JUNE 10, 2022 | Beat Café is a weekly program that explores the music scene in New Orleans and the broader reach of Louisiana hosted by David Johnson, digital media editor for OffBeat Magazine. The program is broadcast on WHIV 102.3 FM every Friday from 1 to 2 p.m. Central.

This week’s episode features Luther Gray, a drummer and community activist who served as  co-founder of the Congo Square Foundation in 1989, which was renamed the Congo Square Preservation Society in 2011.  The society has been instrumental in the resurrection of drumming and cultural activities in Congo Square, a historic gathering place dating back to the 18th century where enslaved persons and free people of color regularly gathered to practice African music and dance on the outskirts of the French Quarter.  In 1993, the Congo Square Foundation was successful in placing Congo Square on the National Register of Historic Places. Gray was part of a team of drum makers who carved three bamboula  drums from a 100-year-old cypress tree that are now on display at the Louisiana State Museum of History in Baton Rouge. The Congo Square Preservation Society sponsors weekly drum circles on Sunday afternoons in Congo Square that date back to 1988.

Gray is also the founding director of Percussion Incorporated and Bamboula 2000, for which he has won the Big Easy Music Award in the world music category twice.

The second half hour of the program features a conversation with Givonna Joseph, a mezzo-soprano and the founding director of  the award winning OperaCréole, a performing arts organization dedicated to researching and performing lost or rarely performed works by composers of African descent. The company focuses on works by free 19th-century New Orleanian composers of color, and also on promoting Louisiana’s Creole language and culture.