By Web Behrens
“Black people have just been marginalized and cut out of everything. It’s not a coincidence in this world of classical music that there’s not a lot of faces that look like me. That’s one thing we try to instill in kids: You do belong here.”
It seems implausible that a casual bet on a golf game could determine the trajectory of a young man’s life. But truth is stranger than fiction, as Wil Baptiste found out.
One half of the groundbreaking string duo Black Violin, 38-year-old Baptiste spent much of his life thinking a mix-up had determined his musical fate. Although he hadn’t played an instrument during his first decade of life, the adolescent started daydreaming about the saxophone. So he joined a summer music program, visions of John Coltrane bebopping in his head, but ended up in the string section. For years, he thought he’d just ended up in the wrong class by fate, but, as he told Ravinia Magazine during a recent phone chat, “Came to find out, it was orchestrated.”
Teenaged Wil Baptiste looks on as Kev Marcus practices violin, not yet aware that the scene would continue to play out between them as the genre-defying duo Black Violin (top photo), both on concert stages far and wide and in schools to inspire young musicians like they once were.
A self-described “island boy” born in the Bahamas, Baptiste moved to Florida when he was 10. He encountered the viola during the fateful summer before 8th grade. Back then, “I was that kid beating on the table while the other kids rapped. That was me,” Baptiste recalls. “The security guards would get really upset with me. One of them told me he made money on the weekends playing the sax. I was like, ‘I need money,’ so I signed up for the band summer program.”
Plot twist: When he went to enroll, “the string teacher was there too, and I guess he and the band teacher both saw my enthusiasm. The string teacher says, ‘All right, let’s play golf, and whoever wins the game gets this kid in their class.’ Obviously the string teacher won. I got to class and realized it was not where I wanted to be, but I was stuck there. So I picked up the viola because everyone’s ignoring it. Everybody wants to play violin!
“I didn’t find out that story about the golf game until 2012,” he adds. When Black Violin performed on Broadway, Baptiste’s original teacher attended. “We were hanging out afterward and he told me. This whole time, I’ve been saying it was a crazy mistake, you know?”
In their Ravinia debut September 11, Baptiste and Marcus will be joined onstage by their two regular collaborators, DJ SPS and drummer Nat Stokes.
Who knows how Baptiste’s life would’ve progressed if he’d picked up the woodwind instead. He met his future music-making partner during that summer intensive: soon-to-be-violinist Kev Marcus attended at his mom’s insistence, envisioning it as a corrective to misbehavior after he got caught stealing candy. After spending their summer on the strings, the boys’ paths became further entwined at Dillard High School of the Performing Arts, setting their course as best friends and collaborators for decades to come. The Butterfly Effect of one fateful golf game is too powerful a story to ignore.
“I thank God for it, because it was definitely meant to be,” Baptiste says. “I don’t even care for the sax anymore.”
Today, the duo from Fort Lauderdale have become highly renowned artists, known on multiple continents for their innovative sound, which blends hip-hop with classical. This unconventional career path has led to some thrilling places, including a performance at President Obama’s second inauguration ball in 2013. Other feathers in their collective cap include opening for Jay-Z in Switzerland and Kanye West in Dubai.
Like so many acts, Black Violin had a lot of plans in place before the world came to a crashing halt in spring 2020. Their late-2019 release, Take the Stairs, had won rave reviews; it went on to earn the pair their first Grammy nomination, for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album. They’ve just resumed touring this summer with their two regular stagemates, drummer Nat Stokes and DJ SPS, and the four musicians catch up with one of those plans deferred on September 11 when they play their much-anticipated Ravinia show.
They’ve dubbed this tour the Impossible Tour, named after one of the Take the Stairs tracks. Despite the Grammy categorization, some of their output contains lyrics—including “Impossible is Possible,” an inspirational pop anthem. The song deftly reflects Black Violin’s ethos, and Stairs is really a right-place-right-time release for this strange but exciting era, as the country emerges from the long shadow of COVID.
Although they recorded the album in 2019, Baptiste notes that they were channeling hope even before the pandemic. During a two-week-long creative jam session, “we put up a board and wrote, in big letters, HOPE. We wanted to make an album that projected the idea,” both instrumentally and through vocals. “Our music lends itself to hope, even from the very beginning. We’re thinking outside the box. Don’t judge a book from its cover. That’s been our mantra.”
Of course, undergirding their inspirational outlook and bold artistic choices are years of hard work. After attending different colleges, Baptiste and Marcus moved in together in South Florida. “We just started creating music. The idea was just to be the next Timbaland, the next major producer,” Baptiste says. “We wanted to incorporate classical music into pop music in a way that no one had ever done. That was the whole goal. Pulling out violins and playing on top of our beats, or on top of music from the radio, it came very naturally.
“As we would perform for certain artists, we started noticing that the crowd was very responsive to us. … Just imagine being at the club, having a good time, and these two Black guys are walking around playing violin, you know? We did that for years and years.” Their popularity surprised promoters, but it kept the bookings coming.
Their breakthrough came after the guys sent a demo tape to Showtime at the Apollo. It took two years for a producer to respond, but once they got invited to New York to be on the show, they kept winning Apollo’s amateur night competitions, ultimately taking the top prize in 2005. Suddenly a huge TV audience was hip to their vibe. As Marcus likes to tell a crowd as their show starts: “We know some of you thought you were coming to a quiet violin concert. But rule number one at a Black Violin show: This is a party!”
Leveling up brought plenty of changes, including, of course, a lot of time spent touring. As their profile rose, opportunities increased, which led to collaborations with a diverse roster of musicians including Wu-Tang Clan, Wyclef Jean, and Tom Petty. Still, when asked about their most memorable opportunities with established artists, Baptiste recalls one of Black Violin’s earliest encounters as a favorite.
“One collaboration that stands out was with Alicia Keys,” he observes. “She was the first person who took us out on tour. We did the Billboard Awards with her, and we got to see how professionals really do it, how they perform and interact with fans. That was great, to really see that.”
It’s just one example of mentorship that made a significant impact on Baptiste and Marcus—and provided a model for the pair to turn around and pay it forward. In 2019, they established The Black Violin Foundation. Run by Corryn Freeman and Anne Sylvester, the wives of Baptiste and Marcus, the foundation aims to provide more opportunities for today’s youth through music. Among its programs is the James Miles Musical Innovation Grant, a scholarship named for a teacher who made a huge impact on the duo. Additional efforts promote racial diversity in the classical world by giving grants to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, Persons of Color) youth.
“Obviously, representation is very important to us,” Baptiste says. “We went to college as performance majors. Going to rehearsal, being pretty much the only Black kids in that environment—it’s not the most inclusive or safest environment. Playing in high school was very, very different; for the most part, everybody looked like us. Going to college was very eye-opening.
In addition to their educational work with their own Black Violin Foundation, Baptiste and Marcus have partnered with the Kennedy Center as Turnaround Artists in their home state of Florida since 2017.
“Basically, Black people have just been marginalized and cut out of everything. It’s not a coincidence in this world of classical music that there’s not a lot of faces that look like me. That’s one thing we try to instill in kids: You do belong here. If you want to engage with this world of classical music, understand who you are and understand that you belong. … But also, if you don’t want to come into this space, it’s okay. For me, as much as I love classical music, I don’t necessarily consider myself a classical musician. You know, I’m just a musician who plays the viola.”
However anyone describes the music Baptiste and Marcus compose and perform, there’s no denying that they’re breaking down barriers and inviting new generations into a musical world that often feels remote.
“The best way I describe our music is like a nice bowl of gumbo,” Baptiste observes. “There’s a lot of different ingredients, but there’s two main ones, hip-hop and classical. It’s something that, no matter what you’re into, you can appreciate what’s happening.” ■
Native Chicagoan Web Behrens has spent most of his journalism career covering arts and culture. His work has appeared in the pages of the Chicago Tribune, Time Out Chicago, Time Out New York, Crain’s Chicago Business, Advocate magazine, and Mobil Travel Guides.