Victory Stride: The Symphonic Music of
James P. Johnson
The Concordia Orchestra
Marin Alsop, Conductor
Music Masters 67140 (1994)
Dominique-René de Lerma:
This final survey served more as a
reminder of Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, James P. Johnson, Mary Lou Williams,
Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn,
and Nat King Cole. What we need, and Bill can do it, is a counterpart to Exploring
music. Everyone lauds jazz as a distinctive Black American musical
language, but in reality it is poorly represented in sober, historical terms.
Take Ellington, as a major example. Not
only was he an innovator in orchestration. We have many examples of parallel
dominant sevenths with Debussy. How did Ellington add that to his vocabulary
in the first full measure of Sophisticated lady? Zeitgeist? Billy
Strayhorn? La cathédral engloutie? And his use of the ballad form
(AABA), now expanded to AABABA, with the short voyage to a distant key in the
bridge (B), in a form rather alien to the spiritual (despite Burleigh's Deep
river), which Dvořák used in the slow movement of the New world
symphony? Serious listeners would welcome a penetrating discussion.
This two-week survey has ended with some
other unfinished business, as Bill readily admitted. There is a whole world of
the spiritual, much older than jazz, from the Fisk Jubilee Singers, John Work,
Carl Diton, William Dawson, to contemporary reflections with Olly Wilson,
Charles Lloyd, Undine Smith Moore, and John Daniels Carter, and our Black
college choral groups. We enjoyed ten hours without mention of Primous
Fountain, Blind Tom, David Baker, Eubie Blake, Will Marion Cook, or Ella
Fitzgerald. How welcome were the voices of Leontyne Price, William Warfield,
Kathy Battle, and Robert Sims. Now what about Martina Arroyo, Grace Bumbry,
Sir William White, Gloria Davy, George Shirley, Thomas Young, Daryll Taylor,
Denyce Graves? There can be days dedicated to Aaron Dworkin and his Sphinx
Organization winners and ensembles, to the Ritz Chamber Players and Imani
Winds, to Venezuela's sistema, to Sanford Allen, Leon Bates, Anthony
Elliott, Antoinette Handy, William Nyaho.
The program's target was the African
American, so it was a luxury to hear Saint-Georges and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor,
but there remains that new dynamic world of the African composer, from Enoch
Sontoga, to Fela Sowande, Joshua Uzoigwe, Akin Euba, J. H. Kwabena Nketia, Fred
Onouvwerosuoke. And we have major figures from Cuba: Amadeo Roldán and Leo
Brouwer, for starts. This finale ended touchingly with Ray Nance playing
Ellington's Come Sunday and Langston Hughes memories of rivers.
This is offered not as a complaint, but
as a stimulus with very deep gratitude and a touch of divine dissatisfaction
(God, it's a bit chilly here in heaven. Could we raise the thermostat a
bit?). It's just that this is a huge and wonderful world, filled with known
and unknown bards, all of whom had what Leontyne Price called, "the luxury
of being Black."
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Dominique-René
de Lerma
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