[A work by a stride pianist whose records had a place of honor in my
childhood home, along with those of Meade Lux Lewis. A blues opera about
a union organizer, with libretto by Langston Hughes. Boy, how I'd love
to hear it. - Scott Morrison]
A jazz giant's lost legacy: A U-M musicologist resurrects the
long-forgotten blues opera 'De Organizer' by innovative pianist
James P. Johnson, who married high-brow classical with the
rhythms of black culture
December 1, 2002
BY MARK STRYKER
DETROIT FREE PRESS MUSIC WRITER
Jazz historians and aficionados have always known that James P.
Johnson, the father of Harlem stride piano, devoted much of his
later career to writing orchestral tone poems, a piano concerto,
a symphony and an opera.
But even before Johnson's death in 1955, his concert works had
become little more than historical footnotes. The biggest mystery
surrounds "De Organizer," Johnson's one-act blues opera about
unionizing sharecroppers, with a libretto by Langston Hughes.
The opera vanished after just one performance at Carnegie Hall
on May 31, 1940, as part of a convention of the International
Ladies Garment Workers Union.
Johnson advocates have excavated and performed other unpublished
orchestral music from family archives, but "De Organizer" hasn't
been heard since its premiere.
Until now.
Forces from the University of Michigan are mounting a concert
version of the 35-minute opera this week and next in Detroit and
Ann Arbor. The hero of the project is U-M professor and early-jazz
expert James Dapogny. After years of crack detective work,
painstaking compositional surgery and a lucky break bordering
on divine providence, Dapogny has reconstructed "De Organizer"
from bare-bones vocal and piano sketches unearthed in California
and, remarkably, Ann Arbor.
Like all Johnson's concert music, "De Organizer" is based in
vernacular styles -- jazz, blues and popular song -- but aspires
beyond them, to somewhere between, as critic David Schiff once
put it, the concert hall and the dance hall. "De Organizer" is
sung through, with no spoken dialogue, and its swooning blues
laments and peppy jazz-age rhythms are outfitted in orchestral
clothes.
Dapogny's realization is faithful to Johnson's original orchestration
-- eight solo voices, chorus and an orchestra of 45, including
a conventional complement of winds, brass and strings, plus four
saxophones, piano and percussion. The only song already known
is "Hungry Blues," a bittersweet lament Johnson recorded in 1939.
"It's a nice piece of music and an interesting piece," says
Dapogny. "There are many things that are very beautiful and a
lot of variety. There's stuff that's menacing, goofy, jolly,
life-affirming, and there are laments, recitations of wrongs
having been done."
It's hard to imagine a musician better suited to the task of
reconstructing Johnson's opera than Dapogny, a classical composer
by training but also a widely respected "hot" pianist specializing
in the jazz styles of the 1920s and '30s.
Dapogny's restoration promises to shed new light on one of the
most fascinating figures in American music. Johnson was a critical
figure in early jazz history, as well as the composer of the
'20s anthem "The Charleston." But Johnson also belongs to a
constellation of early 20th-Century American composers intrigued
by the cross-pollination of African-American idioms and art-music
traditions.
His brethren include Scott Joplin, who wrote a ragtime opera,
"Treemonisha," in 1911; Duke Ellington; William Grant Still;
Aaron Copland, and Johnson's closest aesthetic cousin, George
Gershwin.
Ellington wrote extended works for jazz band in the early '30s.
Still, the dean of black American classical composers, wrote his
"Afro-American" Symphony in 1931. But Still was a product of the
classical establishment, while Johnson came roaring out of
Harlem's nightspots.
The Gershwin of "Rhapsody in Blue" and "Porgy and Bess" offers
Johnson's closest parallel. The composers were acquaintances,having
met in 1920 when both were cutting piano rolls. Both had popular
music roots; both wrote for Broadway; both harbored classical
ambitions; both crafted hybrid works of "high" and "low."
Both also lacked formal training in classical techniques and
built their extended works from a homespun succession of tunes.
Classical conductor Marin Alsop, a Johnson champion who tracked
down some of his orchestral works a decade ago and recorded them,
says music like Johnson's four-movement "Harlem Symphony" (1932)
suggests a link between Joplin and Ellington.
"Johnson was always cognizant of exploring black culture and
exposing it to a wider audience," she says. "The writing is
simple -- it almost sounds naive to us -- but it was sincere and
it has a purity we hadn't experienced before, with very simple,
beautiful melodies and a lot of color.
"I'm not looking to compare him to Beethoven. What I'm looking
at is the mood he's able to capture and the stories he's able
to tell."
Alsop was one of the legions who had tried to find "De Organizer,"
scouring the basements of old buildings in Manhattan. The Institute
of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, which has a copy of Hughes'
libretto in its collection, also came up empty in its search for
the music.
"This is a legendary work, and it occupies a special place both
in James P. Johnson's history but also jazz history," says
institute director Dan Morgenstern.
When Dapogny began searching in 1989, everyone told him the same
thing: Don't bother. Everyone's looked. It's gone.
The crucial break came in 1997, when the African American Music
Collection at U-M put on display some material never previously
exhibited. There in a glass case was a notebook inscribed with
the words "De Organizer. Property of Eva Jessye."
Dapogny's knees buckled when he saw it. Johnson's heirs didn't
even know about this. Jessye was a choral director who had
prepared the original cast of "Porgy and Bess" -- and, evidently,
the cast of "De Organizer." Coming together
The Jessye score was crippled. Only the melody notes and text
were present, with no indication of harmony, texture or other
details of orchestral accompaniment. But Dapogny had found every
single bar of sung music, in its proper order, with choral
passages voiced in harmony.
The next stop in Dapogny's quest was the Johnson Foundation in
Riverside, Calif. Rifling through boxes of material, Dapogny
came across unidentified piano sketches that he recognized as
part of the opera. The sketches made up about 25 percent of the
opera and answered questions of harmony and texture. Dapogny
then assigned pitches and rhythms to instruments in keeping with
Johnson's 19th-Century, Dvorak-inspired approach to orchestration.
In another stroke of fortune, Dapogny also found in California
a piece of paper on which Johnson had indicated the specific
instrumentation for the opera. The only music Dapogny had to
conjure completely from his own imagination was instrumental and
amounted to about 80 bars out of a total of 1,004 -- including
an introduction, coda and connective tissue between songs.
"I tried to channel James P. Johnson," Dapogny says. "I don't
hear anything here that I think James P. Johnson couldn't or
wouldn't have written. I did write some of those things, but I
threw them away."
The origins of the opera are cloudy. In "James P. Johnson: A
Case of Mistaken Identity" (Scarecrow Press, $55), biographer
Scott Brown writes that Johnson first contacted Harlem Renaissance
poet Hughes about collaborating in 1937. A year later, Johnson
wrote to Hughes with a concrete idea for a libretto based on
"Natural Man," a play by Theodore Brown. Hughes transformed the
play into free verse, and Johnson set it to music.
The story takes place on a post-Civil War plantation in the
South. A group of exploited sharecroppers have gathered to wait
for the Organizer to arrive and help them form a union. At one
point, an Overseer tries to break up the meeting but is chased
away by the now unified sharecroppers. The blatantly progressive
political and racial ideas are a far cry from the minstrel
stereotypes Johnson was forced to employ on Broadway.
Finding his style
Born in 1894, Johnson's early training came from his mother and
later an Italian piano teacher who emphasized the classics and
proper technique. The young Johnson absorbed the stomp and rag
styles of players like Lucky Roberts and Eubie Blake, but he
also attended symphony concerts.
Johnson became an innovator, smoothing out ragtime's two-beat
feel into the more relaxed four-beat rhythm of jazz and adding
layers of blues and improvisation. The "stride" style he invented
was characterized by oompah figures in the left hand, dazzling
melodies in the right hand and a virtuosic web of syncopation
emerging from the dialogue: He was an orchestra unto himself.
Johnson's influence was pervasive. Fats Waller was his prize
student and Duke Ellington learned to play Johnson's famous tune
"Carolina Shout" by slowing down the piano roll and following
the keys with his fingers. Thwarted ambitions
The '20s were Johnson's heyday. He recorded his own piano solos,
dominated the Harlem scene, wrote numerous Broadway musicals and
revues. He also began experimenting with extended compositions.
"Yamekraw," for piano and orchestra, was written in 1927 and
orchestrated by William Grant Still. In the '30s, Johnson devoted
most of his attention to his classical muse, writing two symphonies
and a piano concerto.
His classical compositions got a few performances around New
York; but, with no conductor or patron from the white establishment
willing to champion his work, the music fell into oblivion. His
classical career peaked in May 1945, when a career retrospective
at Carnegie Hall included excerpts from several orchestral pieces.
Johnson died in 1955, after a series of strokes had limited his
activities.
The tragedy of Johnson's life was that his ambitions and formal
training were stymied by his color and his jazz pedigree. Who
knows what he might have accomplished had fate bestowed upon him
Gershwin's connections or the alliances that helped Still gain
a foothold in the concert-music world.
"Johnson always had aspirations to stretch himself," says Alsop.
"What he wrote was wonderful, but he also had tremendous potential."
Scott Morrison <[log in to unmask]>
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