Renaissance Magazine

09/12/2026

GATHER

ROBERT NELSON

HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS

Saturday, November 28 • Thanksgiving Weekend

Gather with family and friends for dinner, cocktails and an evening of live music. Kick off the holiday season with jazz, soul & groove in an intimate, sophisticated setting.

Come for dinner. Stay for the music. Gather for the holidays.

Tickets are going fast.

A new music showroom and lounge in the CWE. Local and national acts will be taking the stage at least three nights per week, with dinner available five nights a week. We are offering a thoughtful, full service menu and a superb w**e and beverage program.

09/12/2026

WE REMEMBER: CRYSTAL LaBEIJA

Some of the most influential chapters of Black culture were written in spaces the larger world rarely thought important enough to document.

Crystal LaBeija is one of those chapters.

Her story reaches beyond ballroom. It is about race, colorism, beauty, belonging—and what happens when Black and Brown people stop asking an institution to recognize their worth and begin creating spaces that recognize it themselves.

In Paris Is Burning, ballroom elder Dorian Corey called reading “the real art form of insult”—an art of finding the fine point and exposing it with wit.

Years earlier, Crystal LaBeija gave us one of the most iconic reads ever captured on film.

In the 1968 documentary The Queen, Crystal confronted a pageant system she believed privileged white beauty while Black and Brown queens competed against standards that did not value them equally.

But the read is not the whole story.

What came afterward is why we remember.

The House of LaBeija became foundational to ballroom culture—a world where Black and Brown LGBTQ people created space to define beauty, performance, family and belonging for themselves.

And eventually, language and aesthetics born in these communities traveled far beyond the ballroom.

That is where cultural memory matters.

Because when the world inherits the language but forgets who spoke it, celebrates the style but forgets who created it, or embraces the culture while losing the names of its architects, history becomes incomplete.

Renaissance Magazine exists, in part, to keep that from happening.

We remember the language.
We remember the struggle.
We remember the creators.

And we say their names: Crystal LaBeija.

09/03/2026

WE REMEMBER | CASSANDRA WILSON

Cassandra Wilson expanded what was possible for the jazz vocalist—not simply standing before musicians, but creating among them as a musician herself.

Rooted in the blues, fearless in exploration and unmistakable in sound, Wilson understood that music lives through conversation, interpretation and the freedom artists give one another to speak.

Her voice is now part of the cultural memory we are responsible for carrying forward.

Renaissance Magazine
Preserving the voices. Honoring the legacy. Continuing the conversation.

09/01/2026

WE REMEMBER | WHEN TRADITION CARRIES THE STORY

In Jumping the Broom, a wedding tradition becomes something much larger: a conversation about memory, ancestry and what one generation chooses to carry forward from another.

The conflict over jumping the broom asks a question at the heart of Renaissance Magazine’s September issue:

If we don’t preserve the story, who will?

For generations, Black history was not always preserved in institutions or written into textbooks. Sometimes it survived because somebody remembered the ritual. Somebody told the story. Somebody kept the photograph, sang the song, prepared the meal—or insisted that a tradition still mattered.

That is why cultural memory matters.

Jumping the Broom reminds us that even within Black families, our relationship to history can differ. Class, geography and experience may shape how we understand the past—but forgetting it has consequences.

This September, Renaissance Magazine examines the people, traditions, music and memories that carry Black culture from one generation to the next.

Because one day the witnesses will be gone.

The story does not have to go with them.

RENAISSANCE MAGAZINE | SEPTEMBER 2026
WE REMEMBER: If We Don’t Preserve the Story, Who Will?

08/31/2026

FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF | SEPTEMBER 2026

This September, Renaissance Magazine turns its attention to a responsibility that belongs to all of us: memory.

Our cover asks a question that grows more urgent with every passing generation: Who preserves Black culture when the witnesses are gone?

Louis Armstrong gives us a powerful place to begin. Beyond the trumpet, the unmistakable voice and the international legacy, Armstrong understood the importance of leaving a record. He preserved photographs, letters, recordings, scrapbooks and pieces of his everyday life. He did not simply leave us his music. He left us evidence.

That is the spirit of this issue.

Black culture has never suffered from a lack of creation. We have created music, language, movements, institutions, traditions and ways of seeing the world that have transformed America and influenced the globe. But creation carries another responsibility: preservation.

The photographs in our homes matter. The stories our elders tell matter. The church programs, rehearsal tapes, family recipes, handwritten letters, neighborhood histories and memories sitting in boxes matter. What seems ordinary today may become the evidence someone desperately needs tomorrow.

Last month, Renaissance asked whether we still have the spaces that allow us to belong to one another. This month, we ask what we are preserving from those spaces.

WE REMEMBER is more than our September theme. It is a call to action.

Record the story. Write down the name. Save the photograph. Interview the elder. Preserve the music. Document the place.

Because one day the witnesses will be gone.

The story does not have to go with them.

Welcome to the September 2026 issue of Renaissance Magazine.

— Dr. Robert Nelson
Editor-in-Chief
Renaissance Magazine

08/31/2026

RENAISSANCE MAGAZINE | LEGACY IN THEIR OWN WORDS

Sometimes the biggest decisions in music begin with a simple choice—and become a blessing.

Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis reflect on those early days with Prince and The Time, including the choice of who would play bass. What may have seemed like a small decision became part of a musical journey that helped shape the Minneapolis Sound and generations of music that followed.

This is what cultural history sounds like when the people who lived it tell the story themselves.

RENAISSANCE MAGAZINE
Preserving the stories. Honoring the legacy. Keeping the culture in conversation.

08/29/2026

RENAISSANCE MUSIC | PUT SOME RESPECT ON HER NAME

GLADYS KNIGHT.

Sometimes the résumé speaks so loudly, all you need to do is say the name.

From “If I Were Your Woman” to “Midnight Train to Georgia” to “Love Overboard,” Gladys Knight has spent more than six decades showing us what it means to be a singer—not simply someone who can hit the notes, but an artist who can make you feel every word.

And live? That voice. That phrasing. That church. That soul.

Seven GRAMMY Awards.
22 GRAMMY nominations.
GRAMMY Hall of Fame.
Kennedy Center Honoree.
Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award.

But even those accolades only tell part of the story.

Gladys Knight belongs to that extraordinary generation of Black artists whose music crossed R&B, soul, pop and gospel without ever surrendering its cultural roots. She could break your heart with “If I Were Your Woman,” put an entire generation aboard that “Midnight Train to Georgia,” and years later turn around and make the world dance to “Love Overboard.”

That isn’t just longevity.

That’s mastery. That’s legacy.

So when we talk about the great voices of American music, put some respect on the name:

GLADYS KNIGHT — THE EMPRESS OF SOUL. 👑

Renaissance Magazine | Celebrating the music, artists and cultural legacies that continue to move us.
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08/22/2026

RENAISSANCE MUSIC | ISAAC HAYES

There was a time when soul music was allowed to take its time.

In 1975, Isaac Hayes stepped onto The Midnight Special and delivered “Come Live With Me” with the kind of sophistication that made him singular—deep baritone, lush orchestration, sensuality, musicianship and unmistakable presence.

Hayes understood something important: Black music could be romantic, cinematic, sophisticated and grown—all at once.

No rush. No gimmicks. Just a great artist allowing the music to breathe.

More than fifty years later, the performance reminds us why Isaac Hayes helped expand the possibilities of soul music—and why preserving performances like this matters.

This is Black music history.
This is Black cultural elegance.
This is Renaissance.

🎶 Isaac Hayes — “Come Live With Me”
📺 The Midnight Special, 1975

08/21/2026

RENAISSANCE MAGAZINE | AUGUST 2026
WE STILL NEED EACH OTHER

“When the world feels less safe, we have to remember where Black people have always found safe space—in the church, the barbershop and beauty shop, around the family table, in our neighborhoods, and especially in our music. Gospel gave us sanctuary. Blues gave us testimony. Jazz gave us freedom. Soul gave us voice. Hip-hop gave a new generation a language to tell its own truth. Music has always been more than something we listen to—it is where we have gathered, remembered, resisted, healed and found one another. We still need each other.”

— Dr. Robert Nelson
Editor-in-Chief, Renaissance Magazine

This August, Renaissance Magazine explores Black power, Black culture and Black community—and asks an essential question:

When the world feels less safe, where is our safe space?
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