Covered a live R&B experience took place in Seattle’s very own Columbia City at Black and Tan Hall, Converge Media’s Deaunte Damper attended the event where he caught up with Teme Wokoma, owner of Sankofa Theater and Spirit of Ire Productions. An active advocate for showcasing Black art in Black spaces, Wakoma put on the event with extreme gratitude for Besa Gordon while honoring her late business partner Elijah Lewis.

“I spoke earlier in the event that Black art is not always seen as fine art, so we’re not the first to be booked at Seattle Art Museum or any of these more upper echelon finer art spaces,” said Wakoma. “It was important to ground ourselves in who we are, Black and Tan has been working relentlessly to create a space that represents what we do and who we are as a BIPOC community.”

Filled with energy, positivity, and creativity, Jacoby Sampson who attended the event described it as “being apart of history, while standing in history, bringing the city together for a very intimate experience and breaking ground as being black artists.”

The night was met with countless songs from the 90’s and 2000’s being sung on stage, displaying how they were able to mix and master songs that the audience and the majority of the world know and love.

Janae Elements, singer-songwriter and member of the Collective Covered, expressed the importance of black artists coming together by saying, “coming together with local artists, black artists and people who can bring a collective together, bringing their own intimate individuality and creativity together was an amazing experience for me.”

Understanding the Black collective’s importance and representation within the Seattle music scene, singer-songwriter Jayza Duhan emphasized, “it’s representation for the youth or anybody to really see that it can be done and that we can make it come to fruition at the end of the day, having a vision then doing it at the best of our abilities.”

Covered was more than just an event, it was a moment that captured what happens when the Black community comes together to display the levels of talent that are all within one another to help shed more light on one another.