A scene from the film "Green Book." (Universal Pictures)
By Anthony Weller
Feb 03, 2019
The
African American pianist Don Shirley wouldn’t be surprised that the
country he loved was embracing a screen version of his prickly persona,
“Green Book,” rather than grappling with the questions raised by his
music.
I
cold-called Donald — “I’m not a Don; that’s a stage name” — in 1980,
and for a few years, we were friends. I’d just graduated from Yale and
moved to Manhattan to seek my fortune. I was studying composition.
I’d
discovered his music by accident, while haunting a used record shop.
That solo album, recorded in 1955, was one of his best: an improvised
sonata on the myth of Orpheus in the Underworld. I was compelled by the
Stravinsky blurb. (“His virtuosity is worthy of gods.”) The music, by
turns lavish and austere, thrilled me.
Donald
lived in a “studio” above Carnegie Hall. The place was vast, a
silk-and-antique extravaganza adorned with candles and bric-a-brac, a
temple erected around a Steinway grand. (He was evicted just before his
death in 2013, after 50 years.)
When
I met him, Donald, then 53, had a shaved head and sinister-looking
beard, but he spoke softly and regally, an erudite professor gesturing
with agile fingers. Three doctorates, eight languages. He rarely stopped
moving. He never stopped talking.
It’s
difficult to imagine the younger and skinnier man of 1962, on tour in
the Deep South with a tough Brooklyn chauffeur, as portrayed in the
movie. Donald never spoke of this to me. But he often talked about the
frustrations of being black. When I’d call and ask what he was up to,
he’d invariably answer: “There are only two things I have to do: Stay
black and die.”
Race
was never far from his mind. “It is only in his music, which Americans
are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their
understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his
story,” Donald wrote on a record jacket in 1961. “Americans who evade,
so far as possible, all genuine experiences, have therefore no way of
assessing the experiences of others and no way of establishing
themselves in relation to any way of life which is not their own. Thus
the idea of my music can be presented without fear of contradiction,
since no American has the knowledge or authority to contest it and no
Negro has the voice.”
He
grew up the son of Jamaican parents in Pensacola, Fla. His father was
an Episcopal minister. His mother, a teacher, died when he was 9. He had
three brothers, all of whom became doctors.
Donald
was a classical-music prodigy. He declared his presence in 1945, at 18,
with the Tchaikovsky Concerto and the Boston Pops. America wasn’t ready
for a black concert pianist, even one represented by Sol Hurok. He was
told to go into jazz or pop.
His
versions of standards tended to merge idioms. His “I Cover the
Waterfront” contains passages from Ravel’s “Une Barque sur l'Ocean,” his
“I Understand” is built on a Schubert impromptu. He called his versions
“transcriptions,” but they’re more like sympathetic re-compositions.
Donald
had an uneasy relationship with jazz. He often decried jazz musicians’
ignorance of classical music, and recounted with glee the time he played
a Stravinsky prelude for Miles Davis, who committed the unpardonable
sin of not recognizing it.
Though
Donald felt the concert stage too stuffy, he had a horror of the
informal jazz club. “I don’t want someone to slap me on the back and
say, ‘Hey, baby!’ ” At the keyboard, he often did a comic imitation of
the latest hotshot.
Donald’s
own trio consisted of piano, bass and cello. Each player’s part was
written, not extemporized. Indeed, Donald argued there was no
improvisation in jazz, since everybody agreed beforehand on the
harmonies.
He
had nothing against improvisation, however. “I improvise very well,”
he’d say. And he did: I once brought him a theme and watched him
improvise a four-voice fugue after subtly improving the original.
At heart Donald was an organist, with one foot in the Baroque. His “Lullaby of Birdland”
treats the melody as a fugue. He conceived of his trio as one enormous
string instrument. He was writing chamber music. This is evident in his
version of “I Can’t Get Started” by Vernon Duke (born Vladimir
Dukelsky), which sounds like missing pages from a Rachmaninoff piano
trio.
I
never found out the source of his prodigious bravura technique. He
never discussed his teachers, though he’d done a long seminar with “Mr.
Rachmaninoff.” Perhaps, like all virtuosi, he simply won it with hard
work.
At
the height of his career, from the mid-’50s to mid-’60s, Donald played
300 concerts a year. When I knew him, he was down to a handful.
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