Carlos Simon Featured on NPR's "Amplify With Lara Downes"

Carlos Simon, GRAMMY-nominated composer, curator and activist who is the Composer-in-Residence for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the inaugural Boston Symphony Orchestra Composer Chair, was featured this week on NPR's "Amplify With Lara Downes." The show is a series of intimate, profoundly personal video conversations between Downes, who is a concert pianist, and Black creatives who are leading change and redefining the culture.

Carlos Simon descends from three generations of preachers. His great-grandfather was ordained in 1924; his grandfather and father both followed at the pulpit. Carlos grew up in Atlanta, where family life revolved around the weekly rhythm of his father's church: Monday night was Bible study, Thursday night was choir rehearsal, Saturday was for cleaning the church and mowing the grass. By the time he was 10, Carlos was playing the piano for Sunday services.

That deep-in-the-DNA gospel was the foundation for his musical life, as a keyboardist and music director for artists like Angie Stone and Jennifer Holliday, and as a composer whose work for both concert stage and film uses a distinctive blend of gospel, jazz and unabashedly romantic influences.

Watch the full video conversation HERE.