A multiple Grammy Award winner, she was a towering figure on operatic, concert and recital stages.
Jessye Norman performing in 1991 at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.Frans Schellekens/Redferns, via Getty Images
Jessye Norman, the majestic American soprano who brought a sumptuous, shimmering voice to a broad range of roles at the Metropolitan Opera and houses around the world, died on Monday in New York. She was 74.
The cause was septic shock and multiple organ failure following complications of a spinal cord injury she suffered in 2015, according to a statement by her family.
Ms. Norman, who also found acclaim as a recitalist and on the concert stage, was one of the most decorated of American singers. She won five Grammy Awards, four for her recordings and one for lifetime achievement. She received the prestigious Kennedy Center Honor in 1997 and the National Medal of Arts in 2009.
In a career that began in the late 1960s, Ms. Norman sang the title role in Verdi’s “Aida,” Wagner’s heroines, characters in Janacek, Poulenc, Bartok and Strauss operas, and Cassandre in “Les Troyens” by Berlioz, in which she made her Met debut in 1983. She went on to sing more than 80 performances at the Met. Its general manager, Peter Gelb, on Monday called her “one of the greatest artists to ever sing on our stage.”
Ms. Norman in her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1983 in the role of Cassandre in “Les Troyens” by Berlioz.Metropolitan Opera
A keen interpreter as well as a magnificent singer, Ms. Norman had a distinctly opulent tone that sounded effortless, never pushed. It was especially suited to Wagner and Strauss.
In a review of a 1992 recital, Edward Rothstein of The New York Times likened her voice to a “grand mansion of sound.”
“It defines an extraordinary space,” he wrote. “It has enormous dimensions, reaching backward and upward. It opens onto unexpected vistas. It contains sunlit rooms, narrow passageways, cavernous halls. Ms. Norman is the regal mistress of this domain, with a physical presence suited to her vocal expanse.”
As an African-American, she credited other great black singers with paving the way for her, naming Marian Anderson, Dorothy Maynor and Leontyne Price, among others, in a 1983 interview with The Times.
“They have made it possible for me to say, ‘I will sing French opera,’” she said “or, ‘I will sing German opera,’ instead of being told, ‘You will sing “Porgy and Bess.” ’ Look, it’s unrealistic to pretend that racial prejudice doesn’t exist. It does! It’s one thing to have a set of laws, and quite another to change the hearts and minds of men. That takes longer. I do not consider my blackness a problem. I think it looks rather nice.”
Ms. Norman in 1989 at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.Frans Schellekens/Redferns, via Getty Images
A new production of “Porgy and Bess” is now playing at the Met; the house said it was dedicating Monday night’s performance to Ms. Norman.
In her memoir, “Stand Up Straight and Sing!” (2014), she recounted meeting instances of racism. “Racial barriers in our world are not gone, so why can we imagine that racial barriers in classical music and the opera world are gone?” she told The Times in 2014.
Ms. Norman was born into a musical family on Sept. 15, 1945, in Augusta, Ga., growing up there in a segregated but close-knit world. Her mother, Janie King Norman, was an amateur pianist; her father, Silas Norman Sr., was an insurance broker. Jessye especially enjoyed visiting her maternal grandparents, fascinated by one particular piece of furniture.
“My grandparents were the only people I ever knew who had one — a grand pedal organ, or more accurately, a harmonium — right there in their house,” she wrote in her memoir. “It lived over in the corner of the front room, and I remember thinking that it was the most exotic thing I had ever encountered in my entire life. As far as I can recall, we were never stopped from playing it, nor admonished for disturbing the adults.”
She began listening to opera on the radio as a child.
“I remember thinking that opera stories were not very different from other stories: a boy meets a girl, they fall in love, they cannot be together for some reason, and most of the time it does not end happily ever after,” she wrote. “For me, opera stories were grown-up versions of stories that were familiar to me already.”
She earned a bachelor’s degree in music from Howard University and studied at the University of Michigan and Peabody Institute. Her career received its first big boost when she won a first-place prize at the Munich International Music Competition in 1968. The next year, she made her debut on an opera stage at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” as Elisabeth.
Ms. Norman acknowledged an ovation at Carnegie Hall in May 2008.Richard Termine for The New York Times
Appearances at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House in London, and other major opera houses followed, and she quickly became one of the busiest opera divas on the scene, a fixture of galas and benefits. An accomplished recitalist, she made records of vocal works by Mahler, Debussy and Strauss.
It was not until 1983 that she made a belated Met debut, opening the company’s centennial season singing the role of Cassandre in a starry revival of Berlioz’s “Les Troyens.” By all accounts she stole the show, winning over “Monday night’s audience and Tuesday morning’s critics,” as The Times reported in its account of her “triumph.”
She rose early the next day to appear on NBC’s “Today” show. “The only person in my family who couldn’t come on Monday was my mother, who is ill and at home in Georgia,’’ she said at the time. “‘I wanted to give her a look at me.”
Her imposing stage presence and large, voluptuous voice made her ideal for certain parts. When she sang the title character of Richard Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos,” one of her defining roles, John Rockwell described her in The Times as “one of our most musicianly singers” and added: “She has just the right voice for this role: a smoothly knit-together soprano that reaches up from plummy contralto notes to a powerful fullness on top.”
In a sign of her international stature, Ms. Norman was tapped to sing “La Marseillaise” in Paris on the 200th anniversary of Bastille Day — which she did, in dramatic fashion, at the obelisk on the Place de la Concorde before an array of world leaders, wearing a grand tricolor gown designed by Azzedine Alaïa. She also sang at the second inaugurations of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
She became a major recording artist at the dawn of the compact disc era, leaving a rich catalog of opera, lieder, spirituals and recitals. One of her most acclaimed recordings was a classic account of Strauss’s “Four Last Songs,”backed by Kurt Masur and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. “Her generous heart, dignified manner and noble voice seem ideally suited to Strauss’s valedictory utterances,” Gramophone wrote in its review.
In person she cut an imposing figure, dressing dramatically and speaking with a diva’s perfect diction. When she entered a room, heads turned. And even after she left the opera stage she remained a restless, probing artist — collaborating with the dancer, choreographer and director Bill T. Jones in 1999 on a piece called “How! Do! We! Do!’’ and later singing anarchic music by John Cage.
She was socially engaged. In 2003, Ms. Norman and the Rachel Longstreet Foundation created the Jessye Norman School of the Arts, a free after-school arts program in her native Augusta for underserved students. In October, that city will rename a street Jessye Norman Boulevard in October; she had planned to attend the ceremony.
Among her final projects was “Sissieretta Jones: Call Her By Her Name!,” a tribute to Jones, who in 1893 became the first African-American woman to headline a concert on the main stage of Carnegie Hall — and who had bristled at her stage name, “the Black Patti,” which compared her to the white diva Adelina Patti.
“Thirty years out of slavery for African-Americans in this country, here she was on the stage of Carnegie Hall,” Ms. Norman said in an interview last year.
In her memoir, Ms. Norman recalled one of her own earliest stabs at singing opera in front of an audience. She was in junior high school when, at a teacher’s urging, she performed the aria “My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice” from Saint-Saëns’s “Samson and Delilah.” She had been singing it in English at church functions and supermarket openings, but for the school performance her teacher had her learn it in its original French.
“I do think that if you can stand up and sing in French in front of an assembly full of middle-schoolers,” Ms. Norman wrote, “then you can do just about anything.”
Neil Genzlinger contributed reporting.
Daniel J. Wakin is an editor on the Obituary News Desk. He has been a reporter and editor in the Culture and Metro departments and has reported from three dozen countries. He is the author of “The Man With the Sawed-Off Leg and Other Tales of a New York City Block” (Arcade, 2018). @danwakin
Michael Cooper covers classical music and dance. He was previously a national correspondent; a political reporter covering presidential campaigns; and a metro reporter covering the police, City Hall and Albany. @coopnytimes •Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 1, 2019, Section B, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Jessye Norman, Regal American Soprano and Met Opera Luminary, Dies at 74. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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Larry Willis, whose ringing authority as a pianist extended to swinging post-bop, blaring jazz-rock, Cuban rumba and free improvisation, died on Sunday morning at the Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore, Md. He was 76 and lived in Baltimore.
His death was confirmed by Pierre Sprey, the owner of Mapleshade Records, for which Willis had served as music director in the 1990s and 2000s. Sprey, a close friend, said Willis had been admitted to the hospital for severe pneumonia on Friday, before suffering a pulmonary aneuorysm.
An unerringly tasteful and often understated pianist, Willis had a prolific career as a sideman over more than 50 years. He was a close associate of South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela, and the anointed piano surrogate in a sextet led by Carla Bley. Among many others who sought out his sterling support were saxophonists Cannonball Adderley, Joe Henderson, Jimmy Heath, Clifford Jordan and Stan Getz.
“He was the perfect sideman,” attests Sprey. “He had that natural bent for accompanying, which a few people have. It’s not because they’re selfless; they just take pride in making other people play better than they would otherwise.”
Willis served stints in a several prominent bands, each highlighting a different facet of his musical persona. He was a member of Blood, Sweat & Tears for most of the 1970s, making his debut on the aptly named album New Blood. From 1988 through the mid-‘90s, he played pacesetting Latin jazz with Jerry González and the Fort Apache Band. And from the late-1990s well into the aughts, he embodied the avuncular elder in an impeccable Roy Hargrove Quintet.
But to hail Willis as the ultimate team player, much as he was, runs the risk of slighting his achievements as a composer and bandleader. His own discography runs from the fiery jazz-funk of Inner Crisis (1973) to well over a dozen hard-bop sessions like Blue Fable (2007). He released a smart run of albums on Mapleshade, including Sanctuary (2003), an ambitious jazz-gospel project, and Exposé (2008), one in a series of freeform duo explorations with drummer Paul F. Murphy.
Willis’ book of originals includes a few that approach the threshold of new standards, at least for musicians who value post-bop literacy — songs like “To Wisdom, the Prize,” memorably recorded by Hargrove, and “Isabel the Liberator,” favored by trumpeter Woody Shaw.
A mournfully elegant Willis ballad titled “Ethiopia” was a staple of his tenure in Hargrove’s band, and he recorded it a few times himself. The most recent version appears on a 2008 HighNote album titled The Offering, with Eric Alexander on tenor saxophone, Eddie Gomez on bass and Billy Drummond on drums.
Lawrence Elliott Willis was born the youngest of three brothers in New York City on Dec. 20, 1942. He grew up in Harlem, shooting hoops with friends including Lew Alcindor, soon to be known as all-time basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. (They remained close over the years; Willis played Abdul-Jabbar’s 70th birthday party at Dizzy’s Club in 2017.)
Willis had a piano in the house throughout his childhood, though he barely touched it; one of his older brothers, Victor, was a classical virtuoso, so it may have been a matter of territorial pride. The youngest Willis aspired instead to be a classical singer, pursuing that major at the High School of Music & Art.
It was there that he met his first jazz peers, like Gomez and trumpeter Jimmy Owens. At around the same time, he fell in love with the Miles Davis album Kind of Blue, initiating what would be a lifelong infatuation with pianist Wynton Kelly. Following his instincts, Willis ditched his vocal studies for the piano, at the top of his senior year. It was a late start, and he was self-taught — but he made such brilliant progress that he received a scholarship to the Manhattan School of Music.
Willis met Masekela during their overlapping time in the conservatory. In fact, it was at Masekela’s urging that he took his first and only lessons, with a seasoned pianist and serious pedagogue named John Mehegan.
As a measure of how advanced Willis was by then, consider his first record date, with alto saxophonist Jackie McLean. He was 19 when he played on the album, a Blue Note release titled Right Now! — and he contributed two of its four compositions. One of these, “Poor Eric,” is a ballad for multi-reedist Eric Dolphy, who had died the previous year at only 36. The song is poetically terse, with a plaintive beauty that comes across even without that tragic context.
Willis — who is survived by a nephew, Elliott Willis, and a cousin, Trish Cooper — faced a life-disrupting challenge in 2007, when a fire consumed his home and most of his possessions in Upper Marlboro, Md. With assistance from Catholic Charities and the Jazz Foundation of America, he relocated to Baltimore; a benefit to offset his expenses featured admiring pianists like Randy Weston and Geri Allen.
In recent years, Willis embraced his own role as a jazz elder. He made two albums for Smoke Sessions Records with a supergroup called Heads of State, featuring longtime associates: saxophonist Gary Bartz, drummer Al Foster, and either Buster Williams or David Williams (no relation) on bass.
“There was something very unique about the way he played,” says producer Todd Barkan, whose club, Keystone Korner Baltimore, presented Willis in his final engagement. That gig, on July 31 and Aug. 1, featured bassist Blake Meister and drummer Victor Lewis. Both musicians later joined Willis in the studio, along with saxophonist Joe Ford and trumpeter Jeremy Pelt, to record what will now be his final album, a posthumous release on HighNote.
Though Willis approached music with utmost seriousness, he was unhindered by pretensions or preconceptions. “My piano teacher always used to impress upon me the need to approach music from an eclectic mindset,” he told Marian McPartland in 2007, for an episode of Piano Jazz.
The callback to John Mehegan went further: “He gave me some very, very good advice that I keep in my forefront,” Willis recalled. “He said, ‘Larry, the piano is the most complicated piece of machinery man ever invented. And I asked him why, and he said: ‘Well, for starters: every time you sit down at this instrument, the odds are always 88 to 10, and they don’t get any better.”
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A director and a composer play versions of themselves in a fascinating but frustrating reconsideration of a movie infamous for its use of blackface.
From left, Nehemiah Luckett, Cristina Pitter, Joshua William Gelb and Stanley Mathabane in the multimedia show “jazz singer” at Abrons Arts Center.Ian Douglas
Jazz Singer
Off Off Broadway, Experimental/Perf. Art, Play
1 hr. and 40 min.
Closing Date: Oct. 12, 2019
Henry Street Settlement – Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand St.
866-811-4111
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Yet Alan Crosland’s picture is now mostly remembered, and discredited, for a scene in which Jolson performs his signature song, “My Mammy,” in blackface — a form of entertainment that has long stopped being acceptable.
Like much art, though, “The Jazz Singer,” based on Samson Raphaelson’s 1925 play, is not easy to entirely dismiss. It is a fascinating, complicated text dealing with assimilation and community, transgression and forgiveness, tradition and innovation. It’s that fraught terrain that the director Joshua William Gelb and the composer/music director Nehemiah Luckett are surveying in their “jazz singer,”a new multimedia show at Abrons Arts Center.
In the first part, Mr. Gelb, Mr. Luckett, the performer Cristina Pitter and the onstage co-sound designer Stanley Mathabane play themselves, or at least versions of themselves; Ms. Pitter also appears as a composite character named Tracey.
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They are all working on what they call an “interrogation” of “The Jazz Singer,” and it’s not smooth sailing as they scrutinize the movie, issues of representation and artistic responsibility, and their evolving attitudes toward one another.
Mr. Luckett, who is black, calmly says, “You’ve seen me perform. Why would you think I’m a jazz musician?” after Mr. Gelb blithely identifies him as such.
The original story involves the refusal of Jolson’s Jewish character, Jakie Rabinowitz, to become a cantor like his father; instead he achieves Broadway fame by performing “jazz” (actually more like Tin Pan Alley tunes) under the name Jack Robin. The performance of identity is at the heart of “The Jazz Singer,” and it is on everybody’s mind here.
Navigating the blackface segment raises yet more issues, and we see a short clip of Jolson coating his face and neck in greasepaint — except the image is safely cropped in such a way that you can’t quite tell what’s going on. (Having seen the film is not strictly required, but it does help.)
The first part of the show is fascinating, if self-indulgent, as we watch creators attempt to negotiate thorny material in the highly sensitized environment that is art-making in 2019. (Mr. Gelb enjoys recontextualizing historically notable art works. In 2016, he tackled “The Black Crook,” which is considered the first modern stage musical.)
The proceedings are not nearly as compelling in the messy second part, when the show moves into the retelling of the film. “Jazz Singer” meanders erratically as it tries to do too much at once: retrace the plot, superimpose a meta-commentary over the action, correct historical wrongs, insert the jazz that’s missing from the movie. (There is a different musical guest every night; on Thursday, it was the cornet player Linton Smith II, of “Playing Hot”).
At one point Ms. Pitter — an Off Off Broadway staple who brightens every show she’s in — sings a tribute to the black actress Carolynne Snowden, triggered by the fact that the one black woman in the 1927 film does not get a line and is not even fully seen. I was reminded of DJ Spooky’s “Rebirth of a Nation,” an audio and visual remix of D.W. Griffith’s racist magnum opus “The Birth of a Nation,” as well as of Lynn Nottage’s intricately plotted deconstruction of Hollywood’s racial fabrications, “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark.”
Here, though, it feels as if the creative team was paralyzed rather than stimulated by their ambivalence and took refuge in a kind of florid obfuscation. Trying to cover all the bases and all the sensibilities, they ended up with a cautious show — and that doesn’t seem very jazz at all.
jazz singer
Through Oct. 12 at Abrons Arts Center, Manhattan; 866-811-4111, abronsartscenter.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
Conceived by Joshua William Gelb and Nehemiah Luckett; Music by Nehemiah Luckett; Directed by Joshua William Gelb
Cast
Joshua William Gelb, Nehemiah Luckett, Cristina Pitter and Stanley Mathabane
Preview
Sept. 24, 2019
Opened
Sept. 29, 2019
Closing
Oct. 12, 2019
Upcoming Shows
Wednesday
October 2
8:00 pm
Thursday
October 3
8:00 pm
Friday
October 4
8:00 pm
Saturday
October 5
8:00 pm
Sunday
October 6
2:00 pm
This information was last updated on Sept. 30, 2019
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 30, 2019, Section C, Page 2of the New York edition with the headline: For a 1927 Al Jolson Film, an Interrogation. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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Hundreds of photos of iconic jazz artists have been hidden away until now
Posted: Aug 5, 2019 / 01:00 PM PDT / Updated:
PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — Portland’s reputation as a great jazz town goes back decades. The world’s top jazz musicians played Portland regularly in the 1940s and 50s.
From Louis Armstrong to Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie to Duke Ellington.
Dizzy Gillespie in Portland. (Courtesy of Carl Henniger estate)
Oregon photographer Carl Henniger captured incredible images of those performers — but most have never been seen by the public, until now.
The former military pilot worked in advertising sales for the Oregonian after World War II. He studied photography at Oregon State University, worked on the yearbook and eventually became a stringer for Downbeat Magazine.
“So what he was doing was he’d go out and take pictures of concerts,” Carl’s son, Michael Henniger said.
Henniger took 385 photos, capturing legends like Charlie Parker with Chet Baker, Dinah Washington, Ray Brown and Dizzy Gillespie.
“Portland was very highly regarded as a venue for musicians playing the West Coast,” Michael Henniger said. “In fact, Duke Ellington liked it so much he had his birthday here — twice.”
They all played Portland, in clubs mostly along North Williams Avenue in Portland’s Albina District. They called it Jumptown.
Duke Ellington at McElroy’s in 1954. (Courtesy of Carl Henniger estate)
The jazz scene was as vibrant as any in America until Memorial Coliseum and I-5 wiped Jumptown away.
“It wasn’t rock and roll that killed jazz,” Michael said. “It was urban renewal, in my opinion.”
Carl Henniger’s photos
Charlie Parker in Portland. (Courtesy of Carl Henniger estate)
Stan Kenton with June Christy in Portland. (Courtesy of Carl Henniger estate)
Oscar Peterson with Ray Brown on bass. (Courtesy of Carl Henniger estate)
Charlie Ventura in Portland. (Courtesy of Carl Henniger estate)
Dizzy Gillespie in Portland. (Courtesy of Carl Henniger estate)
Dizzy Gillespie in Portland. (Courtesy of Carl Henniger estate)
Duke Ellington at McElroy’s in 1954. (Courtesy of Carl Henniger estate)
Errol Garner in Portland. (Courtesy of Carl Henniger estate)
George Shearling in Portland. (Courtesy of Carl Henniger estate)
Charlie Parker in Portland. (Courtesy of Carl Henniger estate)
Stan Kenton with June Christy in Portland. (Courtesy of Carl Henniger estate)
Henniger took jazz photos for a couple of years — long enough to make the money to move his family from St. Johns to Beaverton.
His legacy was almost lost.
“They’ve been in a drawer for literally 60 years,” Michael said.
Now he’s determined to share his father’s work.
“The reason I want people to see them is not only because the people are famous, but because they’re such good photographs,” he said.
Michael got a grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council to exhibit the photos. Thirty selected photos will be featured in the atrium at Portland City Hall for 3 weeks starting September 13, then the collection will go into the archives at Oregon State University.
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Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
Little about the life Robert Leroy Johnson lived in his brief 27 years, from approximately May 1911 until he died mysteriously in 1938, was documented. A birth certificate, if he had one, has never been found.
What is known can be summarized on a postcard: He is thought to have been born out of wedlock in May 1911 in Mississippi and raised there. School and census records indicated he lived for stretches in Tennessee and Arkansas. He took up guitar at a young age and became a traveling musician, eventually glimpsing the bustle of New York City. But he died in Mississippi, with just over two dozen little-noticed recorded songs to his name.
And yet, in the late 20th century, the advent of rock ’n’ roll would turn Johnson into a figure of legend. Decades after his death, he became one of the most famous guitarists who had ever lived, hailed as a lost prophet who, the dubious story goes, sold his soul to the devil and epitomized Mississippi Delta blues in the bargain.
In the late 1960s, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin covered or adapted Johnson’s songs in tribute. Bob Dylan, who, in the memoir “Chronicles: Volume One,” attributed “hundreds of lines” of his songwriting to Johnson’s influence, included a Johnson album as one of the items on the cover of “Bringing It All Back Home.”
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In the 1990s, a lightning-in-a-bottle compilation of Johnson’s music — “The Complete Recordings,” released by Columbia Records in 1991 — revived interest in the blues for yet another generation, selling more than two million copies and winning a Grammy for best historical album. In 1994, a United States postage stamp in Johnson’s likeness memorialized him as a national hero.
The chasm between the man Johnson was and the myth he became — between mortal reach and posthumous grip — has marooned historians and conscientious listeners for more than a half-century. It would have made fertile terrain for one of Johnson’s own songs, many of which frankly and masterfully tilled the everyday hopelessness and implausibility of segregated African-American life.
Indeed, his story is no more or less than the handiwork of the country in which it was written; a country where the legacy of African-Americans has often been shaped by others.
“The Complete Recordings,” released by Columbia Records in 1991, sold more than two million copies and won a Grammy for best historical album.Columbia Records
Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, Miss., in the wake of the Redemption era, a period following Reconstruction when white supremacists across the South reversed many of the freedoms and rights granted blacks after the Civil War.
His mother was Julia Major Dodds, the daughter of slaves, who had 10 children with her husband, Charles Dodds, before conceiving another with a field hand named Noah Johnson.
When Robert was around 7, his mother married another man, and he moved with her to Robinsonville, Miss. It was there, in the town’s popular juke joints — segregated stores or private houses that doubled, after hours, as recreational places — that his now legendary music career began.
As recounted in Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch’s biography, “Robert Johnson: Lost and Found” (2003), Johnson, perhaps as a teenager, attended juke joint performances by the early Delta blues pioneer Son House. The young musician had trained on a diddley bow — one or more strings nailed taut to the side of a barn — and wasn’t much of a guitar player. But a surplus of ambition outweighed his lack of skill.
In a 1965 interview with the writer and academic Julius Lester, cited by Pearson and McCulloch, House recalled Johnson’s habit of commandeering the stage during intermissions in order to play songs of his own. Chastened by House — and the howls of his audience — Johnson reportedly left town. But he returned six months later eager to perform again, this time asking for House’s permission.
“He was so good!” House said of the new and improved playing style Johnson exhibited on the night of his re-emergence. “When he finished all our mouths were standing open. I said, ‘Well, ain’t that fast! He’s gone now!’ ”
Variations on House’s story — a mysterious sojourn, sudden virtuosity — are the source of the myth that Johnson, like Faust, sold his soul in exchange for his genius.
But friends of Johnson have given conflicting testimonies as to whether the singer himself ever endorsed the tale. And the two of his songs most often associated with the story, “Cross Road Blues” and “Hell Hound on My Trail,” make no mention of an unholy encounter. Historians now suggest that Johnson’s real benefactor may have been a guitarist in the Hazlehurst area named Ike Zinnerman (sometimes spelled Zimmerman).
As Johnson’s music began to find an audience in the years after his death, however, critics — many of them white and mystified by black culture in the South — leaned into the legend.
As the music historian Elijah Wald wrote in “Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues” (2004): “As white urbanites discovered the ‘race records’ of the 1920s and ’30s, they reshaped the music to fit their own tastes and desires, creating a rich mythology that often bears little resemblance to the reality of the musicians they admired.”
What is true is that the guitar playing on Johnson’s recordings was unusually complex for its time. Most early Delta blues musicians played simple guitar figures that harmonized with their voices. But Johnson, imitating the boogie-woogie style of piano playing, used his guitar to play rhythm, bass and slide simultaneously, all while singing.
Another innovation associated with Johnson, as noted by the critic Tony Scherman in 2009 in The New York Times, is the walking bass. Appearing on the Johnson songs “Ramblin’ on My Mind” and “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,” the walking bass — a low, ambling rhythm that evokes a swaggering strut — became a building block of both Chicago blues and rock ’n’ roll in the hands of the Johnson apostles Muddy Waters and Elmore James.
Like many bluesmen who lived in the shadow of Jim Crow, Johnson was a wanderer for most of his adult life and performed in juke joints — often traveling with his fellow blues artist Johnny Shines — as far as New York City. He married twice — first to Virginia Travis, who died while giving birth to their child, who also died; then to Caletta Craft. In 2000, a court ruled that Claud Johnson, the child of a girlfriend of Johnson’s named Virgie Jane Smith, was legally his son.
What survives of Johnson’s short career is based on his only two recording sessions, arranged by the American Record Company executive Don Law in 1936 and 1937 in Texas. One song from the first session, the vibrant “Terraplane Blues,” sold a respectable 5,000 copies, giving the singer the only real taste of fame he would know in his life.
Another record executive, John Hammond of Columbia Records, championed Johnson’s music decades after his death. Hammond, who launched the recording careers of Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, issued a posthumous album in 1961, “King of the Delta Blues Singers,” which compiled most of the American Record Company recordings.
The album captivated a fledgling generation of musicians at the dawn of rock’s golden age. As Eric Clapton wrote in 2007 in “Clapton: The Autobiography,” describing his first encounter with “King of the Delta Blues,” “I realized that, on some level, I had found the master.”
The story of how Johnson died, like so many facts of his life, is contested.
A death certificate recovered by the researcher Gayle Dean Wardlow showed that he died on Aug. 16, 1938, at a plantation near Greenwood, Miss. The cause was complications of syphilis, according to a note on the back of the certificate that was attributed to the plantation’s owner.
But David Honeyboy Edwards, a contemporary of Johnson’s who is believed to have performed with him just days before his death, said that Johnson had been poisoned, and that he was probably targeted by the vengeful husband of one of his mistresses.
The location of Johnson’s grave has never been confirmed. Headstones at three different churches in the Greenwood area claim to mark his resting place — the final riddle of a man whose brief, turbulent life became a cipher nearly as sensational as his songs.
Correction: Sept. 26, 2019
An earlier version of this obituary misstated the title of the posthumous album that the record executive John Hammond issued in 1961. It is “King of the Delta Blues Singers,” not “King of the Delta Blues.”
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“Blue World,” culled from the sessions the saxophonist led for a film soundtrack, is a moment of looking back before he pushed even further ahead.
In 1964, John Coltrane was approached by Gilles Groulx, a Canadian filmmaker, about recording the soundtrack to a film.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
John Coltrane’s creative flame was burning at its brightest in 1964. The saxophonist had recently let go of his fixation on complex, layered harmonies, and he would soon pioneer a dry, squalling approach to group improvisation — nearly abandoning Western harmony altogether, and changing the course of jazz history.
Amid the transition, that year he recorded what would be his two most potent albums, “Crescent” and “A Love Supreme.” These works thrive at the crossroads: They are in touch with the driving, cohesive sound that his so-called classic quartet had established, but push into a blazing beyond.
Yet history is not this simple. Even for Coltrane — a symbol of tireless creative momentum, who is said to have never stopped hurtling forward — detours came up.
That spring, Coltrane was approached by Gilles Groulx, a young Canadian filmmaker at work on his first feature, “Le Chat dans le Sac.” Groulx asked his musical hero to record the film’s soundtrack, and to his surprise, Coltrane said yes.
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Between the springtime recording dates for “Crescent” and the “Love Supreme” sessions in late fall, Coltrane’s quartet — the pianist McCoy Tyner, the bassist Jimmy Garrison and the drummer Elvin Jones — found an afternoon to record four originals from his back catalog and one jazz standard, the Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer ballad “Out of This World.” (Coltrane retitled it as “Blue World”, most likely out of copyright concerns.)
“Blue World” is taken from a 1964 session for a film soundtrack.
Groulx inserted three tracks into “Le Chat dans le Sac,” which won the Grand Prix at the Montreal International Film Festival that year and remains a cult favorite, but the session tapes quickly fell into history’s dustbin.
When they came to light recently, Impulse! Records — still catching its breath from the success of last year’s “Both Directions at Once,” a revelatory “lost” Coltrane album from 1963 that has sold the equivalent of over a quarter of a million copies worldwide, according to the label — decided to compile the tracks into an album. It will be released on Friday as “Blue World.”
Calling this a full-on LP is a stretch: Without the two alternate takes of “Village Blues” and one of “Naima,” it would feature just five tracks, clocking in at roughly 25 minutes. (Alternates included, it runs 37 minutes.) And what do we want with a detour, when the creative seeking that Coltrane was doing in these years felt so rich and so pure?
Well, there’s something alluring about this odd little gift of a session, which for Coltrane must have landed somewhere between “just a gig” and “just a favor.” Supporting someone else’s low-budget film, obligingly revisiting items at Groulx’s request that he no longer even played live, the saxophonist sounds as if he was carrying a generous spirit and a relatively easy air into the studio that day.
That isn’t to say the group’s sound is not dark and deep, just as it was on “Crescent,” which the quartet had finished recording only weeks before. In the late 1950s Coltrane defined a swirling, “sheets of sound” approach, and when he did hold long notes he played them in a beaming, silvery tone. By 1964 that had all changed; he was using fewer notes, and each one took up more space, stating its case with subtlety but commanding greater attention.
Even on the relatively brief pieces here — particularly “Like Sonny” and the three versions of “Village Blues” — the quartet doesn’t hurry, and Coltrane plays beautifully carved lines over Jones’s sturdy, polyrhythmic strut. As on “Crescent,” Coltrane’s solos are defined by the weight and steady vision of his playing, as much as by the phrases themselves: a variety of long tones, pendulum-swinging repetitions and zigzagging runs.
Garrison’s bass is turned up rather high, giving the entire session a pulpy, magnetic aura. And the band is having fun. On the two versions of “Naima” — especially Take 1 — Mr. Tyner savors the piece’s strangely colorful harmonies, dancing and skipping in the buoyant style he often brought to ballads (and which he used in live renditions of this tune, the only one on “Blue World” that was still in the quartet’s stage repertoire). It is not as haunting a performance as the original, but it conveys how renewable this piece had become for Coltrane. Written for a soon-to-be ex-wife, it was no longer just a love song; “Naima” lived on as a prayer, and perhaps an issuance of gratitude for a partner who had done so much to help shape and support his creativity.
Like the rest of “Blue World,” these takes on “Naima” might first seem like a light-touch aberration from the work Coltrane was doing in that consequential year. But these performances are, in fact, deeply entrenched in Coltrane’s moment: He’s issuing a warm valediction to his old catalog, full of his characteristic seriousness and serenity, before charging even further ahead.
John Coltrane
“Blue World”
(Impulse!)
The Coltranes
John and Alice stretched the definitions of rhythm and harmony.
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 26, 2019, Section C, Page 2of the New York edition with the headline: Coltrane Took a Detour in 1964. Now It’s a New Album.. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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The pianist and conceptual artist engages with the physical history of jazz in collaborations with Kara Walker, Joan Jonas and other art world figures.
Jason Moran performing with his trio, the Bandwagon, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Performance is as much a part of his exhibition as his sculptures and drawings.Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times
At the Whitney Museum of American Art last week, Jason Moran and his Bandwagon trio had been playing for about 10 minutes inside a replica of the stage at the Three Deuces, a bebop club from 1940s New York, when he suddenly got up from the piano and snaked through the crowd assembled inside the museum’s eighth-floor gallery.
While the drummer Nasheet Waits soloed back at the Three Deuces, Mr. Moran and the bassist Tarus Mateen strode onto a different set, this one recreating the downtown ’60s haunt Slugs’ Saloon. Mr. Waits joined them there and the trio got moving again, from jagged-edged 21st-century blues to reworkings of Thelonious Monk.
In the rollick and riot of the group’s performance, and the curious engagement of the riled-up crowd, these two stages came to life, just as the original clubs once had.
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The performance christened a new exhibition, “Jason Moran,” the first museum survey devoted to this MacArthur-winning pianist and conceptualist. (The show opened last year at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and traveled to two other cities before arriving at the Whitney. It will be up through Jan. 5.) It is an undeniable — if unsurprising — milestone in the career of an artist who has always insisted on moving laterally between artistic practices, and up the art world’s ladder.
Three replicas of stages, including the one at Slugs’ Saloon, above, dominate the exhibition’s main gallery. Large screens show videos and stills from Mr. Moran’s collaborations.Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times
The Whitney show comprises works made with leading art world figures like Julie Mehretu, Carrie Mae Weems, Stan Douglas, Kara Walker and Glenn Ligon. “I was wondering: ‘Why are all these incredible artists linked to this one person?’” Adrienne Edwards, curator of performance at the Whitney and the exhibition’s chief creative architect, said in an interview. “He’s the common denominator, so I became interested in why.”
Mr. Moran and Ms. Edwards intend the exhibition as not just a welcoming of Mr. Moran’s creative conclave, but also as its own, living space. “It’s a solo show — ‘Jason Moran’ — but it’s also a group show,” Ms. Edwards said. “It was about how to keep all these things in the air and floating, as equal parts, in an exhibition format.”
Typically seeing a museum show might involve walking through a number of galleries, but in this one your relationship to space and time is turned sideways. The exhibition’s physical contents are mostly centered in one large room, yet because so many are music- and video-based, you spend a lot of time stationary, letting things play out, as if you were at a performance. And there will indeed be more performances. The stages here will be reactivated most weekends this fall by concerts from jazz groups selected by Mr. Moran. On Oct. 12, he will perform outside the museum on a giant, earsplitting calliope built by the visual artist Kara Walker, meant to evoke the horrors of slavery in the South, and on which Mr. Moran will play songs from the African-American canon.
The main gallery is dominated by the stage sculptures — three in all — which Mr. Moran created with help from fabricators. They are large-scale dioramas of the rooms that once existed at Slugs’ Saloon in the East Village, the Three Deuces in Midtown and the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. On the gallery’s navy-gray walls, three large screens show videos and stills from Mr. Moran’s collaborations. The visuals run without repeating for over two hours, and include footage of him working with Joan Jonas, Theaster Gates and others; video pieces he made with Ms. Walker, Ms. Weems and Lorna Simpson; and photos from his collaborations with others, accompanied by Mr. Moran’s piano playing, which wafts up spectrally from the Three Deuces’ baby grand (it has player-piano capabilities, so the keys are actually playing themselves).
A large-scale diorama reimagines a room at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem.Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times
Details from the exhibition (and a recent concert), which will feature weekly performances.Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times
A small side theater shows Mr. Douglas’s six-hour-long music video, “Luanda Kinshasa,” a period-specific rendering of a 1970s recording session (suggesting a conversation with the intense nostalgia of Mr. Moran’s stages).
The foyer outside the gallery is lined with 10 works on paper, which Mr. Moran made by covering his keyboard with sheets, dipping his fingers in charcoal, and playing. The drawings operate as a kind of kinetic residue of performance, or an alternate notation system. (They have equal roots in the history of nonstandard musical notation, dating back at least to the jazz avant-garde of the 1960s, and in David Hammons’s basketball drawings.)
From his adolescent years, Mr. Moran felt a resonance between music and other forms of art. But as a student at Manhattan School of Music, he found that jazz’s history was largely passed down in the form of exercises and sheet music.
To escape those limitations he sought out painters and other artists, placing them at the center of his process in the way that early jazz musicians had dancers. “I had to see what somebody else thought about the music — not a jazz musician,” he said over coffee recently, in a restaurant near the Whitney.
But it wasn’t until he worked with Ms. Jonas, an art-world eminence, in the mid-2000s that he began to see himself as a conceptual artist. Ms. Jonas makes performance art that leans into questions of physical space and the limits of archival media. Mr. Moran was inspired to bring some of her methods into his own practice.
And Mr. Moran’s influence flowed back to her as well. In their performance she felt inspired to participate in the music-making process for the first time. “Jason, in a way, allowed me to become a musician, to become a percussionist,” Ms. Jonas said in a phone interview. “He’s a very generous collaborator.”
And thanks to her, Mr. Moran saw that a conceptual approach could lead him into an encounter with jazz’s physical history: the spaces and bodies that made its greatest moments possible. This, in effect, could become a way of celebrating the entire culture that the music sprang from — but which often finds itself erased in history, especially as the music rises into the academy.
Works by Jason Moran, from left, “Run 2” (2016), “Run 6” (2016), “Strutter’s Ball” (2016) and “Blue (Creed) Gravity 1” (2018). The first three are works of charcoal on paper; the last piece is made from dry pigment on paper.Sasha Arutyunova for The New York Times
“When I think about all that has happened in those clubs, in those venues, with those audiences, with all the ephemera that is left behind — that tells a fuller picture of what the music is,” Mr. Moran said, pondering his stage sculptures. “That’s without the sound.” At the show, each stage replica is juxtaposed with a small display of photographs, souvenir cards and other objects from the old clubs themselves. Mr. Moran acquired these items, mostly on eBay.
The big precursor to “Jason Moran” was “Bleed,” the weeklong residency that Mr. Moran and the operatic vocalist Alicia Hall Moran — his wife, and his first and most consistent collaborator — presented at the 2012 Whitney Biennial. Just like their recent stage production, “Two Wings: The Music of Black America in Migration,” which debuted this year at Carnegie Hall, “Bleed” too was a convocation of friends and collaborators, its form dictated by their intersections.
It worked as a subtle suggestion that the Whitney might someday become a rich home for performances. And it showed that as black visual artists steadily rise in the contemporary pantheon, more room will have to be made for their counterparts in music and performance, since the art of the African diaspora has always been, by its very essence, interdisciplinary.
The museum has presented jazz and classical concerts since the 1960s, but it has never championed performance on the same level as visual art. Picking up on what “Bleed” put down, thinking and working together, Mr. Moran and Ms. Edwards have made that seem possible.
Jason Moran
Through Jan. 5 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, Manhattan; 212-570-3600, whitney.org.
Performance highlights include the saxophonist Archie Shepp on Sept. 25-26; the vocalist Fay Victor on Oct. 18-19; the Onyx Collective on Nov. 1-2; the bassist Cecil McBee on Nov. 15-16; and the Tiger Trio on Jan. 3-4. Kara Walker’s “Katastwóf Karavan” calliope will be on display outside the museum on Oct. 12, and Mr. Moran will perform on the calliope at 6 p.m.
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How a Newspaper Article Saved Thousands of Black Gospel Records From Obscurity
A professor in Texas collects and digitizes rare recordings from across the country.
Santi Elijah HolleySeptember 24, 2019
The Soul Stirrers, Sam Cooke (left), JJ Farley, SR Crain, RB Robinson, and Paul Foster (right), in 1950. (Photo by Gilles Petard/Redferns) Gilles Petard/Getty
For the last dozen years, in the basement of a university library in Waco, Texas, a small team of audio engineers has been busy trying to save black gospel music. On a typical day, after delicately removing a scuffed vinyl record from its tattered sleeve, an engineer cleans the disc, places it onto a specialized turntable, and drops the needle. A moment later, an exhilarating music rises from the speakers, filling the small room with voices not heard in half a century. Once the song has come to an end, the audio file is loaded into a digital archive, and the record joins thousands of LPs and 45s that are stacked wall-to-wall in a climate-controlled room at Baylor University.
The current effort to preserve gospel recordings began in 2005, when Robert Darden, a journalism professor at Baylor, published an op-ed in The New York Times. He wrote that innumerable black gospel records, particularly from the “Golden Age” of the mid-1940s to the mid-70s, were at risk of being lost, whether because of damage or neglect. It was getting harder and harder to track down LPs of popular artists like the Soul Stirrers (who at one time featured a young Sam Cooke), to say nothing of 45s from largely obscure groups like the Gospel Kings of Portsmouth, Virginia. “It would be more than a cultural disaster to forever lose this music,” Darden wrote. “It would be a sin.”
The Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, released this album of civil rights music in 1962. Robert Rogers/Baylor University
Soon after publishing the op-ed, Darden was contacted by an investment banker named Charles Royce. Royce confessed he didn’t know much about gospel music, but the opinion piece had convinced him that preserving it was a worthwhile endeavor. “You figure out how to save it,” he said, according to Darden. “Send me a plan, and I’ll pay for it.”
Darden first began to recognize the crisis facing classic gospel music while working on his book, People Get Ready!: A New History of Black Gospel Music. He had previously worked as the gospel music editor for Billboard, and had written extensively on the genre, yet he often struggled to find the music he covered. “I’d been frustrated time and time again throughout the writing of the book, when I would write about a very important gospel song that had been influential in the history of gospel music, in some cases in popular music, and I couldn’t listen to it,” Darden says. “I’d go to the used record stores, and online, and everywhere I knew, and there just simply would not be a copy available.”
Darden and other record collectors estimated that around 75 percent of all gospel vinyl released during the Golden Age was no longer available. The records had been completely lost, or only a few remaining copies were known to be in circulation. Darden was determined to know how many of these records could be found, and how many were lost for good.
After Darden came up with a plan to find and preserve these records, Royce provided a grant of $350,000. Darden got right to work, establishing the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project, or BGMRP, in 2007. Inside a sound-isolated room in the basement of Baylor’s Moody Library, gospel LPs, 45s, and 78s are cleaned, archived, and digitized by audio engineers, using state-of-the-art equipment. After each disc is processed, it becomes available to stream for free online, alongside any available original artwork and recording details.
One of the rare songs that Darden helped recover was “Old Ship of Zion,” recorded on a self-pressed 45 in the early 1970s by the Mighty Wonders, a group from Aquasco, Maryland. Darden recalls the first time he heard it: “Our engineer played it for me in the studio, and we both broke into tears.” Found in a box of miscellaneous 45s purchased on the East Coast, Darden spent the next five years trying to track down any information about it. During a public radio interview in Baltimore, a child of one of the original members of the group called in and introduced himself. Darden learned that the group itself didn’t even own a copy. Now one of the BGMRP’s most cherished finds, “Old Ship of Zion” is featured in the gospel section of the National Museum of African American History & Culture.
Most of the music in the archive was loaned by collectors across the country or purchased at record stores by Darden and his team, but some have come from individual donations. Anyone is welcome to send music, either as a permanent donation or a loan. Darden says that opening a new box of records is “like Christmas.” Many of the records now in Baylor’s library, like the “Old Ship of Zion” 45, are among the only known copies in existence, Darden says. He estimates that he and his team have digitized around 14,000 items, including songs, LP jackets, and photos.
Darden recognized the crisis facing classic gospel music while working on his book, People Get Ready!: A New History of Black Gospel Music. Robert Rogers/Baylor University
In a 2007 interview, shortly after launching the project, Darden told the public radio host Terry Gross, “We see it as kind of like those seed banks up around the Arctic Circle that keep one copy of every kind of seed there is in case there’s another Dutch elm disease. I just want to make sure that every gospel song, the music that all American music comes from, is saved.”
Darden, who is white, doesn’t come from a traditional church background. With a father in the Air Force, he grew up moving with his family from base to base. His parents owned a record of Mahalia Jackson singing Christmas songs, but Darden remembers first hearing gospel music in the homes of his black friends, whose parents were also in the Air Force. “That was the music that their parents were playing and singing,” he says. “I loved it from day one.”
Mahalia Jackson performs on stage in 1959. Giles Petard/Getty
The BGMRP focuses exclusively on music from gospel’s Golden Age, the roughly 30-year period that saw gospel music surge in popularity, owing to the musical innovations of artists such as Clara Ward, Mahalia Jackson, the Swan Silvertones, and the Dixie Hummingbirds. Darden points out that gospel’s Golden Age is also significant because it “corresponds with the era of the Civil Rights movement exactly, and it corresponds with the era of the greatest impact of the African-American church on the African-American community.” He adds, “They’re all intertwined. That’s why gospel matters. This was the music of the revolution.”
Reverend Clay Evans, a Baptist pastor in Chicago who has worked as a civil rights leader and gospel recording artist, has powerful memories of the Golden Age. He was born in 1925 and released his first musical project in 1985, with Savoy Records. “Gospel music motivated us,” Evans says. “Music gave us hope. Hope that we needed to continue to overcome. Hope that we were on the right trail to overcome the racism that existed. Hope that God was with us in the struggle.”
Reverend Clay Evans leads members into the new Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church for opening day celebrations in 1973. Chicago Public Library, Special Collections
These days, selections from Baylor’s collection can be found in the National Museum of African American History & Culture, in Washington, D.C., as part of the museum’s permanent collection. But to access the entire collection in-person, visitors to Waco can drop by Lev’s Gathering Place, at Baylor University’s Crouch Fine Arts Library. Sitting on a reclaimed church pew and stained-glass windows, visitors can view photos and listen to thousands of songs on iPad kiosks.
In recent years, Darden and the BGMRP have begun another undertaking: archiving audio recordings of African-American preachers. Recorded sermons were once popular and profitable, especially leading up to and during the Civil Rights movement, but they too face the threat of being permanently lost. “Even less of that has been preserved,” Darden says. “From the Civil Rights movement, for instance, with the exception of Dr. King, virtually none of the sermons that changed America are preserved. Or, when they are preserved, they’re on somebody’s cassette in somebody’s warehouse in the South Side of Chicago.”
Visitors to Lev’s Gathering Place, at Baylor University’s Crouch Fine Arts Library, can sit on a reclaimed church pew and listen to thousands of classic gospel songs. Robert Rogers/Baylor University
Upon learning of this project, Reverend Evans dug out several boxes of his broadcast sermons, some decades old and long-neglected, from a derelict storage space near his church in Chicago. Now 94 years old, Evans has contributed over 900 tapes of his broadcast sermons to the archive. For him, digitizing and archiving these records is about not only preserving a fundamental part of American history, but also providing inspiration to present and future generations.
“We face the same issues today, and we still need encouragement,” Evans says. He sees parallels between today’s struggles for social justice and the civil rights struggles of the past. “It’s good for children to know what we’ve been through. Then they can be encouraged to make it through, too.”
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Charlie’s out on parental leave, which means no one is here to stop Nate from going off the rails. And you know what means… JAZZ! As soon as dad left the room, Nate enlisted his favorite journalist, jazz and sports writer Natalie Weiner, to come on the show and discuss her incredible 1959 Project — a day-by-day chronicle of jazz during one of its most pivotal years. We listen to classic 1959 albums Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and Dave Brubeck’s Take Out, discuss the complex legacy of Billie Holiday, and dig into some of the year’s forgotten gems.
Sixty years later, jazz is no longer the cultural juggernaut is once was — but it still has much to teach us about pop culture of the present.
Playlist:
•Miles Davis – So What
•Dave Brubeck – Take Five
•Billie Holiday – Blue Moon
•Billie Holiday – Billie’s Blues
•Erykah Badu – On & On
•Amy Winehouse – There Is No Greater Love
•Muriel Roberts – Sleigh Ride
•Terry Pollard – Laura
•Willene Barton and her Trio – Rice Pudding
Check out the 1959 and 2019 jazz cuts we’re listening to.
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Since I was a boy, my musical heroes have been jazz musicians — Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, John Coltrane. My own trumpet playing was good enough to get me the solo chair in the school band, but my taste far outstripped my talent and I would never stoop to play in a band that would have me as a member.
Because of that, all my playing took place in school auditoriums, gyms and my bedroom. Then, one particular High Holiday season, this all changed and my musical prowess was finally put to use, although in a way that this aspiring jazz musician would never have expected.
The old man who had always blown the shofar at the synagogue I attended had simply run out of breath. I’d been bar mitzvahed at this synagogue and it was known that I played the trumpet, so the rabbi and chazzan drafted me into service, via my mother.
Well, the gig was on New Year’s (Rosh Hashanah) and I was going to play a big room (capacity 2,500). So, while I was not precisely living out my fantasy of the jazz man who walks into the club and sits in with the house rhythm section, I could always remind myself of Harold Arlen, whose father was a cantor, who ended up as house piano player at Harlem’s Cotton Club and wrote tunes like “Blues in the Night” and “Stormy Weather.” True, I wasn’t going to be playing the trumpet, but most musicians have to learn to play more than one instrument, like trumpet and fluegelhorn. It just so happened I was learning to “double” on ram’s horn.
I began to learn the calls the chazzan makes to the shofar-blower during the service — tekiyah,shevorim,teruah — and what blasts I would have to make in response.
At the same time, I worked on getting the feel of my ancient instrument. The shofar is actually a hollow horn, with one end filed so it can be pressed flat against the mouth. It is blown not in the center of the mouth but in the corner and, as with the trumpet, sounds are produced by vibrating the lips. The shofar has been around for a while and served the needs of some other excellent musicians in the past — Joshua, for example, who made a particular hit during his engagement at Jericho.
When the day of the service arrived, I strode onto the bimah with my instrument in tow and surveyed the room. It wasn’t Birdland, but it was a start.
The service began and I had an immediate shock: from my new perspective on the bimah, I could see that the chazzan used a pitchpipe. This threw me for a moment. Maybe he also sang the blues in the shower (Actually, knowing that the cantor’s pitches didn’t simply descend from on high made me feel that perhaps we could work together).
I was called upon almost immediately to play and so I arose from the throne-like seat and made my way to the solo spotlight. Wetting my lips, I lifted the shofar to my mouth and prepared to blow the first of 100 blasts that I had to play that day.
“Tekiyah,” the canto said softly. “Pth…pth.” Nothing. “Oh God, I thought; “Maybe this sacred/profane mix just isn’t going to work out.”
“Tekiyah,” the cantor repeated patiently. I wet my lips again, as the unsettled buzz of the congregation grew louder. “De-a-ah!” A beautiful sound emerged from the horn.
“Teruah,” he called. “Da-a, Da-a, Da-a!” Now the crowd was starting to fall in line. He continued to feed me calls and I responded more and more confidently. The congregation, used to the more asthmatic (if more sanctified) sounds of an aging sexton, listened raptly to the full-throated roars this instrument can produce.
Each time that I strode out that morning to blow, I had to re-convince a nervous congregation but, as time passed, they were more and more on my side. Eventually, the entire congregation seemed to inhale simultaneously with me and would not release its collective breath until I completed the series of sounds I was making.
The Rosh Hashanah service is closed with a series of blasts that culminate in a tekiyah-gedolah, or “big tekiyah.” This is supposed to be as long a blast as you can manage, with a rising pitch tagged on to the end for good measure. If this note cracks or splinters, all the good work of the day becomes meaningless; as if you had circumnavigated the globe, only for cannibals to catch up with you at your final port of call.
Finally, all the hymns had been sung. The rabbi duly noted who’d paid for the beautiful flowers and who’d bought the knishes for the Oneg Shabbat. The stage was mine alone. I finished the preliminary calls in the last series and the chazzan at last called out: “Tekiyah gedolah.”
I reached down deeply into my adolescent diaphragm and filled that horn with all my breath. “De-aaaah…” A long note emerged, a call to grace and forgiveness. Then, the final push, from deep within: “Ahhhh — Ahhhh!” I lowered the horn slowly, as we all listened to the sound gradually fade away in that reverberant room. Then, at precisely the same moment, everyone released a breath in a massive sigh of satisfaction. I had tapped into an energy that, in some way, had purified everyone in that gathering and I distinctly felt the embrace of every member of the congregation enfolding me. I shook hands with the rabbi and chazzan and smiled.
When we spoke later, they offered to pay me for my work and I said that, if possible, I would like to keep the shofar.
Today it sits peacefully in my music room. It is bone-hard, gently curved and fluted at one edge; hollow, but heavy with the weight of centuries. It resonates still with the power of sound that can unlock the silence within us.
Stephen Provizer is a writer, musician and actor, living in Gloucester, MA.
This story “A Jazz Man’s Tribute To The Shofar” was written by Stephen Provizer.
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A bandleader, composer and educator, he was sought after by top musicians to record with them, drawn by his harmonic sophistication and feel for the blues.
Harold Mabern in 2012. “He was always adventurous, and he was always swinging, keeping the crowd pleased,” the saxophonist George Coleman said.Alan Nahigian
Harold Mabern, a pianist, composer, recording artist and teacher whose richly harmonic, soul-inflected style made him a sought-after bandmate for some of jazz’s premier musicians, died on Sept. 17 in New Jersey. He was 83.
The cause was a heart attack, his publicist, Maureen McFadden, said. She declined to specify the exact location of his death.
Starting in the 1960s, Mr. Mabern (pronounced MAY-burn) recorded more than two dozen albums as a bandleader, but he contributed to far more in bands led by luminaries like the trumpet player Lee Morgan, the guitarist Wes Montgomery and the vocalist Betty Carter.
His employers leaned on him not only for his lush and muscular playing — often rendered in two-handed block chords so that harmony, melody and rhythm came all at once — but also for his compositions. Tunes like “The Beehive” and “Richie’s Dilemma” were built from Mr. Mabern’s signature composite of harmonic sophistication, blues feeling and sharply punctuated swing rhythm.
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“He was just such a complete musician,” the saxophonist George Coleman, a lifelong musical collaborator with Mr. Mabern,said in a phone interview. “He was always adventurous, and he was always swinging, keeping the crowd pleased.”
At well over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and a gentle hunch, Mr. Mabern put his physical heft into his music — playing, as he said in a 2015 interview, “from my shoulders, from my whole body.”
Reviewing a concert by Mr. Coleman’s quartet for The New York Times in 2003, Ben Ratliff observed: “Mr. Mabern carpeted each tune with thick chords, almost never letting up until it was time for a bass or drum solo — at which point, instead of trudging through a dull accompaniment, he enacted spare, nicely worked-out arrangements to accent the solo.”
Mr. Mabern came of age in the Memphis music scene of the 1950s, where jazz kept company with other forms of black popular music. In Memphis, he told the French magazine Jazz Hot, the blues “was a way of life.”
He taught himself to play the piano while in high school, largely at the elbow of two local phenoms, the pianists Phineas Newborn Jr. and Charles Thomas. Six months after taking up the instrument, he was playing professionally alongside Mr. Coleman, in gigs that earned him $1 a night.
Many of his friends from those years went on to illustrious careers, and he would work with some of them frequently after he moved to New York City in 1959.
For nearly 40 years Mr. Mabern taught at William Paterson University in New Jersey, where his students included the tenor saxophonist Eric Alexander and the drummer Joe Farnsworth. Both have gone on to become successful bandleaders, and both played in Mr. Mabern’s ensembles for the rest of his life.
“I don’t have to rehearse with those guys,” Mr. Mabern proudly told London Jazz News in 2014. “I just play and they know what to do.”
He is survived by two children, Michael and Roxanne Mabern, and a granddaughter. His sister, Nettie, and his wife of nearly 40 years, Beatrice, died before him.
Harold Mabern Jr. was born in Memphis on March 20, 1936, to Harold and Elnora Mabern. His father worked for middling wages in a lumberyard, but after discovering that his teenage son could play melodies back from memory, he saved up to buy the family a piano, for $60.
At Manassas High School, which had a strong music program, Mr. Mabern’s classmates included Mr. Coleman, the trumpeter Booker Little and the saxophonist Charles Lloyd, all future jazz stars.
After high school Mr. Mabern moved to Chicago to play in a band led by the saxophonist Frank Strozier, another former classmate. He attended classes at the American Conservatory of Music, joined a big band and practiced, he later said, for 12 hours a day.
Prepared to make the leap, Mr. Mabern relocated to New York at age 23, arriving with $5,000 tucked into his shoes. Soon after his arrival, he ran into the alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, who was on his way to becoming one of the country’s most popular jazz musicians.
“Cannonball knew me from Chicago, saw me and said, ‘Hey, Big Hands, you want a gig?’” Mr. Mabern said in an interview for Jazz at Lincoln Center. “I said, ‘Sure!’”
That night Adderley took him to Birdland, where he introduced Mr. Mabern to a gaggle of other leading jazz musicians. Work soon followed with the likes of Miles Davis and Lionel Hampton. He released his first album, “A Few Miles From Memphis,” in 1968, one of four he would record for Prestige Records.
Mr. Mabern worked mostly as a side musician in the 1970s and ’80s, but a record deal with the Japanese label DIW in 1989 revivified his bandleading career. Over his last three decades, when not teaching, he was often at the helm of his own small groups. He became a regular presence at New York clubs, particularly Smoke. He recorded his last four albums for the club’s label, Smoke Sessions.
Reflecting on his career, Mr. Mabern described himself unpretentiously as “a blues player with chops,” borrowing a phrase from the pianist Gene Harris. “I’m never going to stop being a blues pianist,” he said.
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 24, 2019, Section A, Page 27of the New York edition with the headline: Harold Mabern, 83, Jazz Pianist With Swinging, Lush Style. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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At vast New York warehouse, preserving records in the digital age
B. George, the Co-Founder and Director of the ARChive of Contemporary Music in front of the institution’s vast collection that includes some 3 million recordings
The turntable needle drops and the reverbs of the obscure band The Motifs ring out, bouncing off mountains of records lining the musty warehouse housing America’s largest pop music collection.
The cavernous independent private music library, known as the ARChive of Contemporary Music, on a non-descript street in lower Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood claims more than three million recordings — mostly vinyl and some CDS and cassettes, not to mention a vast collection of memorabilia.
“You’re just constantly discovering things that you wouldn’t know,” its co-founder B. George told AFP from his desk tucked behind the stacks.
In an age dominated by streaming and the ephemerality of digital media, places like the ARChive can prove vital to preserving physical copies of music that can be key to future listening.
News over the summer that some 500,000 recordings from legends like Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Joni Mitchell and Eric Clapton were destroyed in a 2008 blaze at Universal Studios threw the importance of safeguarding physical copies into stark relief.
Some of the work lost included master recordings, the raw material for lucrative reissues and posthumous releases.
While nothing can replace a lost master, George said labels have called on his archive to hear versions as close to the original as possible.
Two discs of a reissue from the late Nigerian superstar Fela Kuti, for example, were made from vinyl belonging to the ARChive.
“Trying to keep a collection intact is really important,” George said.
– Star-studded board –
George started the archive in 1985, when the area was just beginning to attract artists eager to colonize the old warehouses for cheap.
At one point the archive scored 125,000 classic rock LPs — some 1,500 of them signed by artists including Jimi Hendrix — from a house in Boston that was condemned after it was found to be literally sinking under the weight of the vinyl.
Contrary to the snobbish reputation often ascribed to collectors and curators, the ARChive welcomes essentially everything related to pop music — which it defines as “not classical” — with open arms.
And it relies on philanthropy to pay the ever-increasing rent in one of the country’s most expensive zip codes, especially from celebrity musicians.
Early supporters included avant garde performer Laurie Anderson — who George introduced to her future husband, Lou Reed — and Nile Rodgers, known for hits like “Le Freak” by his disco group Chic, the original sheet music of which lives at the ARChive.
Current board members include Rodgers, Richards, Youssou N’Dour, Martin Scorsese and Paul Simon, while both Reed and David Bowie are emeritus.
Today the mammoth collection — maintained by George and a revolving door of volunteers and interns — is used primarily for research by the recording industry as well as filmmakers and researchers.
The Grammy Museum, for example, once needed 3,000 record labels and covers for graphics, and turned to George.
“You can come to us and say I need 3,000 things in two weeks and there’s a good chance we’re going to have almost all of them,” he said.
But though George sees the preservation of the physical as a vital task, he says “everything is fugitive” to the prospect of disaster.
The ARChive is working with the San Francisco-based nonprofit Internet Archive to start digitizing, and keep “as many things in as many places as possible.”
Some 130,000 78rpm records — brittle vinyls usually made of shellac resin, popular until the mid-20th century — have been digitized so far, for example, and are available for free streaming online, George said.
“Libraries burn,” he said. “Realistically in 5,000 years this will all be dust.”
“You do your best, you hope that the migration will happen, that it’ll go to the next stage, it’ll go to the next way of being preserved, but it’s unpredictable.”
B. George, the Co-Founder and Director of the ARChive of Contemporary Music in front of the institution’s vast collection that includes some 3 million recordings
An original concert poster of the Jimi Hendrix Experience
B. George, the Co-Founder and Director of the ARChive of Contemporary Music walks a corridor between the massive collection of records
B. George, the Co-Founder and Director of the ARChive of Contemporary Music listens to a 7-inch vinyl single in the archives
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Saxophonist Chico Freeman carries forth the legacy of his father, tenor saxophone giant Von Freeman. (Chris Sweda / Chicago Tribune)
It would be difficult to overestimate how much the Freeman family has given to jazz in Chicago and, really, the rest of the world.
Most famously, leonine tenor saxophonist Von Freeman remains a symbol of the music even after his death here in 2012, at age 88. His name towered on the signage at the Von Freeman Pavilion during the recent Chicago Jazz Festival, and his legacy resonates in the work of proteges such as MacArthur Fellowship winner and saxophonist Steve Coleman, revered drummer Jack DeJohnette, Cassandra Wilson music director/bassist Lonnie Plaxico and scores more.
Like Freeman, his brother – guitarist George Freeman – played alongside Charlie Parker back in the day. At 92, George Freeman is enjoying wider recognition in concert and on recordings than ever before. Add to this the work of the late drummer Eldridge “Bruz” Freeman, and you have a remarkable trio of siblings whose histories go back practically to the dawning of jazz in Chicago.
For when Louis Armstrong moved here from New Orleans in the early 1920s, he became friends with the Freemans’ father, a Chicago police officer and amateur musician. The two duetted informally during off hours, the young Freeman brothers growing up within earshot of Satchmo, who to this day remains the global face of jazz.
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Which brings us to powerhouse tenor saxophonist Chico Freeman, who has received less attention in the United States than he deserves for a particular reason: Until three years ago, he had been based in Europe for more than a decade. But when you add Chico to the Freeman lineage, you have a regal jazz family that bears comparison to the Marsalises of New Orleans (Ellis, Wynton, Branford, Delfeayo and Jason) or the Joneses of Detroit (Elvin, Thad and Hank).
For anyone who has heard Chico Freeman during his periodic visits to Chicago, there’s no question of his stature, which is documented on recordings such as “Fathers and Sons” (1982, featuring the Marsalis and Freeman families) and “All in the Family” (2015, spotlighting George and Chico Freeman).
So Chico Freeman’s return here from his current base in New York for a four-night run at the Jazz Showcase starting Sept. 26 comes as welcome news to anyone who values fiery jazz improvisation in the Freeman family tradition.
“Some people say it’s like royalty in Chicago, and that’s great,” says Chico Freeman. “My dad, he got his play, and now my uncle George is enjoying his time in the sunlight.
“But there’s somebody that we never shined the light on: my uncle George’s mom and my dad’s mom (Chico’s grandmother). She was a gospel singer, sang with Mahalia Jackson, with the Clara Ward Singers.”
To bring attention to this lesser-known side of the Freeman family, Chico Freeman has been developing a jazz-gospel project that will tour Switzerland in November and, he hopes, the United States next year. It’s an intriguing way of further illuminating the Freeman story.
When Chico Freeman was visiting here over the summer to develop the venture, he dipped into the local scene and was struck by what he heard.
“It’s good to see there’s such good musicians there these days – I was real pleased when I heard Thaddeus,” says Freeman, referring to vibraphonist Thaddeus Tukes, who will join him at the Showcase.
“I went to see (guitarist) John McLean and (singer) Dee Alexander. They had this drummer with them, Charles Heath – he really could play. Really good time.”
Because Freeman still travels between the States and Europe so often, he can’t help but notice the difference in how he feels on either side of the Atlantic. So much so, that whenever he returns to America he considers it “a double-edged sword.”
“It’s great to come back, and the best part is playing with the guys, and playing the way we play, the way we do things,” says the saxophonist.
“The politics and all the other crazy stuff that goes on – I’m always on guard, because of the nature of things, which I don’t have to do in Europe. I’m more relaxed over there.
“In Switzerland, a couple of times I’ll hear the police sirens – they’re not looking for me. They’re not looking for anybody that looks like me. That’s a relief.
“When I come back to the States, I don’t feel that ease. That’s a fact.”
Yet Freeman is quick to point out that he benefited enormously from growing up in Chicago in the presence of his grandmother, father and uncles, their music shaping his understanding of the art of jazz. And though Von Freeman wasn’t doctrinaire about music, he imparted lessons that have guided Chico Freeman ever since.
“He wasn’t a pro-active teacher – that wasn’t his thing, but he never let me go down the wrong road,” says Chico Freeman.
“For instance, he would tell me: ‘Your sound is the most important thing.’
“He would say: ‘Your sound is you. We all play the same notes, but the only thing that makes you different from me, and me different from everyone else, is your sound, your voice.’
“He’d say: ‘You can play a thousand notes, and if you don’t have a sound, no one will know you. But you can play one note, and if you have a sound, everyone will know you.’”
That certainly applied in Von Freeman’s case, his keening tone and sometimes ever-so-slightly-flat pitch distinguishing him from anyone who ever brought reed to lips. Chico Freeman, too, sounds like no one else, the heft and grit of his sound quite far from that of his father.
“The other thing he would say: ‘Saxophone players, our beat is in our fingers, that’s where we keep time,’” adds Chico Freeman.
“And he’d say: ‘People say (that) practice makes perfect.’
“He’d say: ‘No, that’s not true. Perfect practice makes perfect.’
“And I’ve been living that way. You play things slow enough so you can play it perfectly. Otherwise you’re just practicing your mistakes.”
Listeners may not realize it, but Freeman was classically trained at Northwestern University, where he started as a math major but switched to music. Contrary to popular wisdom, the worlds of classical music and jazz have more similarities than differences, thanks to the complexity and depth of the work, which does not easily lend itself to radio airplay or pop-culture approval.
But when Freeman was studying at Northwestern, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, the perceived gulf between jazz and classical was wider than today, as he learned the hard way.
After numerous rehearsals in a classical saxophone quartet at NU, the young Freeman would head to the South Side for jam sessions led by his father and featuring some of the greatest tenor players in a city famous for them.
“So I get up on stage with Clifford Jordan, and I start playing whatever song we’re playing,” remember Chico Freeman.
Compared to tenor master Jordan, “My sound was paper-thin and terrible. I was embarrassed. My dad was embarrassed. So I got offstage.
“At the end of the night, I was getting ready to go back to school, and my father said, ‘Come home with me.’
“He gave me his mouthpiece and said, ‘Try this.’
“My sound was changed. Like boom!”
At the next classical saxophone quartet rehearsal at Northwestern, Chico Freeman played just a few notes before his professor called him out.
“He said: ‘Oh no, what happened, what’s going on?’” recalls Freeman.
“I said, ‘I’ve got this new mouthpiece. Isn’t this great?’
“And he said: ‘You’re playing classical music! We don’t want this!’”
The Freemans, however, had the last laugh.
In 2003, Northwestern awarded an honorary doctorate degree to the jazz musician who had transformed Chico’s Freeman’s sound and influenced generations: his father Von.
Chico Freeman plays Sept. 26 through 29 at the Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth Court; $20-$40; 312-360-0234 or www.jazzshowcase.com.
Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.
hreich@chicagotribune.com
Howard Reich is the Tribune’s Emmy-winning arts critic; author of six books, including “The Art of Inventing Hope: Intimate Conversations with Elie Wiesel”; and writer-producer of three documentaries. He holds two honorary doctoral degrees and served on the Pulitzer music jury four times, including for the first jazz winner, “Blood on the Fields.”
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To write about the life of Steve Dalachinsky, one first has to decide what to call him. “Poet” comes to mind, given all of his books of poetry, the poetry awards and the countless times he read his work, often accompanied by jazz musicians, in the avant-garde clubs of New York and environs.
But Mr. Dalachinsky was always wary of the term. A mini-documentaryStraw2gold Pictures made about him in 2013 opens with 45 seconds’ worth of Mr. Dalachinsky talking about the label and whether he wants or deserves it, a rambling musing that ends with him saying, “I forgot the question.” A 2016 article about him in The Villager quoted him as saying both “I don’t even like being called a poet” and “Let’s put it this way: I’m a poet.”
“Steve didn’t want to be pigeonholed in any way,” his wife, Yuko Otomo, said by email, “although towards the end of his life he realized he wasn’t good at anything but writing poetry.”
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So over what might have been his objections, he will here be called a poet. But he could also be called a jazz aficionado, one so knowledgeable that musicians enlisted him to write liner notes for their albums. Music critics said that if you saw him in the audience at a club, you knew you were about to hear some good music.
He could be called a collagist, whose artwork turned up in exhibitions. And he could be called an omnipresent figure on the avant-garde scene, known in and around SoHo, where he lived, both for carrying forward the sensibility of the Beat generation and for nurturing new jazz talent.
Mr. Dalachinsky was in his element on Sept. 14 at the Islip Art Museum on Long Island, where he gave a reading after having attended a concert by the Sun Ra Arkestra that afternoon in Manhattan. Not long after the reading, his wife said, he had a stroke and a cerebral hemorrhage. He died the next day at Southside Hospital in Bay Shore. He was 72.
“The whole avant scene — music, poetry, visual art — in New York City is going to change now because he’s not around,” the guitarist Loren Connors, one of many musicians who collaborated with Mr. Dalachinsky, said by email. “He was a poet, but he had a lot of music in him. His modulation of sound and rhythm was unsurpassed.”
When he wasn’t performing himself, Mr. Dalachinsky was there, encouraging and absorbing the work of others, especially free jazz musicians, who were part of a scene he documented in a long-running monthly column for The Brooklyn Rail.
“Whereas most writers would say to their editor, ‘I’d like to see So-and-So next Thursday and review the show,’ Steve was already seeing everybody, so it was just a matter of highlighting the shows he’d been to that were most worth mentioning,” David Mandl, who gave him that column in 2008 when Mr. Mandl was The Rail’s music editor, said by email.
“I have trouble recalling any significant, edifying or exhilarating free-jazz or total-improvisation concert I’ve attended,” one critic wrote, “at which Mr. Dalachinsky has not been in the audience, rough-edged, congenial and ready with an opinion.”Brian Harkin for The New York Times
“Steve went to as many shows in a month as I did in two years,” he added, “multiple shows every night.”
Steve Smith, reviewing a Dalachinsky performance in 2013 in The New York Times, described his reading style: “He rushed one phrase and elongated the next; occasionally he stuttered on a single syllable, and then released the pent-up tension in a gush.”
In the same review, he complimented Mr. Dalachinsky’s taste in musicians.
“I have trouble recalling any significant, edifying or exhilarating free-jazz or total-improvisation concert I’ve attended,” Mr. Smith wrote, “at which Mr. Dalachinsky has not been in the audience, rough-edged, congenial and ready with an opinion.”
Steven Donald Dalachinsky was born on Sept. 29, 1946, in Brooklyn. His father, Louis, was a house painter, and his mother, Sylvia (Wolf) Dalachinsky, was a homemaker and office worker.
Mr. Dalachinsky graduated from Midwood High School in Brooklyn and attended Brooklyn College “for about 30 seconds,” as he told The Villager. More important was what he had been learning by knocking around town.
In an interview last year for a segment of the radio program “Jazz Night in America” commemorating the pianist Cecil Taylor, who died in April 2018, he recalled a particularly formative moment when, walking by a nightclub when he was 15 or 16, he heard Mr. Taylor’s music wafting through the door.
“The music went right inside me,” he said, “and my addiction to free jazz began.”
Before he became known for his poetry performances, Mr. Dalachinsky had a humbler distinction: He was a street peddler.
“With only a table and merchandise kept in his apartment a few blocks away, he has for more than a quarter-century displayed a selective stock of records, Beat literature and his own books,” Richard Kostelanetz wrote in “Soho: The Rise and Fall of an Artists’ Colony” (2003).
Mr. Dalachinsky, in an interview for that book, recalled that early in his street-vendor career he had to defend his territory against a young artist who went by the name Samo and who would become a hot art-world commodity under his actual name, Jean-Michel Basquiat.
“I used to chase Samo away from my corner on West Broadway and Spring, where he sold handmade postcards,” Mr. Dalachinsky said. “He was a real brat. If only I had those postcards now.”
Mr. Dalachinsky never went in much for regular jobs, although he did serve as superintendent of his apartment building on Spring Street for years, work that led to “A Superintendent’s Eyes,” a poetry collection published in 2000.
“The poems, assembled over 20 years, are a sometimes joyous, sometimes shattering glimpse of life seen from behind the headlines,” Alan Kaufman wrotein a review for A Gathering of the Tribes Magazine. They mixed the mundane — overstuffed trash cans, money worries, which tenants tipped best — with bigger themes.
The clutter in Mr. Dalachinsky’s own apartment was the stuff of legend.
“Living in our tenement shoe box, Steve didn’t have a study or free space to work in,” his wife, whom he married in 1986 after almost a decade together, said. “I’ve never seen any poet who walks and writes on scraps of paper. The whole world was his desk.”
Mr. Dalachinsky was well regarded in France and other countries. In 2007 he received the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Book Award, and in 2013 came an Acker Award, celebrating avant-garde achievement. In addition to books, he made recordings, including “Phenomena of Interference” (2005), with the pianist Matthew Shipp.
Besides his wife, Mr. Dalachinsky is survived by a sister, Judy Orcinolo.
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Uncovered: the earliest known version of the Hebrew song
Every song carries within it many stories. Before it was a universal Jewish wedding anthem, a European soccer chant, and a Jewish musical cliché par excellence, the Hebrew song “Hava Nagila” started out as a Hasidic folk melody. The song’s many lives have spawned an award-winning documentary, an Israeli court battle, and a generations-long rift between two Jewish families. But its actual origins remained shrouded in mystery. How did an East European religious folk tune become a Zionist sonic emblem only to shed both its religious and political forms and morph yet again into a generic ode to happiness?
The story begins with the musician Abraham Zvi Idelsohn. Born in 1882 in Feliksburg, in the northwest of the Russian Empire (present-day Latvia), he trained as a cantor in Libau before moving to Germany in the 1890s to study at Berlin’s Stern Conservatory and the Leipzig Academy of Music. Idelsohn then worked as a cantor in Leipzig, Regensburg, and Johannesburg, South Africa. In 1907, he settled in Jerusalem with his family.
Living next door to Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the father of modern Hebrew, Idelsohn set as his own goal to create a modern Hebrew music to accompany the national rebirth of Jewish life in their ancient homeland. In the spirit of the Zionist philosopher Ahad Ha’am, Idelsohn began to collect all the riches of Jewish musical traditions that he found in Ottoman Palestine and throughout the diaspora. Using the emerging recording technology, he began to transcribe folk songs and make field recordings in order to forge an old-new musical sound that would be (in his view) authentically Jewish. That meant uncovering what he imagined to be the oldest layer of pre-exilic melody common to all Jewish traditions and liberating it from the foreign accretions resulting from the exile.
Idelsohn’s project was an unabashedly political one. He denounced the cultural and spiritual “assimilation” that he experienced among German Jews. He lambasted his fellow Jewish musicians for flocking into European classical music rather than taking an interest in their own heritage. Many of his innovations—the first major Hebrew songbook for schools and synagogues, the first textbook on the history of Jewish music, the first Hebrew opera, and his seminal 10-volume work, The Thesaurus of Hebrew Oriental Melodies(Hebräische Orientalische Melodiensatz, 1914-1932)—were intended to disseminate Zionism, pushing Jews to embrace a national cultural identity rooted in the common wellsprings of renewed cultural life in Zion. Like other architects of this new Hebrew culture, Idelsohn sought out Jewish religious culture in order to refashion it into new secular national traditions.
Idelsohn’s manuscript sketch of ‘Hava Nagila’ arranged for voice and piano. (Courtesy of the National Library of Israel.)
It was in this context that Idelsohn premiered a new song, “Hava Nagila,” at a mixed choir concert in Jerusalem sometime in 1918. The precise venue of the first performance is unclear, but it appears to have been introduced at a public celebration marking one of three events: the recent Balfour Declaration of Nov. 2, 1917, General Allenby’s assumption of control of Jerusalem and Palestine at the end of World War I, or the laying of the cornerstone of the Hebrew University in June 1918. In any case, the context is clearly celebratory of Zionist political gains. And the opening lines of Idelsohn’s Hebrew text make plain the sense of a momentous occasion. “Hava nagila, hava nagila/ Hava nagila ve-nismeha”—“Come, let us rejoice, let us rejoice, let us rejoice and be happy.” Those lines closely echo the biblical verse from Psalms 118:24, “This is the day that God has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it,” which is recited during the Hallel, the special set of Psalms of thanksgiving added to the Jewish liturgy of festivals and other joyous occasions. For a Zionist activist like Idelsohn, there could have been no better occasion for the conception of such a song than the tangible beginnings of the fulfillment of the dream of a Jewish national homeland.
What of the melody? Much later, in 1932, Idelsohn wrote that he originally transcribed the melody from a Sadegurer Hasid in Jerusalem in 1915. The Sadegurer Hasidic community traced their roots to the town of Sadigura in the Bukovina region of Habsburg Austria (present-day Ukraine). Their founder, Rabbi Avrohom Yaakov Friedman, was one of six sons of Rabbi Yisrael Friedman, who fled with his courtly retinue from across the border in Russian Rizhin to the safety of the Austro-Hungarian Empire because of political and religious persecution. Each of the Rizhiner Rebbe’s sons established dynasties of their own. The Sadegurer Hasidim remained centered in that town until WWI, when their leaders fled to Vienna, and eventually to Tel Aviv in 1938.
The late-1930s Sadegurer arrival in Palestine was preceded by a small subgroup that settled in Jerusalem decades earlier as part of the constant, although not massive, Hasidic immigration to Ottoman Palestine. So it is possible that Idelsohn encountered this community in or around Jerusalem in 1915, just before he was forcibly conscripted into the Ottoman army, where he served as a military bandleader in Gaza during part of WWI. On the other hand, Idelsohn actually spent the winter of 1913 and early 1914 on a fundraising trip to Berlin and Vienna. So perhaps he heard the tune there.
One of the reasons we do not know for sure is because of the subsequent disruptures and dislocations in Idelsohn’s life. Shortly after conceiving “Hava Nagila,” Idelsohn made a dramatic exit from Palestine, first to Europe and eventually to Cincinnati where he accepted a new faculty position in Jewish liturgy at the Hebrew Union College. His path from Zionist cultural activist to academic instructor at the steadfastly non-Zionist Reform seminary was a rocky one. Idelsohn clearly appreciated the chance to influence the course of American Judaism, and his imprint is evident in the way the Reform and Conservative movements began to feature music in their educational and congregational efforts. But he struggled to adjust socially and economically and missed his close family, many of whom had relocated back to Johannesburg. The suspicions of his colleagues about his politics did not help matters, either. Nor did a minor scandal involving Idelsohn and a Midwestern confidence man, who scammed the immigrant professor. Then came a debilitating illness, which led to early retirement and his own move to South Africa, where he died in 1938.
Meanwhile, Idelsohn’s song spread like wildfire across the Jewish world. Immediately after its Jerusalem premiere, he later wrote, “Hava” “quickly spread throughout the country,” one of a number of newly composed pioneer songs then gaining favor on kibbutzim and moshavim. Along the road to Cincinnati he produced the first commercial recording of his celebrated “Palestinian” Hebrew song in Berlin, 1922, a production that further contributed to the spread of “Hava Nagila” beyond the yishuv. At the same time, his publishing efforts quickly boosted the song’s profile. “Hava Nagila” appeared in the second edition of his Hebrew songster also printed in Berlin in 1922. Thereafter it quickly penetrated Zionist youth circles and summer camps in Europe and North America in the late 1920s and ’30s.
Idelsohn’s 1922 publication of ‘Hava Nagila’ in ‘Sefer hashirim’ (Berlin). (Courtesy of the Jewish Music Research Centre at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.)
Meanwhile, questions persisted about “Hava’s” origins and Idelsohn’s role in its authorship. A 1960s Tel Aviv court case revealed a bitter legal dispute about song royalties. For decades, the descendants of Cantor Moshe Nathanson, a Jerusalem-born cantor who moved to New York City after studying in his youth with Idelsohn, have claimed it was he who effectively set the immortal words to the tune collected by his teacher as part of a class assignment. The 2012 documentary, Hava Nagila: The Movie, presented living members of the two families locked in rhetorical combat about the authorship of the song.
For many years, scholars have concluded that there was little way to verify any more about the genesis of “Hava Nagila.” Until a few weeks ago. This past August, one of us (Edwin Seroussi) returned to the Klau Library at the Hebrew Union College (HUC) in Cincinnati 40 years after he had the privilege of spending two months there cataloging the great Birnbaum Collection of Jewish Music housed in the Klau Library. With the enthusiastic collaboration of the present-day library staff, we realized that several important records belonging to Idelsohn remained at his last working place, HUC. Returning these materials to public view was the goal of the recent visit.
When Idelsohn’s family transported him, almost totally paralyzed, to South Africa in 1937 most of his estate accompanied him. That collection contained his extensive correspondence as well as many of his writings, photographs, and scores. In the early 1960s, his heirs donated it to the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem (today the National Library of Israel). Yet Idelsohn himself had previously donated to the Klau Library of HUC in Cincinnati some of his important manuscript volumes. He even designed a special catalog of these items. However, for unknown reasons, these precious materials remained unprocessed for over three-quarters of a century and were only recently reretrieved for conservation and cataloging.
Unique in this recovered Idelsohniana are his notebooks, six in number, in which he registered the melodies he collected as his fieldwork was moving along in Ottoman Palestine, starting in 1907, mixed with his own compositions. In the subsequent two decades, these randomly collected melodies, reordered according to communities of origin, would constitute his major publication, the Thesaurus of Oriental Hebrew Melodies. He also left behind complete drafts and manuscripts of his two important books, Jewish Music in Its Historical Development (1929) and Jewish Liturgy in Its Development (1932) as well as many other documents and additional correspondence.
One of the notebooks, “I4a” in the original catalog, contains what apparently is the earliest and original notation of the melody that would eventually become the song “Hava Nagila.” This notebook, unlike the others, is not dated but it includes one song from 1906. However, it appears that Idelsohn added materials to it in subsequent years.
The earliest notation of the melody that would eventually become the song ‘Hava Nagila’ (Courtesy of the Klau Library, Cincinnati, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, (CN) Idelsohn 4a)
Written from right to left, as Idelsohn wrote much of his music from around 1908 until he left Palestine in 1921, this Hasidic niggun is almost identical to the normative version of “Hava Nagila” circulating until the present. As noted, Idelsohn claimed in volume 9 of the Thesaurus (1932) that he collected the melody in 1915 from Hasidim from the Sadigura court living in Palestine. However, in light of this new discovery it may well be that he collected the tune sometime earlier, most probably a few years prior to WWI. Such inaccuracies are not uncommon in his later publications.
One important detail is worth noticing in this early notation of the tune. On the side, Idelsohn wrote in Hebrew “Hasidit Krilovitz me-Sadigura,” i.e., “Hasidic [melody] [by?] Krilovitz from Sadigura.” This subtle detail may imply that the “Sadigura-Krilovitz” annotation appearing on top of the version of the niggun in volume 9 of Idelsohn’s Thesaurus does not necessarily refer to two towns, both of which hosted Hasidic courts, Sadhora/Sadigura (in Bukovina, Ukraine) and Krilovits (in Podolia, Ukraine), from where the tune originates. This annotation can also be read to denote a person (a Hasid of course) named Krilovitz (an extant family name) who hailed from Sadigura or was connected with the Sadigura community in Palestine. This is of course a hypothesis, and yet the preposition “from” in the annotation opens the possibility of locating a specific individual who transmitted to Idelsohn the by-now most ubiquitous Jewish tune on a global scale.
The most profound critique of Zionism, according to Gershom Scholem, was a line uttered by the German Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen, “Those fellows just want to be happy.” Perhaps that is precisely what Idelsohn had in mind when he recast a Hasidic melody as a Zionist anthem. But music plays by its own rules. Ultimately, “Hava Nagila” transcended its mystical roots in Eastern Europe and its modern Hebrew reconception in Ottoman/British Palestine to become a universal symbol of Jewish happiness. What Idelsohn would make of his song’s fate today, or of Zionism, are unanswerable questions. But the mystery of its origins is now a little closer to being solved.
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Farzad Owrang/Courtesy of Jason Moran and Luhring Augustine
For many observers of modern jazz, pianist Jason Moran became a known entity 20 years ago, with the release of his debut album. For Adrienne Edwards, curator of performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art, his name first circulated more recently, as a kind of rumor.
“I have really good friends who are artists — whether it’s Adam Pendleton, or Julie Mehretu, or Kara Walker, or Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch — that were all saying, ‘I want to work with Jason,’ ” Edwards reflected this week. “And I kept going, ‘What is it about this musician doing things that are much broader than music? What is it about him that they are drawn to?’ “
The answers can be found, if not entirely resolved, somewhere inJason Moran, a pathfinding exhibition that opens this Friday. It’s the first full show presented at the Whitney by Edwards, who originated it (with another curator, Danielle Jackson) last year at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. And, in addition to consolidating a large swath of Moran’s interdisciplinary work, the show highlights how his jazz skillset — not just with improvising, but also with nuances of alchemy and flow and surprise — have opened new possibilities for the artists in his orbit.
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“Everyone had different reasons for seeking him,” Edwards says of those artists, “but the commonality was definitely aesthetic. Trying to get to a feeling of something that they knew, in their own work, they hadn’t fully gotten to yet.”
Moran, 44, grew up in an art-literate family in Houston, Tx., but he traces his current depth of engagement to two apprenticeships, with revered performance artist Joan Jonas and visionary conceptualist Adrian Piper. “You will hear me talk about Adrian Piper with as much vigor and respect as Wayne Shorter,” he said in a museum conference room on Tuesday. Responding to a question about when the chute fully opened to the art world, he looked back to 2006: “Making Artist in Residence for Blue Note, and putting Adrian and Joan on the record. That was me saying: ‘They are like Sam Rivers in my recording catalog. They are that important.’ “
Five years ago, Moran ended a long association with Blue Note, asserting ownership of his music while also signaling a shift in focus. He joined the roster of a gallery, Luhring Augustine. He also started his own label, Yes Records, breaking in its catalog with an album by his wife and collaborator, mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran. (As a team, the Morans have created major concert programs and other projects — including BLEED, a performance residency at the 2012 Whitney Biennial.) Subsequent releases on Yes Records have includedMusic For Joan Jonas, a collection,andMASS {Howl, eon}, after a work made with Mehretu.
YouTube
Jason Moran maps some, but inevitably not all, of these past collaborations. Luanda-Kinshasa, a transfixing film by Stan Douglas, occupies a small gallery. A six-hour loop of hallucinatory realism starring Moran and a handful of other real-life improvisers as 1970s funk shamans, it was previously shown at the David Zwirner gallery, andpartially released on vinyl.
Other collaborations are represented in a video compilation, projected in a loop on three walls of the main gallery space. Unsurprisingly, this feed works best with pieces designed for such a medium — like “Chess,” a three-channel installation by Lorna Simpson in which Moran fills one mirrored frame while the artist inhabits the others, in cryptic costumes. Another standout is a harrowing Kara Walker shadow-puppet film, part of a series titled The Bureau of Refugees, whose power derives in part from a tensile score by Moran and Hall Moran.
The room housing these videos is also home to three sculptural set pieces from a project Moran calls STAGED, which most visitors will understand as the central feature of the show. Conceived as living remnants of mythical New York jazz venues, two of these hulking works — conjuring Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom in the swing era and The Three Deuces on 52nd Street at the height of bebop — were commissioned by Okwui Enwezor for the 2015 Venice Biennale.
A still from Lorna Simpson’s Chess, 2013.
Lorna Simpson/Courtesy of Jason Moran and Hauser & Wirth
In the illuminating museum catalog for Jason Moran, published by the Walker Art Center, Enwezor (who died earlier this year of cancer) notes that even in their vacant quietude, these pieces hum with tensions. “Moran’s constructions are like spirit catchers,” he writes, “meta-spaces where African American emancipatory struggles for political autonomy, social wholeness, and creative rebellion are evoked and memorialized.”
Those echoes of conflict are even more present in STAGED: Slugs’ Saloon, which was commissioned for the Walker show. Slugs’ was a rugged outpost in the far East Village, infamous in jazz lore as the spot where trumpeter Lee Morgan was murdered in 1972. That’s not a leading concern for Moran, who has an ongoing affiliation with saxophonist Charles Lloyd, another Slugs’ alum. Still, it’s hard not to read a trace of violence into the kicked-over chair at the center of the sculpture, beside a glowing but blank-faced Wurlitzer jukebox.
Moran says that with STAGED, he’s reaching beyond the disembodied sound of jazz recordings, considering other ways in which the music’s history has been encoded. “Though I think of these places as so remarkably documented through these records,” he says, “there’s still a gap in the conversation around them. And in museums, you make a thing to display it.”
For those who know jazz history, Moran’s three pieces also lob an implicit commentary on the shifting economies and social realities of the music — its movement from a popular entertainment to an underground art music, and in and out of black artistic control. The Savoy was a space for dancing, and a magnet for white fans venturing uptown. The Three Deuces packaged bebop for hip consumption. Slugs’ was a dive where transactions were often made off the books. That all of these bygone spaces are now being memorialized in a museum exhibition, with all the resources and cachet such a thing entails, is part of Moran’s critical calculus.
Jason Moran, Black and Blue Gravity, 2018.
Farzad Owrang/Courtesy of Jason Moran and Luhring Augustine
In addition to his assemblages, Moran has works on paper in the exhibition, mainly from a series titled Run. Made by taping scrolls across the piano keyboard, and then playing the instrument with charcoal or pigment on his fingertips, these pieces feel charged with kinetic intention. They’re reminiscent of the basketball drawings of David Hammons, and of text paintings by a frequent Moran collaborator, conceptualist Glenn Ligon. “In the glimpse of that front gallery wall,” says Edwards, “you see an entire arc of Jason as a draftsman. They’re these really beautiful private improvisations; it’s him, in his own space, which we don’t see.”
At a reception for Jason Moran on Tuesday night, the opposite was true: Moran was ubiquitous, greeting friends and admirers as he moved through the space. Then it was Go Time: along with bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits, his longtime partners in The Bandwagon, he stepped into the set of The Three Deuces and started into an exploratory performance.
Starting out with a group improvisation, they soon settled into “Refraction,” a piece Moran recorded in two versions on Artist in Residence, with and withoutJoan Jonas. The rustle and tumble of the band, which has become an identifying trait, sounded at home in the room. After moving into another theme, Waits took a drum solo — giving Moran and Mateen the chance to walk across the gallery, through the crowd, and take up new posts at Slugs’ Saloon.
The Whitney will see a lot more like this in the weeks to come, by way of a performance series titled “Jazz on a High Floor in the Afternoon,” after a remark made by Hammons. Slated to begin next Friday, Sept. 27, with a rare performance by saxophonist Archie Shepp, it will also include vocalist Fay Victor (Oct. 18-19), saxophonist Oliver Lake (Oct. 25-26) and pianist Joanne Brackeen (Nov. 22-23). Each artist will be free to utilize whichever space they like.
The Bandwagon will mark its 20th anniversary as part of the exhibition, withticketed concerts on Dec. 19, 20, and 21. But before then, the trio will play its annual Thanksgiving-week engagement at The Village Vanguard, a room that has become as sacred and spiritually charged for Moran as any of the haunts in STAGED. That he’ll be working there during his exhibition seems fitting, as a reflection of the real-life work that his art evokes and cannily distorts.
Inside the Wurlitzer jukebox on the Slugs’ Saloon set, invisible to any observer and unmarked on the menu, there’s a 45-rpm record that Moran had made for the occasion. It’s a recording of audience banter between sets at The Village Vanguard, during one of his recent engagements.
“You won’t ever hear it,” he says. “It’s the audience in there just talking, with some music lightly playing in the background. So yes, there’s a record in there.” He laughs. “Someone I met told me there was a guy who used to whistle all of the solos on the jukebox at Slugs’. I don’t even know if that’s real. But that record is for him.”
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It was one of those mythic New York nights: the Broadway premiere of the Gershwins’ “Porgy and Bess” in 1935.
The starry opening drew Hollywood royalty, including Katharine Hepburn and Joan Crawford. After the ovations died down, the A-listers headed to a glamorous after-party, where George Gershwin played excerpts from his score on the piano.
By the next morning, though, the questions would begin. Those questions — about genre, about representation, about appropriation — have followed “Porgy” through more than eight decades of convoluted, sometimes troubling history, and remain salient as the Metropolitan Opera opens its season on Sept. 23 with a new production, its first performances of the work since 1990.
Is “Porgy,” which features some of the best-loved songs by one of America’s greatest songwriters (“Summertime,” “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” “I Loves You, Porgy”), as well as mighty choruses and bold orchestrations, an opera or a musical? It returned to Broadway in 2012 in a stripped-down form. But since 1976, when Houston Grand Opera brought it back to the opera house, it has often been claimed — you can almost hear the capital letters — as the Great American Opera.
More urgently, is “Porgy” a sensitive portrayal of the lives and struggles of a segregated African-American community in Charleston, S. C.? (Maya Angelou, who as a young dancer performed in a touring production that brought it to the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1955, later praised it as “great art” and “a human truth.”)
Or does it perpetuate degrading stereotypes about black people, told in wince-inducing dialect? (Harry Belafonte turned down an offer to star in the film version because he found it “racially demeaning.”)
Is it a triumph of melting-pot American art, teaming up George and Ira Gershwin (the sons of Russian Jewish immigrants) with DuBose Heyward (the scion of a prominent white South Carolina family) and his Ohio-born wife, Dorothy, to tell a uniquely African-American story? Or is it cultural appropriation? The fact that the most-performed opera about the African-American experience is the work of an all-white team has not been lost on black composers who have struggled to get their music heard.
And has the Gershwins’ insistence that “Porgy” be performed only by black artists — originally aimed at keeping it from being done in blackface — helped generations of black singers by giving them the opportunity to perform on some of the world’s great stages? Or has it pigeonholed some of them, limiting the roles they are offered?
Or is the answer to all these questions yes?
The Met is engaging with the work’s complex history as it prepares to stage its new production, directed by James Robinson and conducted by David Robertson. It has assembled a strong cast, led by the bass-baritone Eric Owens and the soprano Angel Blue, and designed a staging that aims to rescue Catfish Row and its inhabitants from the realm of stereotype. It is holding talks around the city about the work and turning the lens on its own checkered racial past with an exhibition at the opera house.
George Gershwin called “Porgy and Bess” a “folk opera,” which placed him in a long line of composers who drew inspiration from folk themes, real or imagined. In an essay he wrote for The New York Times in 1935, he wrote that to keep the work musically unified, he had decided to write “my own spirituals and folk songs.”
George Gershwin, DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin, the creators of “Porgy and Bess.”PhotoQuest, via Getty Images
And he discussed aspects critics later decried as stereotypes, writing that “because ‘Porgy and Bess’ deals with Negro life in America it brings to the operatic form elements that have never before appeared in opera and I have adapted my method to utilize the drama, the humor, the superstition, the religious fervor, the dancing and the irrepressible high spirits of the race.”
Hall Johnson, a black composer, arranger and choir director whose musical “Run, Little Chillun!” had been a success on Broadway in 1933, wrote that Gershwin was “as free to write about Negroes in his own way as any other composer to write about anything else” in a 1936 essay in Opportunity, a journal published by the Urban League.
But he added that the resulting work was “not a Negro opera by Gershwin, but Gershwin’s idea of what a Negro opera should be.” (Decades later, reviewing the film, James Baldwin echoed that critique, writing that while he liked “Porgy and Bess,” it remained “a white man’s vision of Negro life.”)
The Gershwins were determined to avoid performances of “Porgy” in blackface, an offensive relic of minstrelsy that was still common then onstage and onscreen. Al Jolson, who had worn blackface in 1927 in the breakthrough sound film “The Jazz Singer,” had also wanted to mount a musical based on the story and hoped to play Porgy.
“Porgy and Bess” provided work for generations of classically trained African-American singers at a time when discrimination barred them from the Met and other leading stages. When the work’s first tour reached the segregated National Theater in Washington, its African-American stars took a stand and threatened not to perform — forcing the theater to integrate, at least temporarily. “Porgy” helped many singers of color launch their careers, including Leontyne Price, who played Bess right out of Juilliard.
It became a symbol of American culture around the world. When the piece had its European premiere in Copenhagen during World War II, staging a work by a Jewish composer about black Americans was seen as an act of provocation aimed at the occupying Nazis. The inescapable contradictions of a Cold War-era tour of Leningrad and Moscow in the mid-1950s were chronicled wryly by Truman Capote.
But the controversies did not abate. When Otto Preminger’s film version was released in 1959, during the civil rights era, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry debated him on Chicago television, declaring that stereotypes “constitute bad art” and noting that African-Americans had suffered “great wounds from great intentions.” But the music of “Porgy and Bess” only grew in popularity, as generations of jazz pioneers, including Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Miles Davis, put their own stamps on the songs.
The requirement to cast black performers remains in effect for dramatic performances of “Porgy and Bess” around the world, Sargent Aborn, the chief executive officer of Tams-Witmark, which licenses it, wrote in an email.
It is an unusual stipulation in an age where casting is increasingly colorblind. “Porgy” is the one opera the Met’s own chorus does not sing: The company hired a chorus of black singers for its new production. When the Hungarian State Opera staged “Porgy and Bess” with a white cast earlier this year, against the wishes of the Gershwin brothers’ estates, it asked its singers to sign declarations that African-American origins and spirit formed part of their identity, a Hungarian news site reported.
The cast of a touring production of “Porgy and Bess,” circa 1953. Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos, via Getty Images
Some black singers are wary of “Porgy,” both out of discomfort with the piece and concerns that they could get typecast and kept from exploring other repertoire.
Davóne Tines, a bass-baritone who starred recently in “The Black Clown” — a new musical adaptation of Langston Hughes’s searching 1931 poem exploring race and representation — said in an interview that it made him uneasy that the only black opera in the canon, and still one of the main opportunities for many black singers, requires them to “don costumes of rags” and “embody flat stereotypes.”
“Just as we have moved from aggression to microaggression, from analog to digital, and from low-fidelity to high-definition,” he said in an interview, “so, too, must we move from broad brush strokes and put a finer point on the pen that delineates black experience.”
Some have tried to reinvent the piece. The first production that Golda Schultz, the South African soprano who will sing Clara at the Met, ever saw was a famous one by the Cape Town Opera that moved the setting to a South African township.
Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge in Otto Preminger’s 1959 film version. Harry Belafonte turned down an offer to star in the film because he found it “racially demeaning.”George Rinhart/Corbis, via Getty Images
“Setting it up in a township, everyone understood this notion of a struggling community, a tight-knit community, because townships are like that,” Ms. Schultz said during a recent rehearsal break at the Met. “My dad grew up in a township and you knew your neighbors, you knew people’s business — because the walls on a shack are really thin, corrugated iron.”
The director Diane Paulus and the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks made substantial changes for their 2012 Broadway production, cutting some of the dialect, rewriting scenes and trying to give more back story, and agency, to Bess. Some objected: The composer Stephen Sondheim cried foul about their plans, calling the work’s characters “as vivid as any ever created for the musical theater.”
The Met is asking audiences to take a new perspective even before they enter the opera house. The artist Kerry James Marshall, acclaimed for huge paintings that are fantasias of black life and history, has created an arresting “Porgy and Bess” banner that hangs outside.
It upends the traditional image of Porgy, a disabled beggar, and the woman he loves, Bess, who has suffered from abuse and addiction. Mr. Marshall’s Porgy — drawn in a muscular social realist, almost comic-book-superhero style — stands braced for action, wielding his crutch like a weapon and carrying Bess, on his shoulders.
“Most of the images you see of ‘Porgy and Bess,’ particularly the way Porgy is represented, he’s always on his knees, or down on the floor,” Mr. Marshall said in a telephone interview, adding that he had always been struck by the character’s strength in trying to protect Bess: “That’s where I started: I wanted to give Porgy at least one moment of heroic presence.”
The company is mounting an exhibition, “Black Voices at the Met,” that delves into its history with race both before and after 1955, the year contralto Marian Anderson became the first African-American artist to perform a principal role there. And it is releasing a new CD — “Black Voices Rise: African-American Artists at the Met, 1955-1985” — celebrating Ms. Anderson and some of the stars who followed in her footsteps, including Leontyne Price, Jessye Norman, Kathleen Battle, Robert McFerrin and George Shirley.
Mr. Robinson, the director of the new production, said he envisioned its Catfish Row as a working-class community of entrepreneurial, aspirational people.
“We have to treat these people with great dignity, and take them seriously,” he said. “When they become caricatures, it just seems to ring false.”
Mr. Owens, the bass-baritone singing Porgy, said that he viewed the work as “one part of an African-American experience.” He may define the role of Porgy these days, but it does not define him. A star who has performed in operas by Wagner, Mozart, John Adams and Kaija Saariaho at the Met and will sing Wotan in Lyric Opera of Chicago’s “Ring” cycle in the spring, Mr. Owens said that when he started singing Porgy a decade ago, he made a conscious decision never to make his debut at an opera house with it.
The soprano Angel Blue.Justin French for The New York TimesThe bass-baritone Eric Owens.Justin French for The New York Times
“It just put people on notice that I’m an artist who does many things,” he said in an interview in his dressing room.
The new production shows how much deeper the Met’s roster of black singers is now than it was when the company first staged “Porgy and Bess,” in 1985. That production was led by a pair of Met stars, Simon Estes and Grace Bumbry, in the title roles — but the Met had to bring in newcomers in order to cast black singers in many of the other roles. This year, by contrast, almost all of the singers in the main featured roles have already sung at the Met, including Denyce Graves (a distinguished Carmen) and rising younger singers including Ms. Schultz, Ryan Speedo Green and Latonia Moore.
At a rehearsal earlier this month, shortly after Hurricane Dorian had devastated parts of the Bahamas and as it was heading toward the Carolinas, the “Porgy and Bess” cast was on the Met’s stage rehearsing the scene in which a deadly hurricane strikes Charleston.
The power of Gershwin’s terrifying and inventive music came through, even when played by just a rehearsal pianist in the pit. The chorus sang its anguished prayers with passion and precision. Yet some of the dialect (“hab mercy!”) still sounded jarring.
The moment suggested perhaps the only answer to the many questions that have surrounded “Porgy and Bess” for almost a century. The work, on that day, seemed to be taking its place in an operatic canon full of contradictory, discomfiting, occasionally offensive works that time and again nevertheless demonstrate their relevance and power.
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Memphis-born jazz piano great Harold Mabern. (Photo: Smoke Sessions)
Memphis jazz great Harold Mabern, a product of the city’s fertile high school music scene who became a master of soulful “post-bop” piano, has died. He was 83.
He was known for playing with such legends as Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins.
Mabern’s death was announced Thursday by his current record label, Smoke Sessions Records, based in New York, where Mabern lived much of his adult life. A cause of death was not announced.
Attending Douglass and then Manassas High School (which was famed for its music program), Mabern belonged to an unparalleled generation of Memphis jazz musicians that came of age in the 1950s. That generation included pianist Phineas Newborn Jr., trumpet player Booker Little and saxophonists George Coleman, Frank Strozier and Hank Crawford in its ranks.
Although Mabern studied music at a Chicago conservatory, “I say that I got my knowledge from the university of the streets,” he told the Knoxville News Sentinel in a 2012 interview. “You don’t have to go to school to learn how to play this music.”
After moving to New York, Mabern toured and played with some of jazz’s most significant vocalists and instrumental and compositional innovators, including Davis, Rollins, Wes Montgomery and Sarah Vaughan.
He paid tribute to his roots with his first album as a band leader, 1968’s “A Few Miles from Memphis,” where he was joined by fellow Memphian George Coleman. Another 20-plus albums as a leader followed over the next five decades, including a 1995 tribute to Newborn, “For Phineas,” and 1970’s “Greasy Kid Stuff!” which showed the influence of funk and fusion music.
In a review of Mabern’s 1978 album “Pisces Calling,” Marc Myers, author of “Why Jazz Happened,” wrote: “Mabern’s fingering is commanding and lyrical. His chords aren’t merely played but hurled like fistfuls of darts, and there’s an urgent snap to his delivery.”
In the 1990s, Mabern joined a younger generation of Memphis jazz pianists — including James Williams, Mulgrew Miller and Donald Brown — for a series of albums and tours as “The Contemporary Piano Ensemble.”
Mabern also taught music at New Jersey’s William Paterson University for 36 years, influencing several generations of students and players. “I don’t consider myself a teacher,” Mabern told the News Sentinel. “I’m an advanced student. You never stop learning. If you stop learning, you might as well go crawl in a hole somewhere.”
He performed several times in recent years in his hometown and had been scheduled to appear again locally in January at the Germantown Performing Arts Center.
Mabern made what would be his final appearance in Memphis in April of 2018, where he performed and was honored by Rhodes College’s Mike Curb Institute for Music. He was presented with a Beale Street Brass Note by Curb Institute director and longtime friend John Bass.
“I’m not sure if there is a musician who epitomized or represented Memphis better than Harold Mabern,” Bass said. “His playing stretched the boundaries of music, but he always just described himself as a blues man.
“He shared his knowledge and stories with so many people, and I’m grateful that he shared some of them with me,” Bass added. “I’ll never forget seeing grand pianos literally shake under his fingers, or his laugh, and I’ll miss him.”
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Charlottesville resident Roland Wiggins is one of the greatest jazz theoreticians of our time. And while he’s shared his knowledge with some of the most famous names in jazz (John Coltrane, Yusef Lateef, to name just a couple), a spirit of self-expression and generosity is what has come to define his storied career. Photo by Amy and Jackson Smith
Roland Wiggins taught his first music lesson when he was in elementaryschool. He was about 10 years old, and his music teacher, Helen Derrick, had written a series of notes and chord intervals on the chalkboard. As the lesson progressed, Wiggins noticed that Derrick had made a mistake.
“Excuse me, Ms. Derrick. You’ve made an error,” the boy said from his desk. “What you told us just doesn’t work, really, musically.”
Derrick replied, “Now, wait a minute. I’m going to check all my theories and check all the books, and if I come back and you’re right, I’ll bring you an ice cream cone.”
Half-reclining on a formal sofa in his Charlottesville living room (which also doubles as his practice studio, with an upright piano and clavinova in one corner), Wiggins, now 87, interlocks his fingers behind his head and looks up toward the ceiling as he remembers the scene. “Ms. Derrick was going to be a better music teacher than most. I wasn’t being mean, that’s just what I felt,” he says, then laughs quietly before ending the story.
Next music class, he says, eyes smiling, everyone got a vanilla ice cream cone.
Wiggins still loves vanilla ice cream best, and he’s built his love for music, and music education, into an astonishing career that’s included teaching everyone from Philadelphia public school students to John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. A resident of Charlottesville since 1989, Wiggins is one of the foremost music theorists and logicians of our time.
His approach to music and music theory, which he calls the “atonal method,” or, more casually, “the Wiggins,” allows musicians to better express themselves by breaking the rules of Western tonal music. It’s about, among many other things, avoiding clichés, infusing original compositions with more individuality, or giving a singular voice to a standard piece. It’s about communicating honestly.
A young Roland Wiggins (center) poses with his mother, older sister, and older brother. Wiggins, who grew up in Ocean City, New Jersey, was a musical prodigy by age 10. In addition to his many accomplishments, he is one of just a few people authorized to teach the Schillinger System of Musical Composition, a method based on mathematics and encompassing theories of rhythm, harmony, melody, counterpoint, form, and semantics (emotional meaning). Photo courtesy of Roland Wiggins
By the time Wiggins corrected his music teacher’s work, he’d already been playing and studying piano for a few years.
Wiggins says that his mother “played church music very well,” and practiced regularly on the Wiggins’ family piano. It wasn’t a great piano, he recalls—it was missing a few keys, and some of the others didn’t make a sound. But this imperfect instrument may actually have enhanced Wiggins’ innate musical abilities.
One day, Wiggins’ mother told him he’d be playing music at church the following Sunday. “Well, Mom, I would probably make a lot of mistakes,” he said to her, looking over at the flawed piano.
A stern glance from Wiggins’ father said that Wiggins would indeed play music at church the following Sunday. “So what I did was, to learn the pitches that were missing, and put them here,” says Wiggins, pointing to his ear. He played that Sunday, and kept practicing, “And there came a time when the whole keyboard became friends rather than enemies, or matters of ignorance.”
Throughout junior high and high school, he took private lessons as well as classes at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music, including some from highly regarded classical composer Vincent Persichetti. Wiggins then enrolled in Combs College of Music in Philadelphia, where, about a week or so into classes, he was invited to join the faculty. Over the course of eight years, Wiggins attended Combs part-time, earning undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral degrees while simultaneously teaching music in Philadelphia public schools.
Wiggins then left Philadelphia for New York, where he studied composition and advanced chord theory with Henry Cowell, regarded by many as one of the most innovative composers in 20th century American music. (Cowell is perhaps best known for his development and use of “tone clusters,” in which a pianist plays multiple adjacent keys on the keyboard at once, often with the forearm, to achieve a certain sonorous sound.)
Somewhere in there, he served in the U.S. Air Force and played in a band with famed jazz and R&B trumpeter Donald Byrd (Wiggins says he taught Byrd about embellishments, musical flourishes on a melody or harmony in the form of added notes).
During his stint in the military, Wiggins, seen here at the piano, played in an Air Force band. Among his many bandmates was famed jazz and R&B trumpeter and vocalist Donald Byrd. Photo courtesy of Roland Wiggins
In a distinguished and varied career, Wiggins has been director of the Center for the Study of Aesthetics in Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (1971-1973); a music teacher and choral director for Amherst Regional Junior High School (1976-1979); and an associate professor of music at Hampshire College in Amherst. He later chaired the Luther P. Jackson House for African American Studies at the University of Virginia, and taught a few classes in UVA’s music department while he was at it.
At the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, he conducted grant-funded research into advancements in electronic music production and helped create the Sound to Score translator device, which used computerized analyses of world famous jazz musicians to teach music.
And there were opportunities he did not take: In 1971, for instance, Harvard psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce requested that Wiggins interview for the position of director of the Urban Studies Center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a post that came with a full professorship. The committee felt Wiggins’ approach to digital music education could “serve as a model in numerous institutional programs,” Pierce wrote, adding, “Your own ability as a jazz and classical musician was mentioned to me by Mr. Quincy Jones, a musician of international stature, who praised your handling of the philosophical, educational and research components of the Institute of Black American Music.”
Yes, that Quincy Jones, producer to Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson, and Aretha Franklin, among others. Wiggins got to know him through Jesse Jackson, who tapped Wiggins to serve as a charter member on the board of directors for his Operation P.U.S.H. (People United to Save Humanity). For the record, “Q” wanted to study music with Wiggins, too, but Wiggins’ queue of students was already full.
Wiggins turned down the Harvard interview. It didn’t pay as much as UMass Amherst, and by that time he had a family—his wife, Muriel, and their three daughters—to consider. But he was proud to be asked, and keeps the letter in a plastic sleeve inside a binder alongside some of his most prized photographs and sheet music.
Wiggins’ list of accomplishments goes on and on, and might fill the allotted word count for this story. But in talking with Wiggins for even a few minutes, it’s clear that while he’s accomplished quite a bit in his life—musically, academically, culturally—he’s not doing it for the accolades.
“I’ve got awards and stuff, that I don’t hang on the wall,” he says. His walls are instead full of large-scale abstract paintings by one of his Air Force buddies; a portrait of his three daughters, Rosalyn, Susan, and Carol; a few family photos; and other items close to his heart. Atop his piano are family photographs, lamps, cassette tapes, and small clocks, rather than trophies and citations. When Wiggins talks about what he’s accomplished, he speaks not of his awards, but his students.
“I’ve had a lot of students. Either directly, or indirectly,” he says, smiling. Some of them just happen to be some of the greatest and most influential jazz musicians of all time. Yusef Lateef. Billy Taylor. Archie Shepp via Jimmy Owens. John Coltrane, unhappy with what he’d come up with after the monumental success of both Giant Steps (1960) and A Love Supreme (1965), called Wiggins for guidance.
“I said, ‘first of all, John, give yourself credit for the mastery that you’ve already developed and the contributions you’ve made,’” Wiggins says. Their phone call was cut short, but another of Wiggins’ students, Charlottesville-based musician and restaurateur Jay Pun, says it’s generally understood that that Coltrane-Wiggins phone call influenced much of what Coltrane did on Interstellar Space, recorded in 1967 (the year Coltrane died) and released in 1974.
Wiggins (right) and legendary pop music producer Quincy Jones embrace at a fundraiser for Tandem Friends School in the mid-1990s. Wiggins and Jones met in the 1970s, via Jesse Jackson’s Operation P.U.S.H. (People United to Save Humanity). At the time, Wiggins was running a program at the University of Massachusetts focused on recruiting notable African Americans to advanced degree programs, and “Q” expressed interest in enrolling. Photo courtesy of Roland Wiggins
Charlottesville-based guitarist Jamal Millner saw Wiggins’ influence on these stars firsthand. Millner, perhaps best known as a member of the Corey Harris-led blues band 5×5, studied music at UVA in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was a great era for jazz in Charlottesville, he says, and a lot of jazz greats came to town to play at Old Cabell Hall. Millner, who was playing music professionally even before going to college, would sometimes loiter backstage and listen to the stars discuss technique and theory. Wiggins was usually there, too.
During one show, legendary jazz drummer Max Roach gave Wiggins a shoutout from the stage, and it nearly blew Millner’s mind. “The highest level of jazz musicians were always giving Dr. Wiggins his props,” he says.
So, what exactly are they giving him props for?
Wiggins giggles when he explains what he’s been working on in his decades-long music theory career. “I keep laughing and giggling,” he says, “because I’ve developed a system of atonality. That means, it purposely breaks all the rules of Western tonal music.” (Most music in Western cultures is tonal.)
He gets up from the sofa and goes over to the clavinova (a digital piano) to demonstrate. His system has to do with, among many other things, added tone systems; embellishments; sets of chords and their behaviors; how the end of one musical entity (a chord, or a rhythm, for instance), is immediately or simultaneously the beginning of another one. It’s hard to explain in words, but easy to hear. Wiggins gets on the clavinova and demonstrates how his system of atonality can expand the emotional and intellectual capacity of a composition.
“So, if you’re angry at, say, some of the racism, or some of the more offensive mechanisms that are still around in society, you can’t express that musically and be truthful” when you’re playing something upbeat and proper, he says as he plays a measure. “But if you do the Wiggins atonality,” he says, his fingers floating over the keys, playing that same measure in a different voice, one with more tones, more notes, more variation, and as a result, more feeling. “It’s not easy to sing, but I’m expressing something real, some rage, honestly,” he says.
It’s a way to get to know someone. “Have you heard this one?,” Wiggins asks before launching into “What A Wonderful World,” Wiggins-style. Of course I have; it’s part of the Great American Songbook. But I haven’t heard it like this. Not from the perspective of a black man born in Ocean City, New Jersey, during the Great Depression, who was a musical prodigy by age 10. Who, growing up in a segregated United States, was not allowed to swim in the local public pool except on Fridays, just before it was cleaned for the week.
I haven’t heard “What A Wonderful World” from the perspective of someone whose family was only allowed to buy a home near the railroad tracks. Not from the perspective of a brilliant mind who was told by the dean of UMass that he was being hired “because he was black, and a scholar,” not because he was a scholar who was also black (Wiggins asked him to reverse that statement).
Wiggins (left) with jazz icon Dizzy Gillespie (right). Photo courtesy of Roland Wiggins
Next, he plays Thelonious Monk and, with a wry smile on his face, says that since Monk’s not here to tell him otherwise, “let’s help ourselves” to “‘Round Midnight.” He adds “the Wiggins” to Monk, builds upon his friend’s composition, makes it his own.
He’s had two surgeries on his hands, he tells me as he leaves Monk behind, those very hands still dancing over the black and white keys. But at the time, he’d fallen in love with a piece full of tenths, a piece that required both hands to play. “Ah, Chopin!” he declares. “Takes me back to Combs College! Cadence. Deceptive. All running up and down the keyboard. They’re instrumental forms, and not every musician uses the same ones others do,” he explains.
The Wiggins system is about individual, truthful expression and communication through music. It’s what he aims to share with his students, so that they in turn may share it with their own students and listeners.
It’s an approach to teaching, playing, and writing music that has changed the work, and the lives, of a number of local musicians who’ve worked closely with Wiggins over the years.
I’ll say this about Charlottesville,” says Millner. “There are a lot of great musicians around. But Dr. Wiggins? He’s a person that, for most folks, only exists in theory. But he’s here. Talented, intelligent, and a very nice guy. In all the ways he’s great at music, he’s great as a person.”
For Millner, as well as other area musicians like Morwenna Lasko and her husband and collaborator Jay Pun, living in such close proximity to Wiggins has allowed them to mine the depths of the theorist’s brilliant mind and big heart in ways that folks like John Coltrane simply could not.
Pun first heard of Wiggins through his friend and musical mentor LeRoi Moore, saxophonist and founding member of Dave Matthews Band, who arranged music around Matthews’ song skeletons. Every time Pun visited Moore’s farm outside of town, the two would have the same conversation.
“Do you know Wiggins?,” Moore would ask.
“No, who’s that?,” Pun would say.
“He’s a music theorist, and he will blow your mind!”
“Whatever, Roi,” Pun would reply. Pun graduated from Berklee College of Music, so what more could another music theorist have to teach him?
When Moore died of pneumonia after being seriously injured in an ATV accident in 2008, Wiggins played at his funeral. But still, Pun had his doubts.
After a chance meeting while waiting in line to see Barack Obama at the Sprint Pavilion in 2011, Pun gave Wiggins a call: He was a friend of LeRoi’s, and he wanted to take a lesson. But before Wiggins would accept him as a student, Pun had to pass a test.
“What’s in a C diminished chord?” Wiggins asked.
“C, E flat, G flat, B double flat,” said Pun.
“Is that all?” Wiggins inquired.
Pun paused, tentatively offered up a few more options, and Wiggins told him to call back when he knew for sure. His pride bruised, Pun decided it wasn’t worth it. And yet, he had to know what Wiggins knew about the C diminished chord, that he didn’t.
Pun did his research, called Wiggins back the following day with a better answer: C, E flat, G flat, and B double flat are the consonant tones, but each chord has even more dissonant notes, like ninths, elevenths, and thirteenths. That’s what Wiggins wanted to hear, and so they set up a lesson: One hour, for $50. That hour turned into three, almost four. Then it turned in to another lesson, and another.
Once Pun started learning “this note goes with that note because of this,” and “this note combined with those note sounds like this because of this,” the number of people buying his records and attending his live shows mattered less and less to him. Under Wiggins’ tutelage, Pun says that for him, music transformed into a world worth exploring, rather than just a product to promote.
Roland Wiggins “is a one-in-a-lifetime teacher, and friend,” says Morwenna Lasko, a Charlottesville-based musician who has taken lessons from Wiggins since spring 2013. Over the years, their talks on music and music theory have led to conversations about life and family, a driving force in both their lives. “The Western tonal system of music will only take you so far, as far as expressing things. And that’s why Dr. Wiggins is a genius in certain aspects, because he’s tried to undo it,” says Lasko. Photo by Amy and Jackson Smith
Lasko took her first lesson with Wiggins in spring 2013, a birthday gift from Pun. Lasko started playing violin at age 3, after seeing Itzhak Perlman play on “Sesame Street.” Her musical gifts were evident from the start—she’d often retreat to her room to figure out a “Masterpiece Theater” theme—and she knew early on that music is how she best expresses herself, how she best relates to people.
Lasko is classically trained and highly skilled (she can play Paganini caprices, considered “the ultimate” in technical accomplishment), but she was nervous for her first Wiggins lesson. She arrived early and sat in her car in the driveway to compose herself before ringing the bell.
Once she was inside, though, at the piano with Wiggins, her nerves mostly subsided. She’d gained not just a teacher, but a friend, and the lessons were “magic.” They talked theory and played pieces like Billy Taylor’s “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free,” and Thad Jones’ “A Child Is Born” to get to know one another. As with Pun, Lasko’s one-hour lessons were almost always longer, but Wiggins never charged more than the $50.
Early on in their lessons, Lasko and Wiggins noticed that deer would often come up to the French doors in the living room and listen in on what they were doing on violin and piano, respectively. Lasko’s convinced it’s the late, great jazz artists stopping by to hear what they’re doing, to continue learning from Wiggins.
Wiggins’ theories and methods “[give] you so much more juicy vocabulary to use” when expressing oneself through music, she says.
He’s also helped her to realize her own musical tendencies and clichés. Musicians get comfortable with what they know, says Lasko, and they’ll slip back into the same chord progressions or familiar melodies. But Wiggins helped her see that identifying and recognizing that comfort zone, and then stepping outside of it, is where a musician can grow. While recording The Hollow, her latest release with Pun as MoJa, Lasko wrote her violin solos, listened to them, decided “that sounds so Morwenna,” and then re-wrote them to be almost the opposite of what they were…and they’re now some of her favorite solos.
Many musicians, once they reach a certain point of virtuosity, think there’s nothing more to learn, says Lasko. But there’s always something to discover, and Wiggins leads by example. While recovering from a hip surgery in a rehabilitation facility, Lasko and Pun brought Wiggins a keyboard so that he could play music for his fellow patients (often accompanied by his wife singing), and so that he could work late into the night on his theories.
During their lessons, Lasko and Wiggins usually play violin and piano, respectively. But Wiggins often has Lasko hop on the piano bench with him to do a one-finger melody exercise. Photo by Amy and Jackson Smith
After Berklee, Lasko wondered what she would practice that would continue to inspire her. The answer, it turns out, is music theory, and Wiggins’ atonal method in particular. “That language is so vast and broad,” she says. “The more you know of it, the more you can say, the more you can communicate with others. The more I build my language of music theory, the more powerful I feel. The Western tonal system of music will only take you so far, as far as expressing things. And that’s why Dr. Wiggins is a genius in certain aspects, because he’s tried to undo it.”
“I have notebooks full of stuff that I will literally be digesting for my entire life,” says Lasko. “It’s almost like life is too short, like you need 10 lives, or 25, to really learn all there is to learn.”
But, says Wiggins, Lasko’s doing a pretty fantastic job. “I just adore her. If I were to die tomorrow morning, the person that would know so much of what I’ve taught to do, would be Morwenna.”
And that’s a very good thing: Lasko teaches private lessons to students of all ages here in Charlottesville, sharing some of that Wiggins knowledge with a whole new generation of musicians.
This Saturday night, Wiggins will give a somewhat rare concert during A Night of Black Innovation in Music at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center.
In a Facebook post about the show, Wiggins wrote, “The opportunity to help preserve and extend the life of Afro-American arts, especially music, is tremendously exciting for me.” He’ll perform alongside a slew of local black artists, including pianist and composer Ivan Orr, singer Yolonda Coles Jones, neo-soul artist Nathaniel Star, and others. Some of his beloved students—including Lasko, Pun, and Millner—will perform as well.
Proceeds from ticket sales will benefit the future Eko Ise performance, music theory, and education program at the Jefferson School, something that, of course, is close to Wiggins’ heart.
Lasko and Pun say Wiggins is always talking about ways to get a music theory program, especially one geared toward black children, started here in town. Because music is a language to be used for self-expression, Wiggins is particularly committed to getting that idea into the minds of black children, perhaps, he says, because that was his own experience. Music, and music theory, not only gave him opportunities, it gave him a way to express himself fully, in a world that was, and often still is, not kind to black self expression.
When I ask Wiggins what he hopes his legacy will be, he gets up from the couch for what must be the tenth time in two hours, and walks to the stand up piano. He takes a black plastic cassette player from the top and rifles through a stack of tapes. This one’s Billy Taylor’s, he says, and sets it aside. The next one is Thelonious Monk, working through a piece for him. He sets that one aside, too. The third tape in the stack is the one he’s after, the one with a pink label.
Wiggins sits at the clavinova in his Charlottesville living room. On the wall is a painting by one of his Air Force buddies. Photo by Amy and Jackson Smith
Wiggins returns to the couch, sets the cassette player on the table, pops in the tape, and rewinds it a bit. When he presses play, it’s not Taylor, or Monk, or Coltrane, or Lateef that comes out of the speaker. It’s the children’s choir he directed in Amherst in the 1970s, singing a Billboard No. 1 hit, the “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” medley from The 5th Dimension.
“Harmony and understanding,/ Sympathy and trust abounding, / No more falsehoods or derisions,” sing the hundred or so voices with nothing but piano accompaniment.
The dozens of children sing with gusto, with soul. Wiggins listens thoughtfully, appreciating the passion with which they sing.
When the song ends, the crowd erupts in applause, and Wiggins lets it play out before pausing the cassette. “The applause was so long. I’ve never had applause, for anything, as long as [I did for] those kids, from their parents, and their community. I just…I felt very good about that,” he says, nodding his head.
He’s influenced some of the greatest jazz musicians to ever play. And yet, it always comes back to children, to those who might choose music for their own journeys, if only they’re given the chance.
Wiggins hopes that those who’ve learned from him “don’t become stingy with the subject matter that I’ve developed. That they want to share. I would like to see that people use their creativity, even in sharing. That’s a generosity that I would like to leave here,” he says, bringing it back to his own first lesson in music, one that’s led him down a lifelong path of musical discovery and truthful self-expression.
If you give someone money to buy some ice cream, “You don’t tell them chocolate, or cherry. You let them choose for themselves.”
Roland Wiggins will give a somewhat rare concert appearance during A Night of Black Innovation in Music at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center this Saturday, September 21. The event, which highlights the importance of black music and honors the contributions black musicians have made to American culture, will also include performances by Jamal Millner, Ivan Orr, Yolonda Coles Jones, and many others, including Wiggins’ longtime students and friends Morwenna Lasko and Jay Pun.
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Steve Dalachinsky, a contemporary poet unrivaled in his dedication to the jazz avant-garde, not only as a gimlet-eyed observer but also as a prolific collaborator and performer, died early Monday morning at Southside Hospital on Long Island.
He was 72. His death was confirmed by multi-instrumentalist Matt Mottel, a longtime friend who was with him when he died. Dalachinsky had suffered a stroke after reading his poetry at an art exhibition on Saturday night.
A steadfast presence on New York’s downtown scene — streetwise and pithy, sardonic but never jaded — Dalachinsky seemed to know everybody, and heard more live music than most. Many of his poems bear witness to some ephemeral magic on the bandstand, from the “long agos farewelled” of a Sheila Jordan-Steve Kuhn gig to the “screeching cohesions bowstrummed” of a concert by the Joe McPhee Quartet.
Within the avant-garde community, he was known as a discerning barometer. Jazz critic Francis Davis, who was born in the same year, advised his readers in The Atlantic “to keep an eye out for Steve Dalachinsky, a stream-of-consciousness poet and a loquacious advocate for his favorite players. His presence is a guarantee that on any given night you’re where the action is.”
Pianist Matthew Shipp, who first met Dalachinsky shortly after arriving in New York in 1983, remembered him on Monday morning in the present tense. “He’s very charming in one way,” Shipp said, “and in another way he’s so in-your-face and brutally honest. Personality-wise we just hit it off.” Their long creative partnership can be traced through a thicket of poems, performances and liner notes, as well as a book, Logos and Language: a Post-Jazz Metaphorical Dialogue.
Dalachinsky drew obvious inspiration from Beat poets like Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, but no less from Japanese haiku, e.e. cummings, Federico Garcia Lorca and other sources. And while jazz didn’t always provide the spark in his poetry, he acknowledged the depth of that connection; he was a permanent fixture at The Vision Festival, both as an artist and an audience member.
“Music is my main obsession and in avant-garde jazz just like in Beethoven’s late string quartets, the artists are always taking risks,” he said in a 2016 interview with AMFM Magazine. “Though many of my poems are fairly linear, they in part follow and try to become part of that rhythm, that movement, that risk.”
His work appeared in literary journals like The Evergreen Review, periodicals like The Brooklyn Rail, and chapbooks like Long Play E.P., for saxophonist Evan Parker. A decade ago, the RogueArt label published Reaching Into the Unknown: 1964-2009, a massive collection of jazz-respondent poems, with photographs by Jacques Bisceglia. A previous Dalachinsky collection called The Final Nite & Other Poems: The Complete Notes From a Charles Gayle Notebook 1987-2006won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award.
Dalachinsky also performed his work on a number of albums — the first and most fateful being Incomplete Directions, released in 1999 on Knitting Factory Records, with accompaniment by the likes of Shipp, bassist William Parker and guitarists Vernon Reid and Thurston Moore. Positive response to the album led to the publication of A Superintendent’s Eyes, inspired by Dalachinsky’s experience as a super in a building on Spring Street.
Steven Donald Dalachinsky was born in Brooklyn on Sept. 29, 1946, and grew up in the Midwood neighborhood, later recalling his childhood as solidly working class. He was drawn early to the visual arts but soon switched over to poetry, inspired to no small degree by Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind.
He was 15 or 16 when he first heard Cecil Taylor, the sphinxlike icon of avant-garde pianism; he was walking past The Five Spot when the music pulled him in. Dalachinsky retold this story for an In Memoriam episode of Jazz Night in America last year. “The music went right inside me,” he said, “and my addiction to free jazz began.” As was often the case with Dalachinsky, affinity led to a long and lasting friendship. That warmth is evident in his 2009 chapbook The Mantis— and in this reading of “cecil taylor-derek bailey duo at tonic,” from last year.
Dalachinsky was a longtime SoHo resident, predating the neighborhood’s evolution into a phalanx of flagship boutiques. With his wife of 36 years, visual artist and fellow poet Yuko Otomo, he lived in an apartment stuffed with books, records, and art materials. In addition to Otomo, he is survived by a sister, Judy Orcinolo, and a nephew, Shaun Orcinolo.
Along with his writerly calling, Dalachinsky was a serious collagist. His work was documented in collaborative practice and often in dialogue with his poems. Some of it became part of the fabric of New York, through local arts institutions.
Two of Steve Dalachinsky’s brilliant collages, which he contributed as AFA calendar covers in 2014. He was a truly beloved member of the AFA family and we are heart broken by the loss.
In recent years, Dalachinsky was called on to memorialize a number of friends who’d passed; he spoke at memorials for Taylor, alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman and tenor saxophonist David S. Ware, among others.
On Monday, social media was awash with memorials to Dalachinsky — his tireless work, his generous friendship and most of all his vital presence. “There was no pretense with him,” said Shipp, speaking by phone. “He can’t really be replaced.”
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Fall arts 2019 | Music: Jazz legend Charles McPherson eager to keep growing
The sax great, who turned 80 in July, is busier than ever with tours, new albums and more
Jazz saxophone great Charles McPherson credits his wife and social media for keeping him very busy, at the age of 80, as both a touring and recording artist.
“I’m actually working more than ever and a lot of it is due to Lynn,” McPherson said of his wife, whom he met after moving to San Diego in the late 1970s. “She’s become quite media-savvy and uses all the tools of the internet and social media to let people know what I’m doing when and where. Lynn is really the engine behind a lot of it. She’s been doing this the last few years, and it’s really started to snowball.”
Recently returned from his most extensive tour of Spain to date, McPherson will again perform in Europe this fall, after concerts this month in San Diego and Santa Monica.
The internationally acclaimed alto saxophonist was in New York in April for two 80th birthday year concerts at Rose Hall. He shared the stage with piano legend McCoy Tyner and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, led by Wynton Marsalis.
“Charles is the very definition of excellence in our music,” said Marsalis, a longtime admirer. “He’s the definitive master on his instrument. He plays with exceptional harmonic accuracy and sophistication. He performs free-flowing, melodic and thematically developed solos with unbelievable fire and an unparalleled depth of soul.”
In addition to celebrating his actual 80th birthday on July 24, McPherson is this year celebrating his 60th anniversary as a professional jazz artist.
The Missouri-born musician rose to prominence in the early 1960s during his 12-year tenure in the band of jazz bass giant Charles Mingus, with whom he made more than two dozen albums. McPherson’s first solo album, “Bebop Revisited,” came out in 1964. His reputation as an unusually eloquent and adroit musician has long been a matter of record. Ditto his ability to invest each note he performs with a singular combination of carefully calibrated consideration and freewheeling spirit.
“I’m still passionate about playing and I’m having fun, maybe more fun than I’ve ever had,” McPherson said. “Through the accumulation of life, you have more to say, to write about, and to play about — not only because of your world view, but your sense of life, who you are and the art you are involved with.
“I’ve become more of an experienced person and maybe have a deeper understanding of things. That’s one reason it’s more fun for me, because I understand more. You spend a lot of your early life dealing with craft and mastering the medium you are working through — in my case, music and the sax. After that, it’s more about content and what is it you’re saying with your music. This is where you understand not only what the note is, but why that note now, as opposed to another note at another time.”
McPherson prefers to look forward rather than back. Later this month, he will do both simultaneously, in a manner.
On Sept. 28, he will perform a fund-raising concert at San Diego City College’s Saville Theater for award-winning radio station KSDS Jazz 88.3. Billed as “Charles McPherson plays ‘Charlie Parker with Strings’,” the concert comes 14 years after his superb album, “A Tribute to Charlie Parker,” which McPherson recorded live with his quartet and the Cleveland Chamber Orchestra.
He is so adept at playing the music of bebop sax pioneer Parker, a key early inspiration, that he was prominently featured on the soundtrack to “Bird,” film director Clint Eastwood’s 1988 biopic about Parker.
“I think Charlie Parker is a legend, as opposed to myself,” McPherson said. “I shy away from that designation. Because, when you think of a legend, you think of age being a part of what a legend is. Maybe it’s because I’m 80, but I don’t even like to think I can be constrained by my age, even though I know I am. It’s not like I can run up and down the street, like when I was 17!
“I consider myself a work in progress. I’m in a state of becoming, not only as a musician and artist, but as a being.”
Future legend, as chosen by Charles McPherson
Trumpeter Gilbert Castellanos, the artistic director of the Young Lions Jazz Conservatory and curator of the San Diego Symphony’s Jazz at the Jacobs concert series
“Gilbert is an excellent musician. He’s such a catalyst for innovating and creating circumstances for young players to perform in town, and for opening up different clubs and venues. He’s all over the place — he could be the mayor! He’s a wonderful musician, a real go-getter and a good businessman. A lot of times, people don’t do all of those things well. But Gilbert does.”
Jazz trumpet player Gilbert Castellanos
(Eduardo Contreras)
Charles McPherson plays “Charlie Parker with Strings,” a fund-raising concert for radio station KSDS FM Jazz 88.3
When: 7:30 p.m. Sept. 28
Where: Saville Theater, 1450 C Street, San Diego City College
Tickets: $88.30 for each pair of tickets bought by new or existing KSDS members; no single ticket sales
PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!
Fall arts 2019 | Music: Jazz legend Charles McPherson eager to keep growing
The sax great, who turned 80 in July, is busier than ever with tours, new albums and more
Jazz saxophone great Charles McPherson credits his wife and social media for keeping him very busy, at the age of 80, as both a touring and recording artist.
“I’m actually working more than ever and a lot of it is due to Lynn,” McPherson said of his wife, whom he met after moving to San Diego in the late 1970s. “She’s become quite media-savvy and uses all the tools of the internet and social media to let people know what I’m doing when and where. Lynn is really the engine behind a lot of it. She’s been doing this the last few years, and it’s really started to snowball.”
Recently returned from his most extensive tour of Spain to date, McPherson will again perform in Europe this fall, after concerts this month in San Diego and Santa Monica.
The internationally acclaimed alto saxophonist was in New York in April for two 80th birthday year concerts at Rose Hall. He shared the stage with piano legend McCoy Tyner and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, led by Wynton Marsalis.
“Charles is the very definition of excellence in our music,” said Marsalis, a longtime admirer. “He’s the definitive master on his instrument. He plays with exceptional harmonic accuracy and sophistication. He performs free-flowing, melodic and thematically developed solos with unbelievable fire and an unparalleled depth of soul.”
In addition to celebrating his actual 80th birthday on July 24, McPherson is this year celebrating his 60th anniversary as a professional jazz artist.
The Missouri-born musician rose to prominence in the early 1960s during his 12-year tenure in the band of jazz bass giant Charles Mingus, with whom he made more than two dozen albums. McPherson’s first solo album, “Bebop Revisited,” came out in 1964. His reputation as an unusually eloquent and adroit musician has long been a matter of record. Ditto his ability to invest each note he performs with a singular combination of carefully calibrated consideration and freewheeling spirit.
“I’m still passionate about playing and I’m having fun, maybe more fun than I’ve ever had,” McPherson said. “Through the accumulation of life, you have more to say, to write about, and to play about — not only because of your world view, but your sense of life, who you are and the art you are involved with.
“I’ve become more of an experienced person and maybe have a deeper understanding of things. That’s one reason it’s more fun for me, because I understand more. You spend a lot of your early life dealing with craft and mastering the medium you are working through — in my case, music and the sax. After that, it’s more about content and what is it you’re saying with your music. This is where you understand not only what the note is, but why that note now, as opposed to another note at another time.”
McPherson prefers to look forward rather than back. Later this month, he will do both simultaneously, in a manner.
On Sept. 28, he will perform a fund-raising concert at San Diego City College’s Saville Theater for award-winning radio station KSDS Jazz 88.3. Billed as “Charles McPherson plays ‘Charlie Parker with Strings’,” the concert comes 14 years after his superb album, “A Tribute to Charlie Parker,” which McPherson recorded live with his quartet and the Cleveland Chamber Orchestra.
He is so adept at playing the music of bebop sax pioneer Parker, a key early inspiration, that he was prominently featured on the soundtrack to “Bird,” film director Clint Eastwood’s 1988 biopic about Parker.
“I think Charlie Parker is a legend, as opposed to myself,” McPherson said. “I shy away from that designation. Because, when you think of a legend, you think of age being a part of what a legend is. Maybe it’s because I’m 80, but I don’t even like to think I can be constrained by my age, even though I know I am. It’s not like I can run up and down the street, like when I was 17!
“I consider myself a work in progress. I’m in a state of becoming, not only as a musician and artist, but as a being.”
Future legend, as chosen by Charles McPherson
Trumpeter Gilbert Castellanos, the artistic director of the Young Lions Jazz Conservatory and curator of the San Diego Symphony’s Jazz at the Jacobs concert series
“Gilbert is an excellent musician. He’s such a catalyst for innovating and creating circumstances for young players to perform in town, and for opening up different clubs and venues. He’s all over the place — he could be the mayor! He’s a wonderful musician, a real go-getter and a good businessman. A lot of times, people don’t do all of those things well. But Gilbert does.”
Jazz trumpet player Gilbert Castellanos
(Eduardo Contreras)
Charles McPherson plays “Charlie Parker with Strings,” a fund-raising concert for radio station KSDS FM Jazz 88.3
When: 7:30 p.m. Sept. 28
Where: Saville Theater, 1450 C Street, San Diego City College
Tickets: $88.30 for each pair of tickets bought by new or existing KSDS members; no single ticket sales
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I had a nice hang with Steve and Yuko at the Charlie Parker Fest in Tompkins. He looked fine and was happy talking about Cecil, poetry and everything he had going on.
It was a year ago this month that Steve and Yuko came up to Warwick to give a reading at the Seligmann Center in Sugar Loaf NY.
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Jazz stalwart Vic Vogel, who shared stage with Peterson, Gillespie, dies at 84
MONTREAL — Vic Vogel, who began playing the piano by ear at the age of five and rose to become one of Canada’s jazz stalwarts, has died. He was 84.
A message on his official Facebook page stated he died Monday in Montreal “beside his true love, his Steinway piano.”
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During his lengthy career, he shared the stage with many music legends, including Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Maynard Ferguson, Mel Torme, and Slide Hampton.
Vogel also accompanied Paul Anka, Tony Bennett, Eartha Kitt, Andy Williams, Sammy Davis Jr., Jerry Lewis, Michel Legrand, Ann-Margaret, Shirley MacLaine and Tennessee Ernie Ford.
A colourful bandleader, he was also active in pop and occasionally symphony and once said that one of his proudest moments was writing, arranging and conducting music for ceremonies of the 1976 Olympic Games in his Montreal hometown.
He was born Victor Stefan Vogel on Aug. 3, 1935, to Hungarian parents in Montreal and became interested in music after watching his older brother play.
Vogel also taught himself to play trombone, tuba and the vibraphone and figured out how to arrange music.
At age 14, he gave solo performances on TV, and two years later he began occasionally playing the piano and trombone in Montreal nightclubs.
When he was 19, he sought help in piano theory from Oscar Peterson’s teacher, but since the instructor was in declining health, Vogel was referred to his colleague Michel Hirvy, who helped him perfect his talent.
After playing in several orchestras, he conducted his first band at a Montreal cabaret in 1960, then toured with the Double Six of Paris and the Radio-Canada orchestra. In 1967, he founded his Le Jazz Big Band.
Vogel, who was a fixture at the Montreal International Jazz Festival, remained loyal to the Quebec music scene and is credited with helping to maintain the popularity of jazz in the province.
He and his Le Jazz Big Band toured with Quebec rockers Offenbach, resulting in their “En fusion” record that won the Felix Award for rock album in 1980.
On Monday, Montreal Mayor Valerie Plante paid tribute to “a legend of our city,” whom she credited with helping to develop Montreal’s music scene and world-renowned jazz fest.
“The name Vic Vogel is associated with a musician who succeeded in each of his appearances to share his passion for music, and jazz in particular,” she said in a statement. “My thoughts go to his family, his loved ones and all the fans mourning his loss.”
Vogel had several gold and platinum records and was nominated for Juno and Felix awards. He released his first solo album in 1993.
Vogel also wrote, arranged and conducted music for ceremonies at Man and His World in Montreal and the Canada Games in 1985.
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The photographer of jazz whose work is art in itself is Roy DeCarava. His book “The Sound I Saw”—a montage of his images and texts that he composed in the early nineteen-sixties but was unpublished until 2001—reaches deep to the experience, of the black American city life, that the music embodies and the musicians express. (It’s newly reissued, and DeCarava’s work is also the subject of a pair of current exhibits at David Zwirner.) DeCarava’s musical portraiture is centered on the public performance of jazz in clubs and in concerts. Yet there’s another crucial aspect of jazz history—the private side, of music made in recording studios—which is documented in a remarkable archive newly available online: the photographs of Francis Wolff, which preserve precious moments of some of the greatest musicians at work on some of the most enduring jazz recordings.
Wolff’s photos are a peculiar, passionate, and personal subset of the medium: they’re both documentary and promotional, made in part for use on album covers for the great Blue Note record label, of which Wolff was a co-founder, along with Alfred Lion. They were childhood friends in Berlin, Jews who escaped Nazi Germany. The pair founded the label eight decades ago, and ran it together until 1966. Together they fostered a collective body of work and a teeming set of individual performances that are at the center of modern jazz history and a core of the music’s living repertory; Wolff’s images offer keen reminiscences of historic musical moments, and they inspire fantasies about what it would have been like to experience them in person.
Jimmy Heath, Percy Heath, Miles Davis, and Gil Coggins at a rehearsal for the “Miles Davis All Stars” ’ second session, New York City, April, 1953.
Despite their practical function, Wolff’s photos go far beyond the promotional; they are a part of the Blue Note label’s authentic devotion to the artists. In recording and promoting jazz, Lion and Wolff called attention to black American artistic heroes—many of whom they brought from merely local renown to the enduring spotlight—and Wolff’s photographs reflect the depth of his admiration for them, artistically and personally. (It’s exemplified in his habit of photographing artists from low angles—he’s literally looking up at them.) If there’s an element of mythology in the images, it’s one that’s rooted in truth—in the authentic artistic power of musicians who may have been at the margins of mainstream media but who, for Wolff and Lion, deserved the canonization of any of the cultural celebrities of the time.
Elvin Jones at an Elvin Jones Septet session, Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, March 14, 1969.
Clifford Brown at Art Blakey’s “A Night at Birdland” session, New York City, February 21, 1954.
Wilbur Ware at the “Hank Mobley Sextet-Hank” session, Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, New Jersey, April 21, 1957.
Larry Young at the “Mother Ship” session, Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, February 7, 1969.
Most of the musicians photographed by Wolff are men, because most of Blue Note’s roster of musicians were male. Though there were female jazz musicians active at the time, they also, with very few exceptions, faced prejudice in the development of their careers—except for singers, who were prominent, but Blue Note recorded very few singers, male or female. The label concentrated on instrumental music, and there was an artistic point to that emphasis. The repertoire of most jazz singing was rooted in the so-called American Songbook of repertory from plays and movies; though many Blue Note artists certainly played these works, too, the core of the label’s repertory was rooted in instrumental improvisation—and in the musicians’ original compositions, which the label emphasized, by paying its musicians to rehearse, to prepare to record original pieces that were both unfamiliar and complex. (Wolff documented many of these rehearsals, as in an image of Miles Davis, pencil in hand, working on a chart for a 1953 session, and in the one of Bud Powell, in the company of his son, Earl John, rehearsing the 1958 album “The Scene Changes,” on which all nine pieces are Powell’s originals.) It’s as if the label were setting up a classical modern-jazz repertory that rendered black American music an instant modern American counterpart to the European classical repertory and a part of the avant-garde music of the day.
Bud Powell with his son, Earl John Powell, at a rehearsal for Powell’s “The Scene Changes” session, Birdland, New York City, December 1958.
Most of the musicians in the photos, and in the Blue Note catalogue, were young—in their twenties and early thirties. Lion and Wolff—whose tastes were expanded by their close consultation with the veteran saxophonist Ike Quebec, who also recorded a wide range of albums for the label—found that the jazz they loved was significantly a youth movement. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, they recorded, as leaders of groups, Clifford Brown, Herbie Hancock, Freddie Hubbard, and Bobby Hutcherson at twenty-two; Larry Young and Tyrone Washington at twenty-three; Sonny Clark, Grant Green, Hank Mobley, and Joe Henderson at twenty-six; Lee Morgan and Tony Williams at eighteen. (The latter, a drummer, began recording for the label in 1963, in Jackie McLean’s band, at seventeen.) The saxophonist on the twenty-four-year-old Bud Powell’s classic 1949 quintet date (the band was expressly called “Bud Powell’s Modernists”) was the eighteen-year-old Sonny Rollins.
Billy Higgins in a rehearsal for Andrew Hill’s “Dance with Death” session, New York City, October, 1968.
Hank Mobley at the “Reach Out” session, Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, January 19, 1968.
The names of many of the musicians may not have been known beyond the cognoscenti, but the prominence of the label and its associations helped to expand those ranks. Thelonious Monk’s first recordings as a leader came with Blue Note; John Coltrane recorded only one album, a historic one, “Blue Train,” there, in 1957 (and worked as a sideman on several other major Blue Note albums); the boldly modernistic pianists Herbie Nichols and Andrew Hill recorded a major body of work there. Other crucial modernist innovators were there, too, in the mid-sixties: Eric Dolphy recorded “Out to Lunch” at a key turn toward further extremes of the avant-garde months before his death, at thirty-six, in 1964; Cecil Taylor recorded two gloriously complex and explosive albums there; and Ornette Coleman recorded a spate of Blue Note albums, too (including one with his ten-year-old son, Denardo, as drummer).
Shirley Scott at Stanley Turrentine’s “A Chip Off the Old Block” session, Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, October 21, 1963.
Art Blakey at a rehearsal for the “Roots & Herbs” session, New York City, February, 1961.
John Coltrane at Sonny Clark’s “Sonny’s Crib” session, Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, New Jersey, September 1, 1957.
Horace Silver with Percy Heath (at left) at a rehearsal for Kenny Dorham’s “Afro-Cuban” session, the Village Vanguard, New York City, January, 1955.
Blue Note was, and is, also a business, and Lion and Wolff needed to sell records; not all the music was a part of the avant-garde. They also recorded music that was close to the R. & B. tradition—yet this, too, they recorded with enthusiasm and respect. They both noted and fostered the continuities between popular and intellectual black American music, including in their inspired mixing and matching among musicians for recording sessions, bringing younger and older musicians, more popular and more exploratory ones, together fruitfully. What’s more, even as Blue Note’s studio recordings (most done by the engineer Rudy Van Gelder, first in his parents’ living room, in Hackensack, New Jersey, then in his custom-designed studio in Englewood Cliffs—and Wolff’s photos display these singular spaces) helped to define an era, the label was also a pioneer of live-in-concert night-club recordings, which gave several artists (especially Art Blakey, Jimmy Smith, and Sonny Rollins) unusual and effective showcases. The musicians who recorded for Blue Note were working artists; their recordings were business for the label and jobs for them, and the fusion of their labor and their art meshes with Wolff and Lion’s fusion of their enterprise and their enthusiasm to create a catalogue, both sonic and visual, that’s a product of love on which the transmission of art, from generation to generation, depends.
Thelonious Monk at the Royal Roost, New York City, 1949.
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My subscribers and others have been asking me for some time to post the full film I made back in 1965–I first professional documentary–primetime television at that time. I was 22 years old. I had never really traveled outside of my home area of New England. Being with these wonderful people taken around by the extraordinary collector of talent, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, was one of the most memorable experiences of my life as a filmmaker. I know that some commentators will say that this is not bluegrass but mountain or old-time music. To me, the distinction is irrelevant. Bluegrass. Country. Mountain. Old time. The creative source is all the same. The wonderfully talented people of the Appalachian Mountains. This is not the entire film but a good part of it.
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A Woman’s Place: The Importance Of Mary Lou Williams’ Harlem Apartment
Tammy Kernodle
September 12, 201910:48 AM ET
Mary Lou Williams in 1942. In the 1930s and ’40s, her apartment on 63 Hamilton Terrace formed an important space in advancing the evolution of jazz and the survival of musicians.
Donaldson Collection/Getty Images
You won’t find Mary Lou Williams’ apartment on the historical register or visit it during one of the many tours that have economically revitalized Harlem. From the outside, 63 Hamilton Terrace looked like many of the brownstones that architecturally defined Harlem’s landscape. Inside, however, a generation of young artists met, woodshedded new music and etched out a progressive, radical agenda that would shift the music world off its axis and challenge listeners to rethink their sonic understandings of jazz.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Harlem was full of places that nightly served a menu of music, social freedom, kinetic and sexual energy. There was the Savoy Ballroom on Lenox Avenue between 140th and 141st Streets, which functioned as the birthplace of modern social dance culture and the site of the historic “battle of the bands.” The Apollo Theater on West 125th Street, where amateur performers tested their talents in front of unforgiving audiences. Minton’s Playhouse, Monroe’s Uptown House, Small’s Paradise and the other small nightclubs that jazz musicians rushed to after their regular paying gigs. While all of these spaces shaped important aspects of jazz’s history, they also perpetuated the notion that paradigm-shifting experimentation was male-centered, cultivated in isolation or only occurred in these public spaces. Mary Lou Williams’ apartment on 63 Hamilton Terrace was as important as any of these spaces in advancing the evolution of jazz and the survival of musicians.
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Most of us have heard the cliché, “a woman’s place is in the home.” This axiom gained popularity in the post-war years in counter-response to the overwhelming economic and social freedom women experienced during the World War II and the emergence of the women’s movement in the late 1960s. The phrase originated with the Greek playwright Aeschylus in 467 B.C. In the play “Seven Against Thebes” Aeschylus wrote, “Let the woman stay at home and hold their peace.” In 1732, Thomas Fuller declared, in Gnomologia: Adagies and Proverbs, “a woman is to be from her house three times: when she is christened, married, and buried.” The spread of this belief, especially within the framework of respectability politics, led to the home or domestic sphere being equated with femininity. For many women, especially middle-and-upper class white women, the home became the space of deferred dreams and muted voices. But for black women, the home and domestic sphere represented so much more.
For poor and working-class women, the home provided alternatives to agriculture work and prostitution. Home laundries and domestic work provided these women with consistent work and wages, even if they at times exposed women to economic and sexual exploitation. Despite the limitations, this type of work did provide many black women with the means to acquire their own homes. Home ownership represented physical and social stability in the black community. In addition to providing shelter from the racialized violence inflicted upon black families, the home was one of the primary spaces outside of the Black Church, and black social clubs and Greek-letter organizations, where black women could embody the conventional notions of femininity and respectability. Crucially, the homes of black women also nested a black cultural revolution that extended to the literary, visual and performance arts.
The development of black women’s intellectual acuity first occurred in the home. It was in living rooms and at kitchen tables that black women transferred the knowledge that was key to their survival and negotiation of white and male-centered public spaces. Knowledge transference also extended to the work of cultivating and preserving different forms of cultural expression. In time, the poetry, art, dance and music they created and nurtured migrated beyond the walls of these homes, entered mainstream America’s consciousness and radically redefined expressive culture.
In the years immediately following World War I, a revolution rooted in the ideology of racial vindication and uplift was gestated in the homes of black women like A’Lelia Walker, the daughter of the first self-made black millionaire Madame C. J. Walker. Her brownstones on West 136th Street, near Lenox Avenue, became home to the “Dark Tower,” a salon that hosted the young writers, artists, musicians, civil rights leaders and intellectuals who embodied what we know as the Harlem Renaissance. Writers Zora Neale Hurston, Bruce Nugent and Langston Hughes, along with artist Aaron Douglas, blues woman Alberta Hunter and composer/music critic Nora Holt, frequently participated in the poetry readings, musical performances and art exhibits that marked the Dark Tower’s short history. While working the black vaudeville circuit called the TOBA, a teenaged Mary Lou Williams visited Harlem. While I have founded no evidence that Williams attended any of A’Lelia Walker’s soirées, I have no doubt she would have heard about these grand affairs.
Walker’s cultivation of the black cultural arts through a mirroring of 19th century salon culture became one of the central ways in which black women reflected and promoted the New Negro aesthetic. In Chicago, music educator and organist Estelle C. Bonds hosted an array of writers, artists, performers and composers in her home on Wabash Avenue. Years later her only child, composer Margaret Bonds, recounted how her childhood home had, at one point, hosted every living black composer during the 1920s and 1930s. Helen Walker-Hill illustrates in the book From Spirituals to Symphonies: African-American Women Composers and their Music how Estelle Bonds’ home, like that of A’Lelia Walker, represented many different things to the black migrant community of Chicago. It was one-part hostel, one-part soup kitchen and one-part music school. What was most central to its legacy is how it hosted activity that revolutionized the Depression-era American concert hall. When composer Florence Price could not afford to hire a copyist to produce orchestral parts of her first symphonic work, Bonds called every literate musician she knew on the South Side, and they copied the parts at her kitchen table. This work would go on to win the Wanamaker Prize in 1932 and become the first symphony by a black woman to be performed by a major American orchestra. When black concert artists and composers wanted to create an infrastructure that would finance the training of new artists, and promote the music of their peers, they met at Bonds’ house and created the Chicago Music Association. A little more than two decades later, Mary Lou Williams embodied the same type of energy with her mentorship of the generation of musicians that would create bebop.
In 1943, after spending almost a decade performing and touring with Andy Kirk’s swing band Clouds of Joy, Mary Lou Williams settled in Harlem. The previous two years had marked a period of instability for the pianist-arranger, as the camaraderie with the male musicians that defined her early years with the Kirk band had given way to money issues, personality clashes and sexism. In 1942, during a gig in Washington, D.C., an unhappy and physically-drained Williams left Kirk’s band and returned momentarily to her hometown of Pittsburgh. After an unsuccessful attempt to relaunch her career with a combo that included a young Art Blakey, Williams married trumpeter Harold “Shorty” Baker, and in early 1943 she joined Baker as he toured with Duke Ellington’s band. It was during this period that Williams first wrote for the Ellington band. Her re-working of Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies,”became a feature for the trumpet section that she called “Trumpets, No End.” Several years would pass before the band recorded the song, largely because of the labor strike the American Federation of Musicians enacted against the recording industry between 1942 and 1944. The marriage was disastrous: Baker became physically abusive not long after the two exchanged vows. Despite this, Williams tried to salvage the relationship. These efforts led to her moving into the small apartment at 63 Hamilton Terrace. It is not clear if Baker ever visited the Harlem flat, but for almost three decades the apartment would serve as her home.
In addition to marking a new phase in her personal life, the move to Hamilton Terrace also marked a new chapter in her professional career. Mary Lou Williams settled into the role of solo jazz pianist in a music scene that was dramatically changing. New York in 1943 was very different place from the Harlem she experienced first in the 1920s while touring with TOBA and later in the mid-1930s when the Kirk band played the Savoy Ballroom. Harlem was no longer the center of the city’s nightlife. The fetishizing of black culture that led many to trek up to Harlem was in decline. Instead, jazz patrons and tourists now frequented the nightclubs that lined 52nd Street. However, the music continued to play in Harlem and dancers continued the sojourn to the Savoy Ballroom. Harlem was also changing socially and politically. As Farah Jasmine Griffin discusses in Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II, the neighborhood was quickly becoming a provincial outpost of a larger progressive political movement that aligned itself with the pro-black American Double-V campaign of the war years. This political energy propelled the fight for equality in the decade that followed World War II and infected not only Harlem’s citizenry, but also its jazz community. The alignment of jazz with the left-wing Popular Front shifted the music from simply being popular culture to resistance culture. Mary Lou Williams, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and the young musicians who would come to call themselves beboppers would embodied this consciousness of protest and resistance by rejecting jazz conventions.
As early as 1941, this small group of young musicians began deconstructing the musical foundations of jazz during the jam sessions held at Monroe’s Uptown House and Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem. As Americans sought a diversion from the Great Depression and eventually World War II, the popularity of jazz and its dance culture exploded. Beboppers believed that the consumerist culture that the big band idiom generated throughout the 1930s and 1940s had led to creative and musical dilution of jazz. They had watched as the black bandleaders and bands that had defined the earliest aspects of that culture had been pushed into the margins of the mainstream scene as white bands, who garnered more dollars and support, were coded as emblems of democracy, nationalism and youthful exuberance. During their late-night jam sessions, these musicians devised a response to the “whitening” of jazz culture. They shifted the consciousness of the jazz musician by rejecting the homogeneity promoted through Swing. The emphasis of the collective over the individual was central to the big band idiom. Beboppers disrupted this narrative through their dress, which shifted away from matching suits, to an eclectic style that influenced ’50s hipster culture (e.g. berets, tortoiseshell glasses, goatees, etc.) This break with swing also extended to the emphasis they placed on self-actualization through the cultivation of the individual sound identity. During jam sessions, musicians developed the riffs, nuances and repertory that distinguished their individual quest for artistry from the previous generation of jazz musicians. Musically and ideologically, they professed to be modernists, which was reflected in their use of advanced and complex harmonic and structural devices. They studied, borrowed from and emulated the progressive approaches that framed early 20th century concert music. They also shunned the simplicity of the big band arrangement, deciding instead to deconstruct jazz conventions by decentralizing the melody and placing the focus on intricate and harmonically complex improvisations. Their political consciousness also aligned with this sonic radicalness. This generation embodied the radical blackness of the New Negro aesthetic without the elitist sensibilities that accompanied it. For most, even within the jazz community, the persona, attitude and musical sounds purveyed by this generation of musician was disconcerting, radical and transgressive. But Williams heard and saw something different.
Mary Lou Williams discovered this musical circle soon after moving to Harlem. Nightly, after performing at the influential nightclub Café Society, she would trek uptown to Minton’s Playhouse on West 118th Street. There she met trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, drummers Kenny Clarke and Max Roach, trombonist J.J. Johnson and others. She became reacquainted with pianist Thelonious Monk, whom she had met in Kansas City in 1934 while he was working with a female evangelist. Despite the fact that she was nearly a decade older than most of them, Mary Lou Williams and these musicians had much in common. They all had risen through the ranks of local or territorial bands, and by 1942 had reached the level of the national or acclaimed dance bands. They had endured the brutal tours through Jim Crow America that sustained black bands during the 1930s. In Harlem, they fell into the company of others who shared similar musical interests and ambitions in the after-hours clubs and jam sessions. What strongly linked Williams and these musicians was their spirit of experimentation. The harmonies and structural changes the boppers experimented with were nothing new for the pianist. During her years in Kansas City, Williams played what she called “zombie music.” This style, according to her, consisted of “mainly of ‘outré’ chords, new ‘out’ harmonies based on ‘off’ sounds.” Williams and Kirk argued consistently about use of complex harmonies in her arrangements. Despite remaining with the Kirk band for over a decade, Williams felt creatively limited by his desire for commercial stardom
As her musical and personal bond with this young cadre of musicians grew, Williams’ apartment became another space for personal and musical engagement, the setting for a modern-day “salon” that paralleled 19th-century French musical circles. Each night Williams hosted the musicians as they sat around discussing music, listening to recordings and writing new tunes. “It was like the ’30s,”she remarked years later. “Musicians helped each other and didn’t just think of themselves. Monk, Tadd Dameron, Kenny Dorham, Bud Powell, Aaron Bridgers, Billy Strayhorn, plus various disc jockeys and newspapermen, would be in and out of my place at all hours and we’d really ball.”
The apartment was modest in décor, consisting of two twin beds, seating for a few people, file cabinets that housed correspondence and musical scores, a record player and a Baldwin upright piano. The modesty of this interior, however, belied the creative energy that pervaded this space. Williams had a white rug on the living room floor that the group would sit on. Each would take turns playing because, as Williams recounted later, “most of them needed inspiration.” Some wrote new tunes during these moments. Others brought compositions they had worked on beforehand, seeking her opinion and help in developing these ideas further. More than any of the other musicians that gathered at 63 Hamilton Terrace, Thelonious Monk was particularly drawn to Williams. He valued her opinion greatly and often camped out at her house. In a series of articles chronicling her life and musical experiences that ran in the 1950s in the jazz periodical Melody Maker, Williams wrote “Monk would write a tune and he’d come here and play it for two or three months. I’d say, ‘Why do you keep playing the same thing over and over?’ He’d say, ‘I’m trying to see if it’s a hit. It’ll stay with you if it’s a hit.” She also grew close to pianist Bud Powell and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. Her friendship with Powell extended to her being hired by club owners to ensure he fulfilled his contractual obligations. Williams and Gillespie would share a life-long friendship that was central to her return to the jazz scene following a self-imposed three-year hiatus in the mid-1950s.
The impact of the intellectual activity that took place at Williams’ apartment is measured not only in the musical performances of this generation of musicians, but also Williams’ own work during this period. During the mid-to-late 1940s Williams entered a period of considerable experimentation that stretched beyond the performative aspects of jazz and the conventional spaces it was heard. She entered an exclusive recording agreement with Asch Records, which produced some important recordings that mark the evolution of jazz piano and aligned the progression of her sonic identity with the modern jazz aesthetic. Her composition “In the Land of Oo0-Bla-Dee,” written for and recorded by Dizzy Gillespie, reflected how Williams merged the bebop aesthetic and the big band idiom. Zodiac Suite, a series of compositions inspired by jazz musicians born under particular zodiac signs, represented how Williams was influenced by 19th-century Romanticism. This work stretched beyond the harmonic nuances of jazz to include the structural devices of the Romantic era symphonic poem. Williams’ continuous reworking of the composition in various performance configurations—from solo piano to small combo to setting for chamber orchestra—reflected her vision of jazz extending beyond conventional spaces and sounds.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Williams’ apartment once again was central to the nurturing of a generation of musicians as Williams attempted to prevent the proliferation of drugs and the subsequent decimation of the jazz community. Following her own spiritual and physical breakdown in Paris in 1954, she returned to America and entered a period of spiritual transformation and converted to Catholicism. After experiencing the death of Charlie Parker and witnessing the deterioration of Bud Powell, Williams decided to intervene. In addition to taking musicians to church, she turned her one-bedroom apartment into a one-woman rehabilitation center. 63 Hamilton Terrace became a halfway house where Williams detoxified, fed, clothed and found work for addicted musicians. The worst cases she housed in a room down the hall that she rented cheaply from a neighbor. Musicians usually stayed a couple of weeks and, when possible, left clean, sober and with employment. Sometimes they returned in worse shape than before, but many got back on their feet, resuming their lives and careers. She funded her efforts through royalty checks and donations from other musicians like Dizzy and Lorraine Gillespie. The home that provided an intellectual and artistic sanctuary for a generation of musicians during the 1940s became a space of protection and healing for those battling their addictions and fleeing criminal prosecution. Williams continued this work for a number of years and had hopes to build a facility that would be funded through her Bel Canto Foundation. Unfortunately, this never materialized, but Williams continued her work, financing her efforts for years through the operation of a thrift store in Harlem.
While the cultural and social history that surround the homes of A’Lelia Walker and Estelle C. Bonds during the height of the Negro Renaissance have yet to be fully explored, the cultural importance of Mary Lou’s apartment became part of jazz musicians’ lore. It is important to note that 63 Hamilton Terrace was not the only home to nurture experimental waves of jazz performance and composition during the last half of the 20th century. In the years immediately following the death of her husband John in 1967, Alice Coltrane also opened her home to a generation of musicians who challenged the musical and social contexts of jazz. In this case, Coltrane used the recording studio John built in their Dix Hills, Long Island home to collaborate with the young musicians who had worked closely with him in progressing avant-garde jazz. During the late 1960s and early 1970s Alice recorded a series of albums in that studio that positioned her as one of the progressive voices of the second wave of avant-garde jazz and the genre of liturgical jazz. As with Williams, the progression of Coltrane’s sonic identity occurred after a major lifestyle change that correlated with an emerging wave of musical experimentation tied to radical forms of black consciousness and sound that polarized the jazz community.
The cultural histories of the homes of A’Lelia Walker, Estelle Bonds, Mary Lou Williams and Alice Coltrane illustrate how economic stability and personal agency allowed black women to become important agents in the progression of black intellectual culture and peripherally in the long struggle for racial equality in America. When we tune our ears to hear beyond clichés, gendered expectations, social conventions and canonic markers, we will discover that the real place of a woman is not only in the home, but also within the groove.
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In the early 19th century, Francis Johnson was the entertainer of choice for elite Philadelphia society. A free African American man, Johnson was a bandleader, musician, and composer whose music brought together influences that would go on to pave the way for ragtime, jazz, and “pops” orchestras. Yet his name, like that of so many black American innovators, has been largely forgotten by history.
The Library Company of Philadelphia is telling several of those innovators’ stories in its current exhibition “From Negro Pasts to Afro-Futures: Black Creative Re-Imaginings,” on display through Oct. 18. The sheet music for one of Johnson’s compositions is on display in the show, and his story will come into the spotlight on Friday with a lecture and performance by musician and scholar Brian Farrow.
“Francis Johnson was at the nexus of what became American music,” Farrow said over the phone last week from the Yukon, where he was wrapping up a vacation. “He took early dance hall music, English ballads and operatic pieces, and made them his own, [fusing them into] an American idiom.
“Johnson influenced a lot of people that would take these music styles into the later half of the 19th century,” he said, “until we connect to the beginning of ragtime.”
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Old-time music has long been a passion for Farrow, who played in traditional jazz bands as far back as high school and later worked with Dom Flemons, cofounder of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. He’s also a member of the hip-hop bluegrass band Gangstagrass. While researching early music, Farrow discovered Johnson and immediately recognized the relevance of this obscure figure.
“I hope to contextualize his work and explain why I think his history is important for us today,” he said of his plans for the Library Company program. “We can make him a part of our American music tradition.”
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LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA
Songsheet from Francis Johnson’s “A Collection of New Cotillions”
Johnson’s music makes up one part of the story told by “From Negro Pasts,” which displays historical artifacts to help relate the way that black artists have told their own stories throughout American history. The exhibition includes drawings, poems, speeches, love letters, songs, and more from the Library Company’s extensive holdings, touted as the most important collection of African American literature and history before 1900.
Performer to the queen
Johnson achieved a remarkable level of success, not just in Philadelphia but across the country. He led one of the era’s most popular bands, performing at society balls for Philadelphia’s upper classes as well as for military regiments and at African American churches.
Johnson became the first black man to tour past the Appalachian Mountains and was the first American bandleader to tour Europe, where his ensemble performed before Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace.
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Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens, program director of African American history for the Library Company, compared Johnson to another name rescued from the shadows of history, Solomon Northup. Now famous as the author of Twelve Years a Slave, Northup also worked as a traveling musician whose artistry allowed him access to elite white society.
“There was a niche field of African American male performers who could in some ways wiggle around the color line,” Cooper Owens explained. “It wasn’t that they could escape antiblack racism, but because of their exceptionality in performing they were able to do things as musicians that had been closed to most black people.”
LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA
This 1682 Ethiopian manuscript, “The Homilies of Michael,” is also part of the Library Company of Philadelphia’s exhibition ““From Negro Pasts to Afro-Futures: Black Creative Re-Imaginings.”
In a way, Cooper Owens continued, the Library Company’s African American History program echoes those accomplishments, bringing neglected histories to light in an unexpected context.
“It isn’t lost on me that the Library Company, [an institution] founded by Benjamin Franklin, is a very patrician and elite space,” she said. “Historically the Library Company had not been a bastion of blackness, yet the program in African American history has become its anchor program because of its large holdings.
“Brian Farrow is really following in the footsteps of Francis Johnson, bringing that kind of showmanship, roots music, history, and education to an audience that had not always been as receptive to privileging black people and black history.”
CONCERT AND TALK
Francis Johnson at the Roots of American Music, with Brian Farrow
5:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 13, at the Library Company of Philadelphia, 1314 Locust St. Free with registration.
The exhibition “From Negro Pasts to Afro-Futures” continues through Oct. 18.
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Jim’s skill at getting the word out to the right media in the right way at the right time has resulted in my enjoying audiences ranging from a full house to standing room only. I recommend him highly.
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