The music of which she speaks – or sings – is a golden throated thread coursing through the 4th Annual San Francisco International Arts Festival. This year’s Festival promises to introduce thousands more to such music as Tillery joins with the acclaimed ensemble Black Voices from Birmingham, England to perform the newly commissioned work A Long Journey Home: Concertizing the Golden Triangle. The theme of “survival” takes on additional meaning with the Festival’s closing night concert at Grace Cathedral, a performance which coincides with the end of the Cathedral’s exhibition of The Keiskamma Altarpiece: a monumental artwork created by rural South African women whose families have been devastated by AIDS /HIV. The Altarpiece conveys a message of hope for people who are contending with the devastation that AIDS has wrought in their lives in the midst of poverty and other hardships.

“Some have said the AIDS pandemic has created its own cultural Diaspora,” said Rhodessa Jones, Festival Artistic Director. “Thus there is no more fitting way to bring the Festival full-circle than with a final chorus of hope and inspiration featuring musical artists from all over the world coming together to share their common humanity.”

Tillery is a veteran vocalist, percussionist, producer and cultural historian whose career has spanned 34 years. Since the 1960s, Tillery has been regarded as one of the San Francisco Bay Area's most versatile singers. Her powerful, shimmering alto voice has been showcased in such groups as the Loading Zone, Zasu Pitts Memorial Orchestra, the Solid Sender's and Bobby McFerrin's Voicestra. A native San Franciscan, Linda has Texas soul, rooted in her mother's stories and food, and her uncle Tom Anderson's deft blues whistle. These Texas expatriates anchored her earliest memories in an older musical tradition when the contemporary sound pronounced it old-fashioned. The sound of artists such as Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Bill Doggett, Dinah Washington, Clyde McPhatter, Faye Adams and Ruth Brown were all a part of Linda's early music education.

While singing for the play Letters From A New England Negro in 1992, Tillery was introduced to some field recordings of traditional African-American music. “My God,” she exclaimed. “This is what I've been looking for!” Tillery poured over documentary recordings and ethnomusicology research to uncover a treasure-trove of spirituals, work songs, field hollers, and slave songs. Within months, she assembled the Cultural Heritage Choir ( CHC): Rhonda Benin, Elouise Burrell, Melanie DeMore, and Bryan Dyer.

In addition to songs and chants, delivered through such stylistic forms as call-and-response, multi-layered harmonies, and repetitive verse, the CHC repertoire includes intoned sermons, folk tales, polyrhythmic percussion, and dance.

“This is the music that has been used as a support for just about every political movement in this country,” says Tillery. “People take spirituals, reword them and march together in the name of freedom and justice.”

Quietly and gently, informally and gradually, Black Voices was nurtured under the directorship of Carol Pemberton and Bob Ramdhanie. Since 1987, these two friends have steered Black Voices into one of the most solid performance and teaching companies, sharing a cappella, primarily from Africa but also throughout the Diaspora.

The company has been inspired by Sweet Honey in the Rock, Mahalia Jackson, Take Six to name a few, but since inception, has forged its own dynamic way of distilling and re-presenting black music from a Caribbean, black British perspective. Grounded in the black church, the group began presenting a cappella, both sacred and secular, which was always challenging and entertaining. From Gospel to spirituals, Caribbean to African, jazz and blues, Black Voices is firmly rooted in music that energizes and uplifts; challenges and educates.

The company hosted and presented its own a cappella series with BBC Radio 2, has performed for radio and television in numerous countries around the world, has produced nine CDs, researched, produced, directed and performed in several international collaborations.