Live6 Detroit and Detroit Sound Conservancy partnered on a resident engagement and placekeeping program series centered around music.
The Chessmate, at the corner of Livernois and 6, has a history of late night concerts, cutting-edge acts, and legendary troubadours, as well as nights of joy and pain, from high school students watching James Cotton play harmonica in the middle of Livernois, to a teen being shot by the Errol Flynns after a night of dancing. We forget places like the Chessmate at our collective peril.
In that spirit, Live6 Detroit and Detroit Sound Conservancy will celebrate the rich, complicated, cultural, and social legacies of the former Chess Mate Cafe/The Chessmate (now University Coin Laundry) with storytelling, community listening, and live performances for three consecutive evenings at Detroit Sip (7420 West McNichols Rd., Detroit, MI 48221). This multi-generational, historically-informed, placemaking weekend will attempt to reenact, reinvestigate, and reimagine what those Cafe audiences, performers, and neighbors felt like while informing our current neighborhood discussions. Black, white, and brown, folk, blues, and disco, student, neighbor, and outsider, straight, gay, and exploring, Chessmate brought the then Live 6 community together for a brief moment in the 1960s and 70s in ways worth remembering.
Thursday, April 6th, 6-10 pm: Folk-Rock
Friday, April 7th 6-10 pm: Blues-Jazz
Saturday, April 8th 6-10 pm: Disco
Performers, DJs, and storytellers TBA
Please RVSP via Facebook here.
Live6 is a planning and development organization that seeks to enhance quality of life and encourage economic opportunity in Northwest Detroit. The organization is committed to an urban community and landscape that knows the historical depth of its well earned cool.
Detroit Sound Conservancy is the leader in Detroit music history activism. The organization is committed to a genre-free, anti-nostalgia campaign of neighborhood engagement through sonic storytelling. We preserve musical resistance.