Live Concert Photography: Capital One Presents: The Roots with Marhsa Ambrosius, Bilal, CeeLo Green, Common, and Salt-N-Pepa
SummerStage, Rumsey Playfield
October 8. 2015
With JOVM being a (mostly) one-man operation and with a number of live shows and festivals over the past couple of months, things have been exceptionally busy and as I’ve mentioned, I’ve been actively trying to catch up on and keep on a number of things, including live music coverage. So expect a bunch of things over the upcoming weeks around here.
But let’s get to the business at hand, right? If you’ve been frequenting this site over the course of this year, you may know that this year marked the 30th anniversary of SummerStage, New York’s free, annual Summer festival of music and arts. Over the past couple of years, the festival, which started from very humble origins with a number of performances in Central Park has expanded to hundreds of performances across the city’s five boroughs. And this year, to celebrate the festival’s 30th anniversary, SummerStage hosted the longest season in its history, starting back in May with the Grammy Award-winning Tedeschi Trucks Band and ending just a few weeks ago with Capital One Bank having The Roots with a number of special guests play at SummerStage at an exclusive event for their cardholders. And it was an incredible night of live music. Opening the night was the British singer/songwriter Marsha Ambrosius, who was started her career as a member of Floetry, and has been a solo artist since the release of her solo debut Late Nights and Early Mornings in 2011 and her set was followed by The Roots, who played material from several of their most recent albums and invited an array of special guests including CeeLo Green, Common (who, is sadly not pictured in this post), Bilal, and Salt-N-Pepa. Check out photos from the proceedings below.
(Photo Caption: Marsha Ambrosius performing at SummerStage earlier this month.)
(Members of the Daptone Records horn section performing with The Roots.)
(Photo Caption: Black Thought feeling it, y’all.)
(Photo Caption: The Legendary Roots Crew rocking at SummerStage earlier this month.)
(Photo Caption: CeeLo Green and The Roots covering Al Green at SummerStage earlier this month.)
(Photo Caption: Thrilled fans at SummerStage. Many of these folks had waited hours to see their heroes live.)
(Photo Caption: Bilal offered one of the night’s most powerful moments, as he sung presumably ad-lib a refrain about how much black life matters. For a few minutes, Bilal and The Roots had the crowd and even some of the photographers shouting as though they were at church.)
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(Photo Caption: Salt-N-Pepa with The Roots performing their mega hit and classic song “Push It” at SummerStage last month.)
For these photos and more, check out the Flickr set here:
