Dave Chappelle has just served up another block party—sort of.
According to Variety, Chappelle brought out Q-Tip, Fat Joe, De La Soul, A$AP Ferg, Talib Kweli, Ghostface Killah and more for a 30-minute concert at Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall to close out the 2021 Tribeca Festival on Sunday night (June 20). Because there were no cameras or phones allowed in the screening, it’s unclear which songs were performed at the event.
Chappelle pulled up to this year’s Tribeca Festival in support of This Time This Place, a new Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar-directed documentary chronicling of his carefully planned series of socially distanced comedy concerts he threw in Yellow Springs, Ohio amid the COVID-19 pandemic last summer. The concerts took place in a five-acre cornfield owned by one of Chappelle’s friends. COVID-19 tests were administered at each of the 50 concerts, and Chappelle’s comedian friends Chris Rock, Jon Stewart, Kevin Hart, Michelle Wolf and Tiffany Haddish appeared for some of the shows, too. Reichert and Bognar happen to be Chappelle’s neighbors, and in order to suggest a collaboration, he approached them in neighborly fashion.
“I literally just knocked on their door the same way Black people do when they’re having barbecues,” Chappelle joked to audience members. “‘Hey, I’m having a barbecue. Can I borrow some hotdogs, neighbor?’”
Variety says that, in addition to the logistics of hosting these comedy shows near the peak of the pandemic, This Time This Place puts a spotlight onto the way Yellow Springs responded to the Black Lives Matter movement and the death of George Floyd.
This news arrives nearly 17 years after Chappelle took over Brooklyn to host a surprise concert featuring Kanye West, The Roots, Black Star and more. Chappelle had a documentary titled Dave Chappelle’s Block Party made for the event, and it was released in March 2006. Chappelle delivered a quasi block party concert for Barack Obama as he prepared to exit the White House in November 2016. That one featured performances from Usher, Common, Jill Scott and more.
See photos from Chappelle’s surprise concert below.