “Symphony in the Community” matinee, 3:00 p.m. Sunday, November 10, at Cade Chapel Missionary Baptist Church in Jackson, and the Bravo Series’ “Emotional Depths” concert, 7:30 p.m. Saturday, November 16 at Jackson Prep’s Fortenberry Theatre and McRae Stage in Flowood. (Thalia Mara Hall is temporarily closed for repairs.)
The concerts, particularly the matinee at Cade Chapel, represent a homecoming of sorts for the artist, who grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, but whose family lineage is deeply steeped in Mississippi, in Jackson, and at that church. Her great-grandmother Gussie Seals and her grandmother Lucille Green made it their faith home and her mother Chakita Green grew up in the church and married her dad, Patrick Jackson of McComb, there.
Music and education are strong threads in Jackson’s DNA. Her dad played acoustic and electric bass; her mom, piano and clarinet; both taught in schools. Jackson is now associate professor of cello at the prestigious Berklee College of Music and Boston Conservatory at Berklee. She hopes to work with students during the week she’ll be in the capital city for the two concerts.
Jackson’s musical ancestry traces back generations, to her great-great-great grandfather who played the fiddle on the plantation where he was enslaved. “The way that my dad and my aunt told the story, I guess they just gave him a violin and he figured it out.… I can’t wrap my head around that.” Her great-grandfather was a blues guitarist, and her dad had his first guitar at age 3 or 4 and was in a local band with friends by middle school. He learned upright double bass as a high school senior and his scholarship to Jackson State put him in not only JSU bands, but also in position to sub and play with the then Jackson Symphony Orchestra. “The musical gene is definitely in the family.”
Her own musical journey started about age 2 1/2. “I was throwing tantrums while my mom was practicing piano, because she wouldn’t let me press the keys.” “Maybe she wants to play,” her dad said, convincing her mom to start teaching her.
At Jackson’s elementary school, string students all started the violin in 4th grade, and could choose another instrument in the 5th grade. Jackson, a 3rd grader, wanted to play cello and she didn’t want to wait. But that was the policy. When her father, an orchestra director in another school district, questioned it, the teacher suggested he teach her at home and speculated the youngster would never catch up with her other students. “I started cello in the 3rd grade in September and by January of that year, I was playing with her 4th and 5th graders, and then by my 4th grade year, I was playing with her 7th and 8th graders.”
She’d picked the cello because she’d seen Yo-Yo Ma on Sesame Street. “I was so fascinated.” By the time she saw him on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, it was, “I wanna do that.
“That sparked everything — just seeing Yo-Yo Ma doing it. And then, also just the fact that somebody told me ‘No’ early on.” That just made her want it more, and prepared her for life, she said, as often the only or one of the only Black string players in an orchestral settings and music camp, growing up.
She won her first concerto competition at 12 and soloed with the orchestra at 13. “Then, I started winning solo competitions around town, being the first Black person to do it.… I really enjoyed being a soloist, in the sense of just being in the forefront, but also playing with all these friends of mine.
“For me, it’s not about the limelight. It’s more just playing good music with friends and we’re all in it together.”
Jackson doesn’t classify herself as a classical cellist. “I’m a cellist. Who just happens to be Black.” She thought back to her first major nonclassical gig, on tour to promote Kanye West’s second album. “I was one of a few to be a part of his ‘band.’ He specifically wanted Black female string players, and he was very specific with that, because up to that point, whenever you saw these artists, and it doesn’t matter — hip hop, R&B, whatever — you really never saw anybody of color playing strings.… That was a game changer.”
Jackson recalled her first concert with the Mississippi Symphony Orchestra more than two decades ago. She was still a student at the Juilliard School, meeting MSO Conductor and Music Director Crafton Beck for the first time. “We just clicked,” she said, noting their genuine, mutual respect. He has high praise for her, too, feeling “an immediate connection.”
“It was a very heartfelt connection for her, when we invited her. For her, it was a homecoming, and for her family, a homecoming,” he said. With those Mississippi connections and talents that, two years later, would clinch the Sphinx competition at 19, “She brought us all of that.
“She is just an extraordinary musical personality and a brilliant intellect,” Beck said. “I hoped I would work with this woman many times in my life and tried to make that possible.”
“That concert was monumental,” Jackson said, with several of her elders watching her perform for their first, and their last time.
The last time she and Beck worked together was a concert in Ohio with the Lima Symphony Orchestra. He saw and heard in Jackson’s encore her total embrace of her own uniqueness and her cultural roots, “doing things only she can do on the cello,” he said, that gave voice to her people, culture and heritage through her instrument.
“It blew my mind away, and that’s where this project came from,” he said of the concert at Cade Chapel, where Jackson’s grounding in family and faith, and gospel’s grounding role in the Black community all come together.
At Cade Chapel, she’ll be performing solo, with guest pianist Terrance Evans, and with the Cade Chapel Choir, in a gospel tribute she arranged for the songs “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” and “For Every Mountain.” The concert program also features works by Joseph Bologne Chevalier Saint-Georges and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and four folk songs by composers Percy Grainger and Florence Price in dialogue.
A live, post-concert conversation between musicians and audience enhances the afternoon, fleshing out the experience with insights and background for deeper understanding and closer connections.
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Reminder: Matinee Venue
Cade Chapel Missionary Baptist Church — 1000 W. Ridgeway St., Jackson, MS 39213 — is the location for MSO’s “Symphony in the Community” concert at 3:00 p.m. on November 10, 2024. The informal concert is free and open to all. Pay-as-you can donations are welcome and appreciated.