New BMRE Performances

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Harris Theater for Music and Dance

The Center presented its New Black Music Repertory Ensemble on March 15 in one of its most ambitious programs to date. The event was scheduled to coincide with the opening of the 2006 joint conferences of the Center and the Society for American Music.

The program opened with an extended set of music that demonstrated the physical and musical development of the American banjo. Cheick Hamala Diabate, a Malian musician now residing in Washington, D.C., exhibited his virtuosity by performing a traditional Malian song on the ngoni, a stringed gourd instrument and one of several African instruments that were predecessors of the banjo. The set …