(Reprinted from the November 2021 issue of New York City Jazz Record)
The Metropolitan Opera, long a citadel of European classicism, celebrated its re-opening post-pandemic with the premiere of its first opera by an African American composer. Jazz trumpeter Terrence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up In My Bones adapts journalist Charles M. Blow’s searing memoir by that name—a recounting of Blow’s troubling youth in a small Louisiana town, before his emergence as an influential artist, writer and thinker.
The opera’s three principals—baritone Will Liverman and sopranos Angel Blue and Latonia Moore—are superb opera singers who readily cross over to roots-based American music. Such vocal versatility is a tricky thing to pull off; the singer needs mastery in both the powerful technique that classical texts require and the emotive spontaneity that sets improvisatory music apart. Increasingly, this kind of vocal versatility is becoming more common, along with the rise of works that demand this kind of talent.
How we talk about these syncretic works raises some vexing issues. For instance, while Blanchard is a jazz musician, Fire Shut Up In My Bones is not a jazz opera. It isn’t clear that jazz opera as a genre even exists: The oft-cited Treemonisha, by Scott Joplin, hews closely to the classical tradition, Carla Bley’s Escalator Over The Hill pulls from a wide swath of musical sources and Wynton Marsalis’ Blood On The Fields, an oratorio, plays in a concert setting. But how these works might be defined raises less debate than does assertions about who gets to create them.
Aware of this debate, The Met refused to produce Porgy and Bess for three decades. While the Gershwins’ jazz-based opera has turned out several beloved standards (“Summertime”, “It Ain’t Necessarily So”, “I Loves You, Porgy”), its characterization of Black Americans encourages accusations of racial insensitivity and cultural appropriation—painful stuff for those who love the seemingly inclusive Songbook and its culturally diverse composers.
But after Blanchard’s opera closes this month, the Met will stage Porgy and Bess, a reprisal of its 2019 season opener. Both Blue and Moore will lend their considerable talents to this year’s production, and however problematic this opera’s provenance, it’s hard to deny the beauty of the Gershwins’ exquisite arias or the achievement of the singers who will perform them.
This is exactly the point that linguist and culture writer John McWhorter makes in a recent article in the New York Times, where both he and Blow are columnists. In “Can Cultural Appropriation Be Beautiful?” McWhorter writes about Blue’s rendition of “I Wonder What Became of Me”, by the white songwriting team of Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer.
“The song originated in the precursor to Blues Opera, the 1946 Broadway musical St. Louis Woman”, he wrote. “Arlen and Mercer were what we might today call Black-adjacent artists, often writing, respectfully, in Black-derived idioms, for scripts about Black characters. And ‘I Wonder What Became of Me’ is an art song, not a show tune—a lovely example of fusion music.”
While writers like McWhorter and Blow push this important debate forward, the fusion continues. This past September singer/producer Roseanne Vitro released Sing a Song of Bird (Skyline), a dozen Charlie Parker tunes reworked with modern lyrics and vocals by Vitro, Sheila Jordan, Bob Dorough and Marion Cowings. Couched in cool bop and tight swing, clever turns of phrase reveal the hidden whimsy in Parker’s writing. To start, listen to Cowings’ take on “Now’s The Time”, Vitro’s “Grapple With The Apple”, Dorough’s “The Scatter” and Jordan’s “Quasimodo”. Enduring music—with blurry lines.
Jordan, who turns 93 this month, works relentlessly. On Nov. 12 she’ll participate in the NEA Jazz Masters concert at Flushing Town Hall before joining pianist Alan Broadbent at Birdland on Nov. 18-20. In between, on Nov. 14, she’ll participate as a judge for the 10th Annual Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition at NJPAC, alongside host Dianne Reeves and fellow judge Jazzmeia Horn. The latter too, play the metro area this month: Reeves fronts powerhouse group Artemis at NJPAC on Nov. 13, and Horn releases her first big band album Dear Love (Empress Legacy) Nov. 16-20 at Joe’s Pub.
Notable bookends: JJA Hero Award recipient Louise Rogers and pianist Mark Kross open the month with the WaHi Jazz Fest Nov. 4-7. At month’s close, on Nov. 28, CBS will air “One Last Time: An Evening With Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga”, a replay of the duo’s August concerts at Radio City Music Hall.