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In the early days of the international jazz collective known as the Freedom Riders celebrated vocal artist and educator Sarah Elizabeth Charles and her seven bandmates staged small shows for select audiences to get feedback on their new project.
Launched in 2025 as an outgrowth of the NYC Winter Jazzfest, the group sees its primary goal not as much as activism but amplification: to shed light on, and provide a deeply felt soundtrack for, the global civil rights movement.
Attending one of those shows was filmmaker Stanley Nelson Jr., who made the acclaimed 2010 PBS “American Experience” documentary “Freedom Riders” (2010). It’s about the 13 civil rights crusaders (seven Black, six white, including future congressman John Lewis) who spawned a campaign within a broader movement, starting in May 1961, by riding buses to the Jim Crow South. Their goal was to test a recent Supreme Court decision that integrated interstate travel on buses and trains.
Having lived in that space for years, Nelson was especially qualified to comment on what Charles and her bandmates were trying to achieve and how they were going about it. “I don’t know him very well,” Charles says of Nelson, “but in my experience with him, he’s not going to wear his emotions on his sleeve or tell you he’s excited about something he’s not excited about. He’s not going to lie to you. He’s very candid. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but it was something to the effect of, “You’re on the right path. Just keep doing what you’re doing.”
And so they have, via original arrangements and ample improvisation with accompanying visuals, in venues ranging from small clubs like New York City’s Joe’s Pub and Le Poisson Rouge to Le Festival International de Jazz in Montréal. On Oct. 2, they’ll appear at Symphony Center with acclaimed guest vocalists Kurt Elling and Lizz Wright. The ensemble is led by music director Ben Williams on bass, with Charles on vocals, Makaya McCraven on drums, Carmen Staaf on piano, Sasha Berliner on vibraphone, Alfredo Colón on alto saxophone, Tomoki Sanders on tenor saxophone and Milena Casado on trumpet.
“We had extensive meetings at the inception of this project before we even had a first rehearsal,” Nelson says. “All of our intentional choices to be a part of it in the first place, and what the name Freedom Riders meant to each of us — what it invoked for us and whether it was the right name to go with in the first place. Because it bears a weight.
"One thing we settled on is that it’s important to say that by calling ourselves Freedom Riders, we are in no way attempting to compare what we are doing as musicians on the stage to what the Freedom Riders did in real life. The name is paying homage to their sacrifice, their bravery. These people were beaten. Some of them were killed.”
Besides spotlighting the tragedy and triumph of past heroes, Freedom Riders have a strong connection to the present. “There’s a very active campaign right now to erase parts of our history, including the struggle of the [original] Freedom Riders,” she says, “and so calling the initiative this name also holds up that history and forces us to talk about it.”
The Chicago-based Elling, one of several vocalists who has performed with the group on tour, will make his second appearance with the Freedom Riders at Symphony Center. Though the set list for the Chicago program hasn’t been announced, he knows he’ll sing an arrangement of Paul Simon’s “An American Tune,” which Elling first recorded in 2012 and again in 2018. It’s from Simon’s album “There Goes Rhymin’ Simon” (1973) and its lyrics speak to historical struggle, as well as the fraught current moment in America and elsewhere. “I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered,” the second verse begins. “I don’t have a friend who feels at ease/I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered/Or driven to its knees.”
“There’s a lot of despair that needs to be expressed [now],” Elling says. “But the chief thing I think our music is here for is to remind the audience — and ourselves — of our inherent nobility, and the grace of the moment, and that beauty still exists. And if we stick together and step forward together, we can conquer everything in sight. And if history is any lesson, the victory of our survival and the forward motion of human progress is kind of inevitable.”
On what she hopes audiences take from Freedom Riders performances, Charles is hesitant to foist expectations on anyone. She just hopes they feel something. And that what they hear feels genuine. “I don’t know what they’re going to feel because I don’t know where they’re coming to the performance from; I don’t know their experiences,” she says. “But I hope that it moves them in some kind of way. I hope they leave angry. I hope they leave crying. I hope they leave affirmed. I hope they leave excited. Apathy would be the worst thing.”
