Marilyn Crispell: Jazz Pianist (Interviewed by Jefferson Hansen)

Marilyn Crispell is widely considered one of the leading contemporary jazz pianists and composers. Her reach is tremendous. She can coax extraordinary beauty out of standards such as "You Don't Know What Love Is" or Coltrane's "Dear Lord" by often locating pockets and eddies in the tune that allow for tremendous elaboration while still staying true to the tune. On her own compositions, Crispell has often been much more explosive, playing pounding rhythmic counterpoint opposite cascades of runs up and down the keyboard. Since 1996, on her recordings for ECM, she has explored a more contemplative side, one that emphasizes space, interiority, and quietness. During the 80's Crispell was a member of Anthony Braxton's quartet. She has also played with such major jazz luminaries as Irene Schweizer, Barry Guy, Evan Parker, Reggie Workman, Noelle Leandre and many, many others. The interview begins with a discussion about her cat. [If you would like to listen to a rather rough-sounding audio version of the interview, click on the title above. The entire interview is transcribed below.]

What is the name of your cat?

My cat's name is Freddy.

How long have you owned him?

I wouldn't say I own him. I would say that he appeared at my door full grown about 8 or 9 years ago.

People can find this out in different spots, but I find it interesting that you spent much of your career making money as a hostess in a restaurant.

That was very short lived. At the time I was living down the street from a French restaurant. And that was only for one season in a town just outside of Woodstock, New York.

What drew you to Woodstock as a place to live?

There used to be a school here called the Creative Music School, and it was run by two German jazz musicians, Carl and Ingrid Berger. It was a very unique kind of place where most of the names you would know in contemporary jazz and world music and even some in contemporary classical music would come to teach, and they would have 6-week sessions in the summer, winter, spring, or whatever. The school was on the grounds of an old hotel up near the Catskills. I came up here one summer to check it out, and I ended up moving here from Boston because it was an opportunity to meet all these musicians and work on their music with them in ensembles. At the end of the week they would do a concert with the students. It was beautiful, the Catskill Mountains, there was health food, a focus on meditation and all that kind of thing. It was a unique place that last until about 1983 or 4, until it went bankrupt.

That's usually what happens with institutions like that. They're too creative to last. I hate to divide your career up into two different periods, because I do not believe it is that simple. There is a lot of overlap. But there was a shift in 1996 when you began developing something of a new aesthetic, at least on the recordings under your own name. However, when you play as a sidewoman with Barry Guy or Noelle Leandre and so on, you often use your more dissonant and physical 'earlier' style. What is it like to move back and forth between these styles?

I was never just a sidewoman, I always had my own thing going on, too. I started recording under my own name in 1981 for Cadence records, and I did a lot of recording for Leo records and some other labels at the same time that I was playing in the Anthony Braxton Quartet. I did that because I wanted to establish something on my own, so that I was not simply associated with someone else. Because like any relationship it can come and go and also because I had a voice that was independent of what I was doing with Braxton.

Here's what I was thinking: the voice that appears, for instance, on Evan Parker's After Appleby, which appeared a couple years ago, is similar to the one that appeared on the pre-96 solo albums. How do you manage to work for several months on a solo project, then work under a different leader where you play a style more closely allied with your early work?

It's all connected. It's all a continuum. It's all recognizable as part of the same voice. There is an emphasis on intensity whether it be outer intensity or inner intensity, which the ECM stuff is for me. I think it would have been stranger if I had begun playing traditional jazz tunes, which I do some of. Even in the early recordings I am often playing ballads by Ellington, Coltrane, Bill Evans, even Monk. I allowed that to take precedence because that was what I was feeling at the moment and what I wanted to develop. I think what I am doing is not mainstream stuff, it's just that I allowed a lyrical aspect of my voice to come forward. I don't see it as a break in any way. I play in a lot of different circumstances and some of them involve what you call my 'early' voice, although I would say that with the emergence of lyricism has affected all of what I play, including the so-called 'energy music'. I find it more grounded in a way. It's something that's very difficult to put into words.

That's why it's music.

Yes.

Your latest album, Vignettes, is a solo album. You've made a number of solo albums over the years, The Woodstock Concert, Live in San Francisco, both on the Music & Arts label. And there were others. How do you approach a solo album differently than you do a group album?

I guess with a group album there is more planning. With a solo album I tend to leave things more to chance; this isn't totally the case because there is also total improvisation on the group albums. The more people there are the more planning you need, I think, although there are some people who disagree with me. There are some big bands that deal with total improvisation. In general, the more people you have the less definition things will have unless there is some kind of planning to leave space for things you want to happen. The more people you have the more you have people playing all the time and the less transparency there will be.

That dovetails into another issue. I assume that some of the songs on Vignettes are improvised.

Most of it is improvised

If it is improvised, how do you approach such a song? I assume you must have some idea of what you are going to do with an improvised song, or am I wrong about that?

Well, either or. It can be that, or it can be as simple as sitting down and playing the first note and going from there. It's like having a conversation I don't know what you are going to ask me and depending on what you say I say something. And then depending on what I say you say something and then we go from there. You don't necessarily plan what your first sentence is going to be when you meet a person and have a conversation with them. There does tends to be a back log of vocabulary, and a shared vocabulary if you are playing with other people. Many years of listening, studying, playing all provide a foundation for this improvisation. It doesn't come from nowhere. Just like if you are talking, you have a foundation of a language.

One of the two longest songs on the album is right in the middle and entitled 'Sweden'. Is there any significance to this given that ECM is a northern European label?

For one thing I named all the pieces after the music is finished, and I don't like naming things. I am not good at naming things. The reason I named that 'Sweden' is because I love Sweden. I have been going there since 1992 and it is a country that is very dear to my heart. There are people I love very much there. Somehow the music suggested to me something about the atmosphere of Sweden so I named it that.

In the case of this album how did you determine whether a song was going to be entitled Vignette 1, 2, 3 or something else?

The Vignettes were like small flashes of color interspersed among the longer pieces.

Given this relationship between part and whole, can this album be thought of as a suite?

Yeah. All of my recordings, I look at them in terms of the total picture, how the pieces fit together and how they segue one to the other. And Manfred Eicher at ECM records always chooses the order of the pieces. I think he does this very effectively. Sometimes he thinks one the pieces won't work, and then he figures out if he puts it in this place rather than that one, it works. If it were not an ECM recording I would definitely pay attention to the order and how things fit together. So, yeah, all of my recordings could be looked at as suites.

From what I have read about your recording sessions, you seem pretty ego-less, given that you had the composer, Annette Peacock, in the studio during the recording of Nothing Ever Was, Anyway: The Music of Annette Peacock. And now you say that the owner of ECM picks the song order.

That was not a matter of ego-lessness at all because she was the composer and knew very much about her compostions. She was very particular about how she wanted things played; very, very particular. I had her there conducting, basically, so that the phrasing and timing were just how she wanted it, or at least as close as possible. I could not have done that without her being there, to do that.

I just imagine that there would be a lot of jazz musicians who would balk at having the composer in the studio during a recording.

I grew up in classical music, so it's not that unusual.

I was curious about your naming the album Vignettes given that the word refers to a very slight narrative rather than a full-fledged one.

I had this image of a hallway and opening doors on either side as you walk down, and getting glimpses. I was looking at the word 'vignettes' to mean something like pictures or glimpses.

From your first album on Cadence Records I sense a strong percussive counterpoint between your left and right hands. My sense on Vignettes is that this counterpoint continues but is more melodic and harmonic than percussive.

Yeah, if I told you that Bach is my favorite composer, that might make sense. Counterpoint is a very, very important element in my music, I think. I would say that working with harmony was the last thing to happen. It started out more with rhythm and counterpoint being a linear thing than focusing on harmony. I mean, the piano is a percussive instrument. I am very into drums and overlapping rhythms, so I think it's pretty accurate, what you said. I think the counterpoint is often there, not always. It is a really crucial aspect of what I do, it's very important to me. So whatever form it takes, it's pretty much there.

On a few songs, particularly 'Vignette 2' and 'Vignette 5', it sounded to me as if you were plucking the strings inside the piano. Was this true?

Yeah, I think I was.

Have you done that before?

Yes.

Then I am a dummy because I've listened to almost all your recordings, and I never noticed it.

Maybe it was more evident on the Vignettes album because it was more transparent. It's solo; there's a lot of space. I've done it on some ensemble recordings, so you can't hear it as well.
I don't remember if I ever did it on a solo album before.

It seemed that the strings you were plucking tended to be on the high end.

Yeah, that's true. The lower end strings are harder to pluck, because they are thicker.

Listener response is something that can be extremely tricky, but I want to let you know about my response to the album, and see what you think about it. First, I think this is a beautiful album, terribly moving. As far as the mood goes, I find that most of the album feels elegant and melancholy.

I think I was very much in that spot. I recorded this two weeks before my father died. I did not know when he was going to die but I knew that he was really not well. I think that was very much present there.

I am sorry about your father.

Thanks.

It's approach to death is nothing like Dylan Thomas' lines "Do not go gentle into that good night / Rage, rage against the dying of the light." There is a quiet and elegant acceptance of death's inevitability. At least that's how it makes me feel.

Yeah, maybe it was a kind of unnamed melancholy. I can be fairly melancholic. Maybe that's why I relate to Scandinavians so well. There is something that I love about those northern expanses of snow, darkness, northern lights, very mystical. I can relate to all that.

On my blog right now I am exploring how women horn players have been treated by the jazz world. I will be interviewing some people on this in the future. I would like to get your feelings about the issue of gender in jazz. Have you felt that your being a woman has affected your acceptance in the jazz world?

No, I haven't. Of course the music I was playing, I was not in the mainstream. The people who were playing the kind of music I was playing tended, I think, not to pay a lot of attention to race and gender, at least in the days when I first got into it. I think now they pay more attention to certain aspects, like race it seems to me. I am the kind of person who if I want to do something I just do it, and the fact that I am a woman does not figure into it. It doesn't hinder me. If there were difficulties of that kind I was not aware of them. I could guess that if I was not a woman I may have more work or be treated in a different way by some of the promoters and festivals and things like that. Then again, that's total conjecture because I have dealt with so many people who have been really respectful and treated me like any other musician they wanted to hire. It hasn't been a problem for me.

I thought you were going to say that because of your comments on the topic in the Braxton book about the tour in the 80's —

Oh, Forces in Motion.

Yeah, by Graham Locke. The last thing I have to say is that you have been such an inspiration to me as an artist because of the integrity you have in relation to your artistic vision. I admire any artist on the cutting edge who stays there because it is such a difficult place to inhabit.

Thank you for that, but if that's where you spirit lies, you don't have a choice. It is not an act of courage so much as merely following the path of least resistance. It's kind of like what you do, what comes easily to you, your natural path. It would be more difficult not to do it. I often think that people who fall by the wayside or people who decide to do something else because they are not going to make much money doing this, they didn't want to do this that badly to begin with. I would say that if you are not that driven to do it, don't waste your time. Enjoy it and everything, but if you are seriously thinking of doing it for your life's path, I think you've got to be very driven to do it.

That's what I admire about you. It was not duty. It was coming out of such a deep level, almost as natural as breathing, and you stuck with it. At least that what it seems to me.

You could also look at that as laziness.

With that modest quip, the substantial portion of the interview ended. Stay tuned for more interviews of literary and musical figures.

Donald Washington interviewed by Bill Graham

I wasn’t even half way through this interview when I started thinking, in the back of my head, “how will I ever do justice to this rich tapestry of love of life and music that this wonderful man is unfolding before me?” One hour later, Donald sent me home with a fresh picked apple and a smile on my face, and the result was the following.

Renowned reed player and music educator Donald Washington was born in Mobile AL, where he spent most of his childhood before migrating to Chicago with his family. In the windy city Donald took his first serious step towards becoming a musician after his father bought him a clarinet. Upon the completion of two hitches in the army he returned to the south to attend college at the University of Southern Alabama, where he received a degree in music education in 1970. Mr. Washington moved to Detroit and worked as auto assembler at a Chrysler plant—Donald says “that was a hum dinger”—for five years. It was in Detroit that he met his wife of 33 years, Faye, and began working as music educator for the public schools.

His wife convinced Donald to stay in the motor city, and it wasn’t long before he organized the internationally known youth big band: Bird Trane Sco Now. Cassias Richmond, Roy Whitaker, Kevin Washington, and James Carter are just few of the many young people who came up in this ensemble and went on to great careers.

The Washingtons moved to Minnesota in 1987. Donald has taught in Minneapolis Public Schools, and been a staple of the Twin Cities music scene for the past twenty years. Though he has ‘officially retired’ from teaching as of 2005, Donald is by no stretch of the imagination an idle man. He recently agreed to return to teaching for the Mpls board of education on a part-time basis, and his calendar remains as busy as ever, full of gigs and rehearsals with his many friends and colleagues in the arts community.

I caught Donald at his beautiful home in Fridley and asked him the following questions:

Question # 1 - How did jazz come to be divorced from the black community? I mentioned Wynton Marsalis’s statement to the effect that once the drug epidemic had made its mark on jazz musicians the glue that held the community and the artist together began to disappear.

Donald said that he thought that had a lot to do with it, but he doesn’t believe that was the whole story. He mentioned the perils of being on the road all the time. And that the unfair treatment that black musicians faced on the road had sometime to do with the need to hide behind drugs. He also related that, fortunately for him, he determined early on that life on the road was not for him personally, because of its lack of stability. Another major factor that Donald pointed to was the fact that black parents stopped playing the music for the children in their homes. He tells how he had just recently played some Blue Mitchell for his students and their immediate response was to start popping their fingers and patting their feet. Proof positive that black kids—whose only exposure to music has been hip-hop—will respond to jazz if only they are given a chance. Finally, he brought up the pernicious role that labels have played in isolating the people from the music. Donald recalled Duke Ellington’s warning to Charlie Parker “that once they label your music be-bop they have put you in a box.” Washington went on to explain that labels are unreliable because, while he thinks of John Coltrane and Lou Donaldson when he hears the word jazz, others may think of something else entirely.

Question # 2 - Gary Giddins says that what makes jazz special is, one, the fact that it is a soloist music, two, that it is blues based, and three, that it swings. What do you think of that?

Donald thought that Giddins was headed in the right direction with the notion about the importance of the blues, but he cautions that there most be more than just the notes, ‘it’s got to have the feeling.’ He said that he recalled that jazz pianist Randy Weston had made a similar statement asserting the importance of the blues. As for Giddins' assertion about the importance of swing, he says that is mostly true, but Washington is quick to point out that there is some jazz music, like that of Sun Ra for instance, that you can’t necessarily pat your feet to. Donald maintains that this sort of jazz is just as valid as the swinging kind. “Our music is very vast. Sometimes you can’t pat your feet. The important thing is that the music is saying something. When you listen to Bird you can’t pat your foot. Music is the way we live. It’s our life, and that’s why our music is different.”

Donald likes to quote his colleague Dave Baker of the University of Indiana who said “that black music is music written by black people and played by black people.” He also told me the story of his recent trip to Detroit, where he hooked up with a former student, Michael Carry, and the two of them “tore the roof off the sucker.” Donald says that reminds him “that black musicians play for the love.” On that same trip he said he also had the opportunity to play with an ex-student who was playing on the street corners. Mr. Washington reported that his student was optimistic, “because the music will keep you optimistic.” By way of summary he said “that he plans to keep the blues, keep the swing, and keep the creative thing also.” Washington said that he loves Richard Abrams, LeRoy Jenkins, Michael Carry, Douglass Ewart, and Lester Bowie because “these are the guys that keep it on the edge.”

Question # 3 – I asked what it was like to see the legendary John Coltrane Quartet live, and I also asked him to tell me about any other special jazz listening moments that he has had.

Donald told me that he and a couple of buddies traveled 178 miles from Mobile to New Orleans to see Trane at the New Era club in 1962. He said the club was no where near being full that night, but that didn’t seem to bother Trane, he went on playing as if there were 50,000 people there. Washington says that he still remembers the look of bassist Jimmy Garrison as he played. Donald went backstage and asked Coltrane what he was going to do next musically, and Trane told him that he was going to come out with an album composed entirely of ballads. After the set was over, Donald and his friends followed the Quartet over to a club owned by Ellis Marsalis. Everything was going along great until a waiter spied the bottle that they had snuck into the joint. Fortunately, the waiter graciously overlooked the whole incident and Donald et al were allowed to stay.

Donald related that in 1972 he saw the great Rahsaan Roland Kirk, who was blind, at the Eboe coffee house in Detroit. He said that this particular night was memorable not just for Kirk’s phenomenal playing, but also for something that happened in the audience. When Joe Texador, who was Kirk’s eyes, saw that some guy was recording the performance, Kirk and the band stopped playing, and refused to begin again until Texador had confiscated the tape and destroyed it. Kirk insisted on this course of action because that sort of thing was one of the factors that helped in the destruction of Bird.

Question # 4 – I asked Donald about his attempt at retiring from performing.

Donald said that when he first announced to Faye that he was going to retire she told him “that he couldn’t do that because too many people still want you to play.” Then came Jay Otis Powell’s response to the news of the retirement “yeah, I heard about it, but I didn’t think that it meant me.” Finally there was Douglas Ewart’s reaction which was to simply look at him as if he had lost his mind. That was it. Donald gave up the idea of retiring once and for all. It appears that Donald can no more retire from teaching than he can from performing, when a school principal begged him to return to teaching Donald “saw it as the Creator leading him back so he can help these young people attain some self-esteem, and teach them how to do something that is creative. This music is about being creative.”Along with a full schedule of collaborations with other artists such as Ancestral Energy, Carrie Thomas’s group, Jay Otis Powell, and the Capri Big Band, Donald also recently put out a disc of him playing solo saxophone. He says he was never good at peddling his art. Even back when he was in high school when they gave him candy to sell, he would eat the candy and pay for it himself.

[To read about Donald's profound influence on James Carter, one of the most important saxophonists on the scene today (and perhaps one of the all-time greats), click here.

If you like a copy of Donald's solo album, e-mail me at jpha@earthlink.net and I will figure out a way to get it to you.]

Joshua Cohen interviewed by Lily Hoang

I first came across Joshua Cohen’s work a couple years ago at AWP. I walked by the Starcherone Books table and asked editor Ted Pelton which book he would recommend. He handed me a bunch, and luckily, among those was Cohen’s A Heaven of Others. What struck me then (and continues to strike me every time I read his work) is what an incredible badass he is. For one, he’s an amazing writer. His words are quite literally delicious. But beyond that, he’s the most prolific writer I know (and I know some crazy prolific writers!). Still shy of thirty, he’s got four books in print, one on the way from Dalkey Archive, and tons more sitting either on a physical or virtual shelf. Cohen is a powerhouse, but don’t take my word for it. Go buy one of his books. You won’t regret it.

So yeah, here’s an interview with him:

LH: Something that really strikes in about your writing is the very distinctive voice your characters have. In A Heaven of Others (from here on out known as Heaven), the narrator has an extremely urgent voice, one that compelled me to read faster & faster, until I was practically skimming. (Then of course, I had go back and read the whole thing over again to really savor the language!) Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto (known as Cadenza), however, has a much more patient narrative voice. Can you tell me more about the development of these narrators in particular? Please feel free to talk about your other works as well.

JC: The voices of both my novels are fictions within fictions, and, as that, they're opposites: The voice of A Heaven of Others is that of 10-year-old Jonathan Schwarzstein of Tchernichovsky Street, Jerusalem. The voice of Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto is that of Laster, an octogenarian, perhaps nonagenarian, concert violinist from eastern Austro-Hungary. Again, both are fictions, meaning both are ultimately Me. I think what I've done in all my books so far comes, primarily, from speech rhythm. The rhythm of how I want to speak. How I speak to myself. As for echoes, A Heaven of Others derives from poetry, especially 20th century Hebrew poetry (Dan Pagis), and German-Jewish poetry (Paul Celan), while Cadenza comes from comedy, and despite its typographical trickery owes more to the history of the novel, and much, specifically, to Saul Bellow.

LH: A lot of your writing seems to deal with your—or rather your characters'—Jewishness. What role has that played on your writing?

JC: The more I'm asked this question, the more I want to say that my "Jewishness" is a result of laziness - or, of not thinking enough.
But, it's not that I can't think of anything else to write about, it's just that this comes naturally. I don't think there's ever a reason to do anything against one's nature.

LH: In "The Site of Memory," Toni Morrison writes that "imagination is bound up with memory" (119). To what extent do you think memory plays a role in your fiction? Or does it?

JC: I don't know that Toni Morrison essay - or is it a book? - but I'll say I agree: I'm just not sure how she delimits "memory." The things that have happened to me are as much my memory as what's otherwise called "cultural memory." Certainly imagination begins in a reinvention of one's own life, but that reinvention, for me at least, immediately starts in with a rewrite of my family, of grandparents and origins, of an idea of "community," or of "a people."
To be specific: The terrorist explosion of A Heaven of Others begins outside a shoe store, which I based on my memories of a particular shoe store (Fischer's Shoes, formerly of Margate, NJ; the owner used to give every child who came in a pretzel). Once I knew that my book's Jerusalem store had to be a Shorefront shoestore, all those old cultural tropes - or "memories" - came; following, as it were, in experience's footsteps: the Sinai take-off-your-shoes-you're-standing-on-holy-ground, the barefoot Wandering Jew, Auschwitz's shoe-stack, the Israeli (and hippie) sandal.

LH: It seems like today, we're inundated with coming of age stories. They're hot. They've been hot and will continue to be hot. And yet, Heaven is in many ways an anti-coming of age coming of age story. Were you purposely playing with the genre? How so? Do you imagine his growth and development (not in a physical sense, of course) after death?

JC: I don't know how to answer this question in a short paragraph (to answer fully, I'd have to get away from genre-talk; there are just too many - ridiculous, nonliterary - differences between contemporary memoir, and something like Joyce's Portrait, or Proust, or Goethe's Werther), so I'll just say this, and hope it's enough: Maturity has often been defined as consciousness of death. But for Jonathan, being already dead, being murdered, and at such a young age, maturity has to be defined as consciousness of life: The knowledge of what he's lost, what's been left behind with the shoeboxes and parents.

LH: There are a ton of synonyms for the same word, whether it be experimental, conceptual, innovative, avant-garde, etc. Do you consider yourself one--or any--of those terms? Is there a term you prefer? That is, how would you describe (or even label?) your writing?

JC: I prefer the term "living." I am a living writer. That said, the rest is not commentary, as Rabbi Hillel would have it - no; the rest - "the experimental," "the innovative" - is marketing. And pisspoor marketing, too!

LH: Nabokov argues that in order to really bask in the glory of a book--a book of genius--a reader should not read with her head or heart but with the spine. Is there any way you would want your readers to read your books?

JC: With a bookmark. A friend of mine is freakish. She never uses a bookmark - nothing, not an envelope or paper scrap to hold her place - she just remembers what page she's reading. When she closes a book, she closes it, kicks it off the bed, under the couch, and is never worried that she'll "lose her page." So, instead, maybe that's what I want: A reader who doesn't fold the corners of pages, but rather folds the corners of her mind.

LH: What's next? What are you working on now?

JC: A novel's already finished, Two Great Russian Novels. That's still seeking a home. And there's a collection of short things about New York, Bridge & Tunnel (& Tunnel & Bridge). That's finished, too, also homeless. Other than that, "essays for rent." For the past two years I've kept a Genizah (www.joshuacohen.org/stories) - a place where I put up scribbles needing some air, get them out of the house.
Here are two of the more recent:

Virus
One knee must always be higher than both elbows. Both feet should be kept on the ground (floor, bed).
Your mouth must be open. One finger of each hand must be bent, but only at one knuckle (each).
It should be three p.m. or later. And your hair must be long. One eye must constantly wink at the other (infected) person.
This might be the only way to contract the virus.

My Newest Site

Joshua Cohen was born in New Jersey in 1980. He is the author of four books, including two novels: Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, and A Heaven of Others. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

You can find out more about him at: www.joshuacohen.org

[Lily Hoang's first book, Parabola, won the Chiasmus Press Un-Doing the Novel Contest in 2006. She's also the author of Changing (Fairy Tale Review Press, 2008) and the forthcoming novels Invisible Women (StepSister Press, fall 2009) and The Evolutionary Revolution (Les Figues Press, 2010). Her eBook "Woman down the Hall" is available through Lamination Colony and her chapbook "Mockery of a Cat" is forthcoming from MudLuscious. She's an Associate Editor of Starcherone Books and teaches at Saint Mary's College in Indiana.

Lily was interviewed about her novel Parabola on this blog. Click here.]

World Premiere: Opera Version of Stein's The Making of Americans

[An interview about the opera with poet Greg Hewett can be accessed by clicking on the title of this entry.]

On December 12 at The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, literary and music folk were treated to an insightful and moving world premiere opera based on Gertrude Stein's mammoth novel,The Making of Americans. (I am presently trying to find out if this opera will be traveling to other locations. As of yet, nobody has returned by requests for information. I will inform you when I receive more information.) The Walker's promotional materials read as follows:

"Gertrude Stein's groundbreaking "cubist" novel, The Making of Americans, is the launching pad for this innovative, media-rich chamber opera. Celebrated Boston-based experimental theater director Jay Scheib, Brooklyn-based composer Anthony Gatto, local new-music stalwarts Zeitgeist, and upstart New York string quartet JACK conspire to reimagine Stein's groundbreaking history of all humanity. This ambitious collaboration unfolds in front of sets and machines designed by Minneapolis artist Chris Larson.

In the work's three-dimensional staging, storms fill the sky, shingles are ripped from the roof, and a tree is torn from the ground, its roots pointing upward. In addition to percussion, strings, keyboards, live chorus, and six principal singer/actors (including local favorites Bradley Greenwald and David Echelard as well as the Builder's Association's Tanya Selvaratnam), the unusual high-energy instrumentation invokes sounds of accordions, autoharps, hurdy-gurdies, and church bells."

I interviewed poet and Carleton College English professor Greg Hewett, a devotee of both opera and Stein, about the performance. The interview begins with Greg talking about himself a little bit, so there is no need to be redundant. It appears on my web page, Experimental Writing / Explorative Music, and can be accessed by CLICKING HERE.

In Search of the Promised Land: A Slave Family in the Old South

by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger  (Oxford UP)

It is rare that this blog discusses any work that is reviewed in the New York Times except, perhaps, to contextualize it within wider historical and cultural tendencies. But I must make an exception with this remarkable little book, In Search of the Promised Land. Authored by John Hope Franklin — the indefatigable dean of African American historians best known for his important popular history of African Americans, From Slavery to Freedom — and Loren Schweninger, the author of Rebels on the Plantation and Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915, it follows the lives and fortunes of three generations of slaves and free blacks who were the descendents of a quasi-free slave, Sally Thomas, who lived in Nashville.

What is a "quasi-free" slave? The category was elastic and varied from region to region and even person to person, but a quasi-free slave generally earned their own living as a tradesperson: a barber, a blacksmith, a laundress, and so on. Slave owners would then take some or all of the profit that their slaves took in.

Sally Thomas was fortunate in that her owner paid very little attention to her. Not only was she able to purchase the house where she did her work as a laundress, she was also able to save enough money to buy one of her sons out of slavery (with the consent of her master).

Sally's three sons were the children of two different white fathers. It is not known if Sally willingly entered into sexual relations with these men. One later became a United States Supreme Court Justice. Neither men did anything for their sons — the judge even voted with the majority in the Dred Scott case, which stated that a negro "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it."

In spite of the terrible fathering they received, her sons and grandsons did remarkable things for black men who lived in the last half of the 19th-century: they traveled widely and many became educated, in spite of all the impediments in front of them. Perhaps the most successful was her son James P. Thomas, who became a well-known barber in St. Louis and the husband of a very wealthy free black woman.

The most stunning personalities, however, would have to be John Rapier, Jr., and James Rapier, Sally's grandsons. During Reconstruction, James became an important political leader and was elected to the U.S. Congress. He helped to pass the 1874 Civil Rights Act.

After trying a variety of ventures, including an attempt to jump start a new, non-racist nation in Nicaragua, John eventually made it through medical school. As soon as he graduated, he went to work as a medic for the union army.

During his time with the army, John, Jr., often spent his evenings attending to the medical needs of the black people in the neighborhood where he lived. This was in sharp contrast to the attitudes about poor blacks that he showed earlier while traveling through Jamaica and Haiti. There, he was so appalled by the casual dress, pagan beliefs, and dirtiness of the poor blacks that he wrote to his brother that he became convinced that he would never want to live in a society where most blacks were free.

This, of course, is a stunning and painful demonstration of DuBois's 'double-consciousness', where blacks in America necessarily view themselves both as agents who can affect their fate and as objects in the view of white people. According to DuBois blacks, to a degree, must internalize the way whites objectify them in order to be able to simply get by in a society where whites have the power.

Obviously, this family is unusual. Sally Thomas was given tremendous opportunities due to the leniency of her master, but she also worked her fingers to the bone to make the most of them. And she succeeded: all three of her sons became somewhat educated and important men. And a couple of her grandsons became truly generous and great men.

The question arises: what does our learning about this unrepresentative family teach us about race in America? Plenty. For one thing, during their trips the men often commented on how rude northern people were to blacks. In the south, there were terrible legal impediments in the way of black self-determination. However, white people and black people did seem to get along on a basic day-to-day level. (History proves that this was true only when blacks did not agitate for their rights.)

The book goes to great pains to show that the descendents of Sally Thomas were pained and frightened by seeing slave auctions and people in shackles. Not only did they feel compassion for their brethren, but they also worried that they could easily fall into their lot. Sally's accomplished children were still technically slaves, in spite of their slave mother's very free daily life. If she were to die, or her owner were to suffer a financial loss, the boys could be sold into the most vicious slavery imaginable. This anxiety hung over the heads of both free and slave family members until after the Civil War.

How did Franklin and Schweninger get the information for this well-written and dramatic account? They didn't make it up! At the end of each chapter there are pages of copious footnotes. And as we read through the text, it becomes clear that the authors chose the Thomas-Rapier family for good reason: many of their letters, and the memoir of James P. Thomas (which has been published as From Tennessee Slave to St. Louis Entrepreneur) are extant.  

After reading this book, I do not feel that slavery was any less cruel than I did before. I believe that the 19th-century black polemicist David Walker was correct in arguing that the slavery of the American south during the plantation era was, according to the historical record, the worst that the world has ever seen.

That said, it helps to see the nuance in the situation, to realize that blacks and whites could sometimes be friends on an equal footing (if the white so desired.) That there were ways blacks could push back so as to make their lot a little more tolerable — such as demanding some celebration during the holiday season. And it is inspirational to watch a family go from slaves to important congressmen, doctors, and businessmen in two generations.

It is essential to note that there was one ingredient absolutely needed to make all of this happen: Sally Thomas getting some opportunity in life. She certainly deserved more, but her life and the life of her family shows that nobody gets anywhere without some help.

Opportunity, both for ourselves and others, resides in the choices of a person, a group, a community, and a polity.