Elizabeth A. Baker has had an interesting tour (short story: rental car fraud), but she’s driven 20 hours to get home just in time for a SunLit Festival set at the new Daddy Kool Records in St. Petersburg’s warehouse district.
“I’m beyond stoked and honoured to get back to work with a show at a true Saint Petersburg institution,” Baker told CL, adding that it’ll be a rare outdoor set for her. “I completely forgot about how hot and humid it is in Florida — I will be modifying my tour set up especially for this performance, but I plan on doing a very grateful and contemplative set.”
Hopefully the set will include music from the St. Petersburg artist’s new collaborative project with Tampa Bay expat Nathan Corder, where she and the Nude Tayne guitarist sought to re-explore and re-define the piano as a concert instrument.
“I ended up being dressed in my first African evening gown by a woman from Ghana, but most of all, I did a solid experimental solo piano performance on April 12th which is same day that in 1963 Nina Simone made her Carnegie Hall debut,” Baker said. “That means a lot to me because without ancestors like Nina, I couldn’t have the opportunities to be a black woman on a stage performing the works that I do today.”
More info is available via Facebook. Listen to the Baker/Corder project below.
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This article appears in Apr 18-25, 2019.