Valerie Coleman
In their CD debut released by Cedille Records, Portraits: Works for Flute, Clarinet & Piano, the McGill/McHale Trio sets out with a lofty and time-honored artistic tradition: to create a lasting impression of personal identity.
The naming of Portraits is more than just a quotation the CD’s central work, Portraits of Langston, by Valerie Coleman; Portraits reflects the McGill/McHale Trio’s personal philosophy for the album as a whole. The group is comprised of McGill brothers Demarre, flute, and Anthony,
clarinet—historic figures in American classical music as two African
Americans to first hold principle positions in several top orchestras.
They are joined by the Irish pianist Michael McHale,
and together the trio has produced a strongly autobiographical
recording. In an interview with Cedille Records, Anthony McGill points
out that “[Portraits] shows a lot of our characters, our personalities,
our histories and our roots.”
As classical musicians are trained to execute and embody a composer’s
intentions above all else, making a recording that embodies the
player’s own personalities, histories, and roots is no easy or obvious
task. However, the McGill McHale Trio is able to make many obvious
identity connections through their repertoire choices, which range from
old Irish folk tunes to commissioning a new work from Chris Rogerson
(a Curtis alum, like both McGill brothers). Other connections are less
self-evident but equally strong, like the pervasive use of various types
of non-classical music. Take Paul Schoenfield’s Sonatina for Flute, Clarinet and Piano,
which prominently features the Civil-War American folk song, “When
Johnny Comes Marching Home Again” (also known as “The Ants Go Marching
One By One”), or Coleman’s Portraits of Langston, which uses a gamut of styles with strong American roots, from jazz to swing to African spirituals.
On the subject of identity, what stands out most on this album is Coleman’s Portraits of Langston.
Comprised of six vignettes inspired by a specific poem by Langston
Hughes, Coleman prefaces each movement with a reading of Hughes’
corresponding poem, performed on this record by Mahershala Ali. By
juxtaposing poem and song, Coleman makes connecting the music to Hughes’
evocative imagery easy; each movement has a clear character take-away,
from the light, purity of “Helen Keller,” to the playful sparring of “Le
grand duc mambo.”
At her best, Coleman utilizes specific techniques and timbres of each
instrument to convey a particular and memorable image from Hughes’
poems in an unusual way: the low, slow oscillating clarinet sounds like
the “low slow beating of the tom-toms,” or the jazzy piano that
carelessly swings and improvises in response Hughes’ direction, “Play
that thing,/Jazz band!” Coleman’s writing is often playful and fresh—the
groovy back-and-forth between flute and clarinet in the “Le grand duc
mambo” shows the absurdity of the brothel-brawl described in Hughes’
poem. In this series of specific and well-crafted vignettes, Portraits uncovers the vast range of characters and qualities that a flute-clarinet-piano trio can take on.
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