In her classroom at Columbia College, WXRT-FM disc jockey Terri Hemmert helps students prepare for a future in radio. She does it by teaching them about the past.
Since the 1980s, Hemmert has been teaching a class on “The History of Rock and Soul.”
“One of my main missions is to get them to see how music isn’t in a vacuum now, and it wasn’t then, either,” she says. “It reflected what was going on and it also influenced what was going on.”
Now, that popular class has inspired a concert. Chicago a cappella will give four performances of a show featuring live narration by Hemmert and purely vocal versions of classic songs spanning the decades.
“She is brilliant as a rock historian,” says Chicago a cappella’s artistic director Jonathan Miller, who suggested the idea of the concert to Hemmert, a longtime supporter of the singing group.
Patrick Sinozich, the group’s music director emeritus, took the job of directing the show. His first task was whittling down the list of 200 songs that Hemmert uses in her class.
“I listened to 200 YouTube performances of all these songs,” he says. “I got it down to 70.” Finally, with Hemmert’s help, he narrowed the list down to 38 songs. That was still too many to fit in one concert, but they decided to combine many of those tunes into medleys.
Chicago a cappella’s nine singers will perform music stretching back to the days before rock ‘n’ roll even existed — like Duke Ellington’s big-band jazz standard “Take the A Train” and Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s gospel song “Shout Sister Shout.” Hemmert will talk about how blues, country, folk and other genres formed the foundations of rock and soul music.
The concert then takes the audience into the heart of the rock ‘n’ roll era, from early hits by Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis through Motown, the Beach Boys, the British Invasion and Sly and the Family Stone.
Sinozich originally planned to write a cappella arrangements for half of the songs in the show. The group would buy existing sheet music for the other half. But then Sinozich discovered that no such sheet music existed.
“There were no a cappella arrangements published, so we couldn’t go buy them,” he says. “That’s how I ended up arranging the entire show.”
Sinozich crafted arrangements specifically for the members of Chicago a cappella, an ensemble in its 23rd season of vocalizing music in a wide range of styles.
“These singers are absolutely incredible in their versatility in being able to replicate all these different instruments and to be able to sing in all these different styles,” Sinozich says.
Hemmert’s concert appearances will come just two months after she returned to the airwaves following cancer surgery. She says the surgery was successful and her recovery has gone well.
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She hopes Chicago a cappella’s concerts will help listeners hear connections between genres — the same connections she points out in her college class.
“I love to see the kids open up to different periods of music, different genres of music,” Hemmert says. “The arts open us up to things. They make us more open-minded, more accepting.”
Chicago a cappella, ‘The History of Rock and Soul’
8 p.m. Friday, April 15, at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake St., Oak Park
8 p.m. Saturday, April 16, at Nichols Concert Hall, 1490 Chicago Ave., Evanston
4 p.m. Sunday, April 17, Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St., Chicago
4 p.m. Sunday, April 24, at Wentz Concert Hall, 171 E. Chicago Ave., Naperville
Tickets: $12-$30
Information: (773) 281-7820; www.chicagoacappella.org