Black Violin performs at Wichita’s Orpheum Theatre on Tuesday, Feb. 6, along with openerAbraham Alexander.
The duo, which was formed in 2004, is, at its core, a hip-hop act that draws upon classical influences. Co-founders Wil B (viola) and Kev Sylvester (violin) met in high school and continued their friendship while they attended Florida State University and Florida International University, respectively.
Over the decades, the pair has performed with Tom Petty, Wu-Tang Clan, Alicia Keys and Aerosmith. They have recorded five albums under the Black Violin moniker, including 2020’s “Give Thanks.”
Additionally, they have founded the Black Violin Foundation, which involves work with youth symphonies, community centers and low-income schools.
Wil B recently spoke with KMUW about some of the highlights of Black Violin’s 20-year career.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
You’ve been together as Black Violin for 20 years. When it started, did you imagine that it would have legs to it?
We didn’t have any expectations for it. We were just going. We’re doing something that we love and that we believe in. We’re just moving. There’s nothing wrong with dreaming but in terms of seeing yourself in this huge status, hopefully that doesn’t make you not move. For us, we never really thought of it that way. We were just having fun. This thing continued to take off, and we continued to have reasons to keep playing. Here we are, 20 years later, still doing it.
What was one of the first indications that it was taking off?
That’s easy. The first indication … that I felt like we had something was Apollo. When the 2005 Apollo Legend title [happened], that’s when I realized, “OK, this is cool. People actually like this. We have something special.” I had a telecommunications job where I was answering the phone. That’s when I called my supervisor and said, “Listen, I’m not coming to work anymore.”
[Laughs.]
“I’m pursuing this music thing full-time.” That’s when the lightbulb came on for real, and we really started focusing on this thing.
What are some of your fondest memories of being able to connect with your audience?
There’s so many of them. One instance was at Bonnaroo. I remember someone came up to me and told me, almost tearing up, telling me how our music helped him make it through prison. It was really profound. It was one of the greatest compliments. Your music inspired someone so much that it made them want to keep going. Keep living. I’ve heard it so many times and that’s probably one of the biggest things for me: being able to do something I love, something that’s not that difficult [but] people are transformed because of it.
You do a lot of work with younger musicians. I would suspect that you encounter a number of young people who say, “You inspired me to do this.”
Absolutely. There’s a group out of south Florida, two brothers, they’re called Sons of Mystro, and it was exactly that. We did this festival a while back. Their dad brought them to the show. They hadn’t played before, they saw us play and sure enough they signed up and played and now they’re in their late 20s, early 30s, playing professionally. They’re doing something similar to what we’re doing.
It's great to be able to see that and to be able to inspire the young generation as much as we have. In combination with our foundation, we want to magnify that even more. We’re able to help kids who have things that are preventing them from dreaming. We’ve had so many individuals who were there for us, whether it was [to provide] a flight to music camp, anything that we needed, we had someone there who was able to provide that. That’s one of the things that we do in our foundation, is fill the gap for any kid who has a real passion for their instrument but just doesn’t have the means to get to the next level.
Was that in the back of your mind all along or did you come to a point where you saw there was a need and you said, “I can help, and I want to help”?
It’s always been in our minds because we see the effects of our shows. We see it everywhere. Our foundation’s been around about four years now, but it didn’t happen sooner because we didn’t have the time. As we were having conversations, our wives just decided that we should do it for real. Our wives, Anne Sylvester and Corryn Freeman, my wife, they run the foundation, which really helps because it frees our time to really focus on Black Violin. Whenever they need to bring us in for something, we’re there. It’s just amazing to be able to put forth the energy to expand even more on what we already do right now while we’re on the road.
It seems to me that Black Violin shows welcome an audience that is diverse in the truest sense.
Definitely. You’re exactly right. That’s the real beauty of it. Today we’re in Salt Lake City. It’s amazing. We go out to the crowd, we see the crowd and there’s kids there, there’s adults, there’s people there from different backgrounds and cultures. It’s amazing to see that our music is able to bring people together. The only other time that I really see something like that is maybe with sports. A baseball game. You see everyone in a community come in and show love for the local team. It’s very, very similar in our show and it’s great to be able to bring together, in particular in the venues that we perform, where there’s a lot of people who have lived in that community for their whole lives, but they’ve never been in that venue. It’s a great thing to connect communities together.
It seems to me too that a lot of boundaries in music are breaking down. There was a time when you couldn’t like a particular kind of music if you were a man or if you were a woman or if whatever the perception of you was didn’t fit with people’s idea of that music.
There are no boundaries right now. It’s whatever you feel. It’s whatever you like. Hip-hop is the catalyst of that. Hip-hop is about you as an individual expressing yourself to the fullest and keeping with the traditions of what hip-hop is. Being true to yourself. You definitely see that nowadays with young musicians, they’re able to be bold and be strong in their sense of identity. It’s a great thing to see.
How much resistance did Black Violin meet, especially in its early years?
When we started out trying to convince anyone that this thing we had was good was a challenge because they couldn’t wrap their heads around two Black dudes playing violin on hip-hop beats. We had to prove it to them. We’d pull out the violins, pop the trunk, play some music, play right in front of them, and then they’d say, “Oh, that’s cool.” That’s how we broke in.
There are definitely classical purists that would look at what we’re doing and say, “I don’t know about this.” But it’s not something they would say to our faces. We don’t care. We’re having fun and people love it. I’m sure there’s a few bad apples out there that have things to say about what we do.
You took the name Black Violin from an album by the legendary violinist Stuff Smith. Was that a way of saying, “We’re going to honor him and honor this tradition with what we’re doing”?
Definitely. We thought about the name a little bit. We started doing gigs and they would ask us, “What do you call yourselves?” That album was something we’d been listening to a year or two prior. We started thinking about it and it was really quick. Kev and I looked at each other and knew about the album. People would always call us Black dudes playing violin. The Black guys playing violin. It just made sense. Obviously, Stuff Smith had a huge impact on us.
