For 25 years, I have had the privilege of making music with the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir. An anniversary like this naturally invites you to look backward — to remember the performances, people and moments that have shaped your life.
But music has taught me that honoring the past cannot only be an act of remembrance. Music survives because people keep making it.
That feels especially important as I think about Mood Indigo on Indiana Avenue.
Long before many of the venues and cultural institutions Indianapolis knows today, Indiana Avenue was alive with music. It was a center of Black business, culture, entertainment and community, with jazz as part of its heartbeat. Musicians including Wes Montgomery, Freddie Hubbard, J.J. Johnson and Slide Hampton emerged from an Indianapolis musical culture whose influence reached far beyond our city.
That history deserves to be known and preserved. But Indiana Avenue should not exist in our civic imagination only in the past tense.
A musical legacy is most powerful when another generation can encounter it — not simply by reading the names of those who came before, but by walking into a room and hearing extraordinary music for themselves.
That requires us to think about access.
Those of us who lead and participate in arts organizations spend considerable time thinking about what we will perform. We should spend just as much time thinking about who gets to be in the room when we perform it.
Ticket prices matter. Location matters. Repertoire matters. And whether someone believes an arts organization is meant for them matters.
After 25 years with the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir, I have seen how quickly assumptions about choral music can disappear once someone experiences it firsthand. A choir can sing alongside an orchestra one evening and inhabit an entirely different musical world the next. The boundaries we place around musical genres are often much firmer in our minds than they are in the music itself.
My own musical life has never fit particularly neatly inside one genre. Many of the musicians who have shaped me most profoundly came from very different musical traditions. Perhaps that is why bringing these worlds into the same room feels less like crossing boundaries to me than recognizing how porous those boundaries have always been.
Jazz understands this particularly well.
One of the things I love most about jazz is that it leaves room for something to happen. Musicians listen, respond, take risks and build on what they hear from one another. The music may begin on the page, but what happens in the room belongs to the people making it together.
Choral music asks much the same of us.
That is part of what makes Mood Indigo, the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir’s Oct. 10 performances, especially meaningful to me as I celebrate my 25th season with the organization.
We will welcome New York jazz guitarists Frank Vignola and Vinny Raniolo to Indianapolis for performances bringing together jazz, choral music and musicians whose lives have traveled through different corners of the musical world.
And we will do it on Indiana Avenue, at the historic Madam Walker Theatre.
I don’t view our presence there as an attempt to recreate what Indiana Avenue once was. Its history is too significant—and belongs to too many people — for any single performance or organization to claim.
Instead, I see it as an opportunity to participate respectfully in what Indiana Avenue has always represented: a place where people gather, musicians create, and culture remains alive because people continue contributing to it.
That is also why we are making Mood Indigo free to attend, with an opportunity for those who wish to make a pay-what-you-can donation. For my 25th anniversary, I can think of few things more meaningful than removing a barrier that might otherwise keep someone from walking through the door.
Perhaps that person already loves jazz but has never heard the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir. Perhaps a longtime Choir patron will hear Frank and Vinny and discover something new. Perhaps someone will come because Indiana Avenue means something to their family.
Perhaps someone else will walk through those doors for the first time and discover the remarkable legacy of Madam C.J. Walker, the entrepreneur and philanthropist whose vision helped shape both Indiana Avenue and the institution whose historic theatre we will make music in.
Perhaps a young musician will sit in the audience and hear a possibility they had not considered before.
We cannot know what any single performance will set in motion. That is one of the beautiful things about live music.
Indianapolis has an extraordinary musical inheritance. We honor the people who created it by telling their stories accurately and preserving the places and history that shaped our city.
But preservation alone is not enough.
The next chapter of Indianapolis’ musical story will be written by the people making music here now, by the people willing to support it, and by the people who decide — sometimes for the very first time — to walk into the room and listen.
After 25 years, I remain grateful to be one of them, and more certain than ever that the music matters most when we make room for others to join us.
Mood Indigo will be presented Oct. 10 at the Madam Walker Theatre. Admission is free, and pay-what-you-can donations are welcome. Information and tickets are available at indychoir.org.
Michael Davis is Assistant Artistic Director of the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir, where he is celebrating his 25th anniversary during the Choir’s 90th season. A longtime Indianapolis musician and arts leader, Davis has spent more than two decades helping shape the Choir’s artistic work and expanding the ways audiences experience choral music.
