CHICAGO — If all goes according to plan, the Black String Triage Ensemble will be assembled and activated to bring music and healing to Chicago’s scenes of violence and sorrow by August.
“It’s too important to wait,” founder Dayvin Hallmon told me Thursday. “This has to happen now.”
Hallmon created the Black String Triage Ensemble in Milwaukee in 2019. When a community is shattered by violence, Hallmon and his musicians start repairing the cracks.
The ensemble of Black and Latinx string players brings their instruments to the scenes of tragedy — shootings, usually. But also suicides, overdoses, car accidents. They play concerts around the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. They play a song for each stage, plus a sixth song for what Hallmon calls a sixth stage of grief: faith. They set up away from the crime tape, out of the way of the police, but close enough for the neighbors to hear them.
“To guard against hardening our humanity,” Hallmon said. “The humanity that’s been lost — whether it’s because we view someone as expendable or just a sheer lack of care and compassion — this is how we begin to rescue that back.”
I wrote about Hallmon and his musicians last summer, when the Black String Triage Ensemble performed outside the Kenosha County Courthouse. That city was engulfed in protests at the time, after police shot Jacob Blake seven times.
In April, Hallmon, who was born in Chicago, told me he wanted to expand into his hometown.
“Chicago, unlike any other city in the country, has shown me what love looks like,” Hallmon said at the time. “It does this in a way that New York doesn’t understand. In a way that Los Angeles, with its Hollywood arrogance, doesn’t have the capacity for. In a way that D.C., with its obsession with politics, can’t comprehend. I don’t care who you are or how much money or education you do or don’t have, that city champions culture and says it is for everybody. When I’m there, I feel like I can breathe. There’s something so special about it. There just is.”
And it’s beset by violence. Both things are true.
Violence is a community experience. But so are outdoor concerts, Hallmon points out. Injecting music and beauty and humanity into crime scenes, he believes, can transform them into places for recovery, healing and hope.
“Every city in America feels like the next place for a Black String Triage Ensemble,” he said. “Every city in America.”
Chicago’s time is now.
On June 27 and every Sunday in July, Hallmon will hold open rehearsals for violin, viola, cello and upright bass players who would like to serve as volunteer musicians in his Chicago-based ensemble.
Rehearsals will take place from 6 to 8 p.m. at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church. The church will serve as the Black String Triage Ensemble home base, from which the musicians will fan out to scenes of tragedy on the West Side.
By next summer, Hallmon would like to assemble enough musicians to serve Chicago’s South Side and North Side neighborhoods as well.
Hallmon said he’s heard tremendous support for the Chicago expansion — from Chicago Symphony Orchestra musicians, from clergy members, from fundraisers, from residents.
“There’s enthusiasm in all the right places,” he said.
Now he just needs musicians.
Hallmon is excited about the musical selections he’s chosen for the rehearsals, a collection he titled “Re-stitching the seams.”
“I really want people to feel and understand that everybody has a stake in turning the tide of this violence,” he said. “Whether it’s really looking at teenagers and asking them how they are, or art museums and musical institutions doubling down on their efforts to get art supplies or instruments into the hands of young people or athletic clubs doubling down on youth participation. Whatever everyone is doing, it’s not enough. And that’s not a criticism. It’s just that it has to be twice as aggressive, twice as intense, twice as intentional.”
I hope Chicago listens to Hallmon — his words and his music. We need to go where he wants to take us.
