Commissioned as a part of The Apollo’s New Works initiative, The Renaissance Mixtape is a concert experience crafted with music, story, and video by Soul Science Lab’s Asante Amin and Chen Lo and their eight-member band. The show is a musical journey through the live recording of a multi-media radio show called “Renaissance Radio,” where the musicians grapple with where Black art, culture, and innovation has been in the past and where it is going in the next 100 years.

Our first project under this new initiative is Between the World and Me. Written in 2015 by author Ta-Nehisi Coates as a letter to his teenage son, Between the World and Me weaves some of the most pressing questions about America’s history and ideals with the most intimate concerns of a father for his son. The ideas presented by Coates in 2015 still resonate today.