Good Friday Musical Meditation

Who: Pine Street Church Music Program
What: Live performance of Stevie Wonder's entire album; Songs in the Key of Life
Where: Pine Street Church, 1237 Pine St. Boulder, CO
When: Friday April 14 @ 7:00pm 
Contact: david@pinestreetchurch.net

Pine Street Church, its band, and music program are supremely excited to announce our fourth annual "Good Friday Musical Meditation". Past year's repertoire include live performances of Ray LaMontagne’s album Till the Sun Turns Black, Kid A by world-renowned British band Radiohead and Song to a Seagull by Joni Mitchell. This year we will be performing Stevie Wonder's entire album; Songs in the Key of Life. The performance will take place on Friday April 14th, Good Friday, at 7:00pm at Pine Street Church. Admission to this event is free, however donations are graciously appreciated and will go towards music scholarships for Pine Street Church community outreach programs; Off Broadway School of Fine Arts and the Off Broadway Preschool. 
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Stevie Wonder - Songs in the Key of Life

"Just because a man lacks the use of his eyes doesn't mean he lacks vision," Stevie Wonder once said, a warning to any who doubted the potency of his imagination. In the first half of the Seventies, he had visualized an untried musical path, one that took him far from the assembly line pop of his "Little Stevie, the Boy Genius" era during the early days of Motown. This road ultimately led to 1976's majestic Songs in the Key of Life, a multi-disc 21-song collection that would be the 26-year-old's crowning achievement. It's the sound of a creatively emancipated young artist coming into his own, surrendering himself to his ambition and harnessing his power and potential.
The high watermark of Wonder's so-called "classic period" – an unparalleled streak also encompassing Music of my Mind (1972), Talking Book (1972), Innervisions (1973), and Fulfillingness' First Finale (1974) – it was the culmination of all that came before. "He took his life experience and put them all into Songs in the Key of Life," Motown founder Berry Gordy reflected in a 1997 documentary. "And it worked."

The album offers an unadulterated glimpse into the legend's life. Wonder sings about his childhood on "I Wish" and integrates family recordings into the mix of "Isn't She Lovely," an ode to his daughter Aisha. Those hits, along with his chart-topping "Sir Duke," were wildly successful in their day. They've been continuously reimagined since: "Sir Duke" has been sampled by numerous hip-hop records, most notably as the opening to A Tribe Called Quest's classic "Footprints." The songs have been covered by artists as diverse as Lauryn Hill and Bonnie Wright.

The record was influential because it completely blew apart the confines of R&B. It features a tremendous amount of experimentation that dig into striking new sonic and lyrical territory. The meter-defying "Contusion" is essentially a jazz fusion standard. "Village Ghetto Land" is a slice of Baroque classical that presents an uncomfortably visceral exploration of ghetto life — "Families buying dog food now / Starvation roams the streets / Babies die before they're born / Infected by the grief." And "Black Man" is essentially a master class in race relations and alternative history set to surging funk.

It was a near miracle, and Wonder did it almost entirely on his own. Wonder wrote dedications and thank yous to more than 150 people, but he alone wrote, produced, arranged and composed pretty much everything on the album himself. That idea of the R&B auteur has left a significant legacy in modern music
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