Corinne Bailey Rae leaves audiences spellbound with her sneak preview of 'Black Rainbows' at Yale Schwarzman Center

“Harriet Jacobs was a girl born in enslavement in 1813,” begins Corinne Bailey Rae, holding the audience rapt and silent. “In her early 20s, she escapes her abusive master and hides out in the crawl space above her grandmother's storehouse. Through a loophole in the wall, she can see the people pass by, she can see her children and grandchildren grow up. Eventually, she attains freedom and sets up a school for Black children... I was so inspired... So, I wrote a song about what the sunset looks like from her loophole. This is called Peach Velvet Sky.”

As the audience takes a collective breath in, Rae begins to sing, dazzling New Haven with a sneak preview of her upcoming fourth album “Black Rainbows” at an oversold Yale Schwarzman Center show on Saturday night. Inspired by the objects and artwork collected by Theaster Gates at the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago, “Black Rainbows” explores Black femininity, Spell Work, Inner Space/Outer Space, time collapse, ancestors and music as a vessel for transcendence.

The two-time Grammy® award winner crisscrossed through musical genres—jazz, punk, R&B, sweet ballads, pounding exorcizing rhythms—as she weaved a complex tapestry of Black history and expressionism into her music.

“Sometimes it's very stark and open; sometimes it has some aggression. So here we are here together, just working it out,” she told the crowd. “And, it’s beautiful.”

Rae performed every song on the “Black Rainbows” album, her full-bodied vocals vying between jubilation and heartbreak, anger and hope.

“What an electrifying way to kick off our season, and we are honored Ms. Rae gave us a sneak peak of her upcoming album,” said Rachel Fine, YSC executive director. “The entire album is a love song to Black history, art and culture told through an amalgamation of sonic genres. Her performance was raw and powerful, making people ponder the past, present and future.”

Just prior to the concert, Rae sat with Yale Professor Daphne Brooks for an in-depth conversation about the creation of this intimate, deeply personal album.

“Black Rainbows” started with a Pinterest board.

“I saw a photograph on a friend's Pinterest board of a black male staring out of a photograph. He was staring with such self-possession, confidence, and clarity. Around him was contemporary art,” said Rae. “I looked into who he was and found out he was Theaster Gates, and that part of his art practice is saving these buildings that are about to be demolished in the Southside of Chicago.”

After doing her research on Gates and the Stony Island Arts Bank, Rae paid a visit in 2017 and found herself catapulted into a journey of curiosity and creativity that would take six years to come to fruition.

 “Opening books, seeing photographs and things I haven't really seen before– like the black Indian chiefs or a black family in a Model T Ford... I felt mainly that it answered questions that I had perhaps been asking since I was a child,” said Rae.

“Black Rainbows” became a vehicle for Rae’s newfound knowledge and connection to her culture, her poems pulsing with stories in a steady flow of stream of consciousness. She thought about her enslaved ancestors and what their thoughts about freedom were, and how our past connects to our present.

Rae talked about a sculpture at the Arts Bank that was made from the floorboards from an abandoned police station. Instantly, she began thinking about the rich history within it.

“I thought about the people who had paced these floors. What were they thinking, why were they there, and who had brought them there? Did they ever leave? Did they die there?” Rae pondered quietly. “These objects bear witness: the floor knows, the telephone knows, the bars and the windows know. They can't speak, but in many cases, they're the truth holders.”

From one photograph came “New York Transit Queen,” a sonic explosion of Black punk.

“There’s this photograph of Miss New York Transit... She's wearing this bathing suit, and she's hanging off the back of this firetruck in these men's fire boots . She's looking over her shoulder with this kind of cheeky and innocent expression on her face, and I thought, who is this woman? What is this competition?” Her pre-release song based on this story can be found here.

At the end of the evening, Rae left audiences with that same thrill of curiosity, to know that our histories are all connected and intertwined. And as her song “Put It Down” implies, sometimes “you have to lay down your woes and dance.”

Corinne Bailey Rae's anticipated new album "Black Rainbows" is out now. Listen/share

The Sept. 9 event was presented in partnership with Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Black Sound and the Archive Working Group, the Department of African American Studies, Yale Center for British Art, Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Yale School of Art, and Yale School of Management.