'Frances Walker: A Miraculous Journey - Coleridge-Taylor's 24 Negro Melodies' is New Short Documentary by Charles Kaufmann, The Longfellow Chorus

[Charles Kaufmann: Frances Walker, as she appears in my new short film, Frances Walker: A Miraculous Journey - Coleridge-Taylor's 24 Negro Melodies.]

The Longfellow Chorus Portland, Maine May 9, 2014

"I had a problem years ago with communication. . . and  I thought, 'How do you get people. . . involved?' And I  found, you have to be involved. The performer has to be  involved. It's like the pot is up here, and when the pot is  ready to boil over, that's when the audience feels  something -- when it's your emotions up to the top and  boiling over. When I play, I have to put a tight rein on  myself because I get emotional. . . ." —Frances Walker, from my new short documentary,  Frances Walker: A Miraculous Journey - Coleridge-Taylor's  24 Negro Melodies. Frances Walker Shares Her Story on Film: Recording Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's 24 Negro  Melodies in 1979 Charles Kaufmann: I have just completed a new 15-minute  documentary compiled from my interview last week  with pianist Frances Walker in her Oberlin, Ohio,  home. You can view the complete 15-minute film  here: Frances Walker: A Miraculous Journey -  Coleridge-Taylor's 24 Negro Melodies. The film  contains a number of excerpts from Walker's  groundbreaking 1979 recording of Coleridge- Taylor's 24 piano miniatures, a collection itself  groundbreaking when it was first published in  Boston in 1905. Candid, humorous, moving, and ultimately  inspiring, Frances Walker, in her gentle,  musical voice, expresses her views on  Coleridge-Taylor and speaks out about her 90  years of personal history, expanding upon the  narrative in her autobiography, A Miraculous  Journey (2006).  Shortly after I met Frances Walker-Slocum at  Oberlin College last February during the  screening my film, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor  and His Music in America, 1900-1912, it  occurred to me that her voice was missing from  the film. Having been born and raised in  Washington, DC, in the 1920s, having begun  classical piano at a very young age in the same  tight-knit Washington community that welcomed  SC-T twenty years before, having made the first- ever recording of Coleridge-Taylor's 24 Negro  Melodies -- setting the standard for the next 35  years -- and having nurtured numerous  performers and composers and advocated for  African-American fine arts, Frances Walker owns  a remarkable part of the Coleridge-Taylor in  America story. Frances Walker's narrative now joins the narrative  of the other experts in my Coleridge-Taylor  documentary and spins off into a new  documentary of its own, (to be expanded upon at  a later date from material now on film). Thanks in  no small part to cameraman John Cummings, of  Cleveland, Ohio, who worked with me on the  project.