If it’s true that a serious musician doesn’t really know any genre boundaries, then it’s even truer for the two men who make up Black Violin.
These two Fort Lauderdale natives and graduates of the Dillard High School for the Performing Arts (now the Dillard Center for the Arts) have for 10 years been forging a career out of an original style of music that takes them from Bach to Tupac in the space of a downbow.
And to hear violist Wilner Baptiste, known as Wil Baptiste (previously Wil B), say it, the group’s merger of classical and hip-hop was nothing but natural.
“We were raised in the hood, and so for us, we were listening to Tupac, we were listening to Biggie, we were listening to all the hip-hop at the time. And in second period and fifth period, we were doing classical music,” Baptiste said. “When you start playing classical music, you hear string instruments a little bit different. I remember listening and watching TV, and I heard a violin melody. Now I’d seen this TV show hundreds of times, but for some reason, it sounded different.
“And I picked up my viola, and I just started trying to mimic whatever it is that I heard. It was something that definitely came naturally, and it was fun. And honestly, it kept us going, it kept us really into classical music. It actually helped, because we run into a lot of people that would say, ‘I used to play violin in fifth grade, but I stopped.’ And we just never stopped. We kept going and kept going, and incorporating hip-hop into it had a lot to do with that.”
Saturday night, Baptiste, 32, and his musical partner, violinist Kevin Sylvester (known as Kev Marcus), 31, will perform a benefit concert in Delray Beach for the Plumosa Foundation, which provides funds for Plumosa School of the Arts, a K-5 arts-centered school on Seacrest Boulevard. This afternoon, they’ll appear at the school for a concert and conversation with teachers and students.
“We are so fortunate that an act of this caliber will be performing in Delray Beach for an exciting community event,” Plumosa Foundation President James Mueller said in a prepared statement. “This talented duo will inspire the students of Plumosa. Their success fits into our school’s mission in promoting the vital importance of arts education for children and securing the resources to make it happen.”
Black Violin comes to the school with a long list of impressive accomplishments, including playing at one of President Barack Obama’s inaugural balls, accompanying Alicia Keys in a Billboard Awards performance in 2004, and appearing with American Idol Jordin Sparks at the U.S. Open last year. They have an extensive touring schedule that has them doing 200 shows a year, and can count as collaborators such current eminences as Kanye West and 50 Cent.
Their second album, Classically Trained, is a followup to their first album, Black Violin (2007), and on this one the group (which includes cellist Joseph Valbrun, drummer Jermaine McQueen and turntablist Dwayne Dayal in live performance) starts to explore some straight-ahead soul with a song like Interlude (Tiffany), in which Baptiste croons wistfully as he plucks the strings of his viola.
Baptiste said the school appearance is a reminder of how fortunate he and Sylvester were to find themselves in a music magnet program, which many school systems do not have or cannot afford.
“When talk to kids where they actually do have a string program, we stress that: ‘Listen, man, you are very, very fortunate.’ And we were fortunate to have a string program. I started playing in a summer school going into the eighth grade, and that was the last time they had that string program at that school. So I left that school …
“It does make a difference. The arts are important, and they’re cutting it everywhere,” he said. “So we tell them, ‘You’re lucky, so give it up for your teachers.’”
Baptiste and Sylvester met in the viola section of the Dillard orchestra, and while they went to different colleges — Florida State for Baptiste, Florida International for Sylvester — both majored in music performance, and both stayed in touch. They began working together again in Miami after college, when they joined a mutual friend at a studio and began producing hip-hop records.
“From there, it just grew into this thing, and we just continued making music together and to grow as artists and musicians,” Baptiste said. “And we had to figure out how to approach this thing. At the same time, it’s a fine line: We don’t want to be too classical or too hip-hop … We’re just being ourselves and it works.”
The two men took the name of their project from a 1965 record by the American jazz violinist Stuff Smith (1909-1967), who along with Stephane Grappelli and Joe Venuti was able to make his violin swing. But whereas Grappelli played with a lightness that seems classically French and beautifully suited for the playing of his friend, guitarist Django Reinhardt, Smith played aggressively, with gusto and force.
Baptiste said he and Sylvester, who switched to the violin from viola for the duo, though they were inspired by Smith’s example, don’t listen to a lot of other violinists and violists because they’re trying to keep their sound their own.
“Stuff Smith is obviously an inspiration; we love him. But I don’t necessarily want to play like him because that’s not my style. We have our own way, we have our own style,” he said. “Kevin is a violist, and as a classical musician, I can tell that he was a violist at some point because of the way that he plays the violin. To me, that’s amazing, because every violinist that is doing something different sounds alike; they have the same type of violin, the same type of cadence, and they flow the same.
“But Kevin, he’s a violinist now, and the way that he plays lends itself perfectly to what we’re doing,” Baptiste said.
What they’re doing is cuts like Brandenburg, which takes a passage from the Third Brandenburg Concerto of J.S. Bach as the jumping-off point for improvisations and beats, and A-Flat, in which Sylvester and Baptiste trade urgent riffs over a relentless minor-key harmonic framework and a beat augmented by military-style drum rolls.
“It’s cool that we can take a melody from a popular song on the radio and really make it sound different … that’s what we’re known for. But right now, we perform a majority of original songs on stage,” Baptiste said. “I do a few covers, like I’ll do ‘Radioactive,’ by Imagine Dragons, and I’ll do a little twist on that. But I would say 90 to 95 percent of what we do on stage is completely original. That’s ultimately what we’re trying to get at, and it’s just better for us.”
And with all that music comes plenty of message. One of the key things is how much work it takes to be a good musician, or to be a success at anything.
“With a classical instrument, it takes a while to make it sound decent,” Baptiste said. “We tell the kids, ‘You can’t just pick up a violin, a viola or whatever and just do what we do.’ It starts with all the boring stuff, all the stuff you think is boring.
“I know my scales; I can play every single scale. And that’s why I’m able to move around on my viola the way that I do: Because I know my scales, I don’t have to think about them when I’m playing. At that point, it’s just about feeling the music,” he said.
And telling them that is not as hard a sell as you might imagine.
“The kids look at us and say, ‘Oh, man, this is cool,’ so we’ve got their attention,” Baptiste said. “And we tell them, this is about thinking outside the box, taking something you’re passionate about and taking it further, and it’s a lot of hard work … It’s not necessarily about the most talented person, it’s about the person who works the hardest.”
One of their songs, Triumph, features a video of the group performing and teaching interwoven with scenes of a young kid facing the temptations of the street while being drawn to music. Baptiste says it’s somewhat autobiographical for both members of Black Violin.
“You’re walking around, and you’re seeing these guys that have the money, they have the cars … and then you start wondering, ‘Man, how do I get that? Maybe I should do that, what they’re doing, to get that.’ My childhood was like that, just seeing that kind of stuff.
“And that’s one of the biggest ways that classical music has helped us, helped me, is to feel that I’m special, that I’m part of something unique. There’s not a lot of black individuals that are doing this, and we’re doing it at a high level,” Baptiste said, adding that his many musical activities in high school kept him busy and occupied.
“That story in the video is very much my story and Kev’s story … It’s a story that says, listen: You can dream, you can see past all these things, even though it’s in your environment. You don’t have to see that and think that’s the only way out of here or this is the only way to be successful.
“Come on,” he said. “Dream bigger.”
BLACK VIOLIN appears at the Plumosa School of the Arts Auditorium, 2501 Seacrest Blvd., Delray Beach, at 8 p.m. Saturday. Tickets are $35 for general admission; visit www.plumosafoundation.org.