Victory Stride: The Symphonic Music of
James P. Johnson; The Concordia Orchestra; Marin Alsop, Conductor; Music Masters 67140 (1994)
James Price Johnson (1894-1955) is featured at AfriClassical.com
Marin Alsop
My first encounter with the name James P. Johnson was a fleeting reference to the composer in a liner note for a Gershwin
recording, but it was enough to pique my curiosity. I contacted Robert
Kimball, the author of the notes, and he gave me some intriguing
background on Johnson.
In addition to composing the singular
piece of music that came to symbolize the 1920s in America, "The
Charleston," Johnson aspired to compose music for symphony orchestra and
had actually written several orchestral pieces that were premiered at
Carnegie Hall in the early 1940s. I was beyond eager to get my hands on
that music, but Kimball was quite discouraging. He told me that all of
the parts and scores were long gone; there was no existing recording of
the Carnegie Hall event, and there was no chance that I could find that
music. He said many people had tried unsuccessfully over the years. Little did he know that "can't" is my four-letter motivator!
I
became obsessed with James P. Johnson, and my quest to find, restore
and revive his orchestral music led me — along with my dear friend and
willing collaborator Leslie Stifelman (currently music director of Chicago on Broadway) — on a six-year odyssey in search of Johnsons' long-lost orchestral music.
Finding A Jazz Master's Lost Orchestral Music
My passion for that unique period in America's musical history,
when popular music and "serious" music collided and cross-pollinated to
create a whole new art form, drove me forward on my quest. The
possibility of discovering a missing musical link between Scott Joplin and Duke Ellington was too exciting a prospect to resist at least trying.
Johnson
had big aspirations to write "serious" symphonic music and join the
ranks of Gershwin. But being African-American in 1930s America meant
that you could only compose for popular venues, so Johnson wrote
numerous hit shows for black Broadway.
Johnson's piano roll of his hit tune "Carolina Shout" became
the measuring stick for every up-and-coming piano player. Duke
Ellington learned his fingerings from feeling along as Johnson's piano
roll played in slow motion, and Johnson himself blew everyone away in
"cutting contests" (the virtuosic piano-playing marathons) up until Art Tatum emerged on the scene.
Fortunately for Leslie and me, we teamed up with Scott Brown, a
medical student at Yale who was writing a biography on Johnson and
willingly joined our investigative hunt for his music. It was truly a
detective's challenge, especially in the days before the Internet.
Together we visited all of Johnson's surviving relatives, and eventually
gained their trust enough to be shown a treasure trove of memorabilia
stored in the attic of his daughter, Arceola Glover, in Riverside,
Calif.
After years of searching, the moment when she brought
out stacks of sheet music wrapped in plastic, preserved like an old
photo album, was unbelievable. We gently pawed through the yellowed
pages. This was the long-lost music from that Carnegie Hall concert!
While the music clearly needed attention — and some was obviously
missing — we could see its greatness and understood even more profoundly
the enormous talent of this great American creator.
We
painstakingly restored the scores and recopied all of the music in
preparation for performances at Lincoln Center, under the auspices of
the Lincoln Center jazz program at Avery Fisher Hall, and a recording
for the MusicMasters label (now reissued
on Nimbus). We have made all of the music available to orchestras for
performance and are incredibly proud to have played a part in preserving
this important piece of our shared American legacy.
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