[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 Johnson advocates have excavated and performed other unpublished orchestral music from family archives, but "De Organizer" hasn't been heard since its premiere.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]>