Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran
(Fadi Kheir)
May 15, 2019
By Howard Reich
In our popular mythology, the Great Migration of African-Americans
from the rural South to the industrial North carries a romantic glow.
Didn’t
this massive movement of humanity, after all, nurture jazz, blues and
gospel music in several cities, none more than Chicago?
But to pianist and MacArthur Fellow Jason Moran and mezzo-soprano
Alicia Hall Moran, his wife, other layers of the narrative have been
forgotten, obscured or simply not acknowledged in the first place.
Which
is why they’ve created “Two Wings: The Music of Black America in
Migration,” which has its Chicago premiere May 24 in Orchestra Hall at
Symphony Center.
“We wanted our ‘Two Wings’ to show the calculated flight, the degree
of calculation for the terror that was inflicted on black people, the
great energy that their fleeing created, the holes that their departures
left in the South,” says Alicia Hall Moran.
And they wanted to
show that as African-American populations built new lives up North, they
also found “new conflict in Chicago, new conflicts in New York,” adds
the singer.
To tell these stories, the Morans have created a
program of classics and originals to be performed by them and
colleagues, including the Imani Winds (which will play Jason Moran’s
four-movement chamber work “Cane”), Chicago’s Pastor Smokie Norful and
others.
But the music tells only part of the story. In addition,
the Morans have featured a different narrator in each city where “Two
Wings” has taken flight, with author Isabel Wilkerson, for instance,
having drawn on her book “The Warmth of Other Suns” to tell the tale at
New York’s Carnegie Hall (which commissioned “Two Wings”).
In Chicago, another distinguished author, Margo Jefferson, will provide a different text.
“The
last thing Jason and I wanted to do was to come to any storied
institution, such as Chicago Symphony (Center) … and not be armed with
great works and the eye of journalism, criticism and lyricism,” says
Alicia Hall Moran.
As for music, “Jason and I decided we really
wanted to veer away from the idea of only celebrating the hit records of
every era,” she adds. “Things that actually have great value – but now
we’re in 2019. Anything that we thought we’d seen before, we’re trying
to find an angle on it, so that we can teach ourselves something new.”
Thus
the program takes on a somewhat different form in each venue, to better
reflect that city’s Great Migration narrative, and spans a wide
stylistic reach. In Chicago, listeners will hear everything from Moran’s
aforementioned chamber work “Cane” and Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog
Jr.’s “God Bless the Child” to Pastor Norful’s “Dear God” and the
spiritual “Two Wings,” which gives the evening its title.
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