Taina Asili brings Fever Pitch to UPROSE in celebration of Climate Justice Week

Applause filled the room Friday night as community members, climate activists and music lovers gathered at UPROSE for Taina Asili’s Fever Pitch concert.

In the hour-long set, Asili sang about environmental protection, social justice and the Israel-Palestine conflict. For her finale, she asked the audience for words to weave into a song — terms like “matriarchal,” “lucha” and “persistence.” Her band’s drum-heavy music mixed with activist lyrics and choreography rooted in African and Latin dance, symbolizing struggle, resistance and connection to the earth.

“It was an amazing and transformative performance,” said Isabel Martinez, who traveled from North Carolina with her partner, bassist Molefi Ramos.

The show marked the penultimate stop on Asili’s Fever Pitch Pilgrimage, a 15-day, 155-mile walk from Albany to New York City to protest climate change and share community singing. She and her band averaged 10 miles a day, making eye contact with everyone they passed and performing for grassroots groups including Clearwater and Fairgrounds.

“I really wanted to find a way to use this work as not just performance on a stage, but really that cultural work within the community in the most grassroots way that I could,” Asili said. “And this walk allowed me the opportunity to stop from community to community all the way down and have beautiful, deep conversations with people.”

She chose to close her journey at UPROSE, a Latino-led climate justice organization in Sunset Park, as part of its “Climate Justice Lives Here” week of events. The collaboration followed a successful partnership during UPROSE’s last year’s climate festival.

Asili’s cousin and bandmate, Ramos, said their families’ activism stretches back decades, when their parents founded the first Latin Students Club at Binghamton University. “So I was of that community, Taina was, my siblings and a couple other family friends were very close together. And that kind of led us to be in the new generation of what that looks like,” Ramos said.

UPROSE creative director Javier Bautista said the organization shares that same commitment to longevity and sustainable organizing through the exchange of intergenerational knowledge. His mother, Elizabeth Yeampierre, became executive director 26 years ago, and he has been involved ever since.

Speaking about his mother’s vision for an intergenerational model of community organizing, Bautista said: “It’s this institutional knowledge that she passes on, but also new innovative ways of thinking from an up-and-coming generation.”

Asili echoed that mission, framing her pilgrimage as an act of both singing and listening. “Music is helping us to move from the head into the heart and the spirit. We have melody, we have tone, we're singing all the time. We don't even realize it. So it's really just listening. That's what we call this fever pitch. Because it pitches the sound that we need to listen to in this moment.”