[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   Johnson advocates have excavated and performed other unpublished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]>