A Happy Fan Club

Back in January 0f this year I wrote a piece about soprano Alicia Hall Moran’s Motown Project, her intriguing re-visiting of some of the label’s most memorable hits, interspersed with a few opera chestnuts and impressively staged in a performance/theater melodrama.  I wrote about the work in the context of “Things to See, Hear, and Read” in 2011.  The Motown Project has grown in great directions: she’s nipped, tucked, and added with each of its performed iterations.  In other words, Hall Moran has treated it as a running work-in-progress, as a living entity that invites reconfiguration and rethinking. That’s what artists do.

Singing and Signing

On the first day of Kwanzaa, the Blackberry buzzed in my pocket with a vigorous hot-off-the-press text from the conceptual pianist Jason Moran, Hall Moran’s partner: “Alicia is Bess tonight on Broadway. Many tix available. I have a babysitter and a night out. YES!  Come thru if you’re . . . free.”  A quick bite and an hour later, I’m in a yellow heading uptown into a shoulder-to-shoulder crush of holiday Time-Squarers for some rare Monday night Broadway (it’s usually closed on Monday).   I’ve wanted to catch this musical theater version of the famed all-American opera Porgy and Bess ever since it premiered in Cambridge, Massachusetts back in October.  Now in previews on Broadway, more people can see for themselves what has become something of a controversy.

Miles had his shot at Porgy and Bess, too.

Back in the summertime of 2011 when the living was supposed to be easy, the criticism was jumping and the tensions were high when none other than Stephen Sondheim openly criticized the female creative team of director Diane Paulus, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, and composer Diedre Murray for revamping the popular 1935 opera for a different forum (Broadway musical theater) and for contemporary sensibilities.  Of course, the work has always attracted high praise, strained critique, and endless dialogue on myriad grounds including, the Jewish George Gershwin’s meditation on black culture, ideas of race and opera, and the black singers who have traditionally sung its roles.  The past year, for example, witnessed a sustained and engaging conversation about Porgy and Bess on the important web-group the African American Art Song Alliance (founded by the abundantly talented tenor, Dr. Darryl Taylor, a professor at the University of California, Irvine).

While I’ve found some of the lasting contentions surrounding the opera somewhat baffling, this latest—the so-called “audacity” of daring to be creative with it—hard to take seriously.  It’s great to present a work—an opera, a symphony, a Duke Ellington recording—as a historical artifact worthy of an attempted replication or as facsimile of the composer’s “intention.”  But I also appreciate artistic license: the courage to imagine other possibilities for a work.  Whether the work is better or worse off by this repurposing is best left to the judgments of the individual contemplating the matter.  This interpretive free-for-all represents a huge part of the pleasure of encountering “the new” or the kind of new, indeed, the theme and variation of it all.

Stage Door!

As understudy for the lovely and formidable Tony-Award-winning Audra McDonald (sorry readers, in this writer’s estimation some ladies have earned lots of adjectives!), “Alicia’s Bess” made all of us who dropped everything and grabbed a ticket burst and strut with pride as she shows vocal growth and an expanding sense of “ownership” of the audience’s gaze every time I see her.

This versioning of Porgy, then, is on some levels what American musical culture is all about.  How many versions of “Summertime” can one appreciate with its sultry blues-like chord structure?  How many African American singers have sustained serious careers after they got their shot in one of the historical productions of this work?  Why should this text be deemed more sacred and untouchable than the Motown songs that Hall Moran’s operatic versions pulled in the other direction on the art/pop continuum.  (Apparently, part of this tempest in a teapot controversy is high opera’s Porgy slumming around in the tourist trap of “mere” musical theater).

We are all richer when artists force us to think beyond the envelope—even when it feels “peculiar” at first brush.  And despite what so-called arbiters of culture might insist, it ain’t necessarily so that some forms, songs, and repertoire are off limits to this “will to version” whether it be a pop song that made your booty shake and America aesthetically integrate or a folk-opera that transformed South Carolina blues culture into an iconic force that was singular in helping to integrate America’s opera stage.

I’m thrilled to see a singer that I know get her shot. I loves you Porgy.

Holla! umm, I mean Brava!!!

Balancing Act I: Alicia Hall Moran--Diva, Composer, Arranger, Impresaria

It’s great to witness the process of emerging work.  This is especially true when the piece is as thoughtful as Alicia Hall Moran’s Motown Project, a meditation on the Motown songbook.  Of course, there have been many “covers” of this treasure trove of songs through the years.  Even jazz musicians have found them ample fodder for the improvising imagination.  But, trust me, Ms. Moran’s take is singular.

I saw the premier of this work in December 2009 at The Kitchen in NYC.  I wrote at that time, describing the piece: “The idea of thinking about those Motown recordings as a Schubertian song cycle winding through the stages and associated emotions of a love affair—from declamation, assurance, doubt, disappointment, to anger—was brillant:  Hall Moran managed to draw attention to the poignant poetry of the featured songwriters, while also exploring their universal potential beyond teenage wonder and angst.  The cycle’s accompaniment underscored the harmonic sophistication and her choice of ensemble acoustic guitar, electric bass, taiko drums, and R&B vocalist] was daring and inventive, and highlighted her vocal control, dramatic talent, and conceptual range.”

The idea was born on an international flight from Europe as she returned home from singing with the Bill T. Jones Company.  An in-flight feature of Motown songs conjured images of her parents’ record collection, and inspiration was ignited.  To her ears, the themes of love and loss running throughout her serial listening session sounded grand, dramatic, and potentially operatic.  Then came research.   Described by Ms. Hall Moran as “a passionate love affair,” she began to add Motown to her regular repertoire—her own arrangements performed with pianist Jason Moran, her husband and dependable accompanist when he’s not touring his own projects.   As the Motown Project develops—Hall Moran is constantly expanding the accompaniment scope, adding songs, and seeking a balance between the tricky mechanics of delivery between soul and operatic melisma.  She has a clear vision for the work’s future, stressing that beyond her plan to add costumes and orchestra, she’s enjoying triangulating her classically trained voice, an engaging and well-known repertory, and the larger conceptualization pulling it all together.

Coupling and Conjuring Conventions: Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran

I hear that the audience at the West Village’s Le Poisson Rouge raved when she presented a version of the work in November 2010.   I’ll keep you posted about the next performance of this thoroughly original exploration of history, memory, and performance practice that invigorates an important slice of the American musical landscape.

Dr. Guy

Next up: The innovative Los Angeles-based group, The Supra Lowery Brothers;

Guest Curator Dr. Kellie Jones interviews the legendary visual artist Betye Saar in her Los Angeles studio about works in the exhibition Now Dig This!

Kellie Jones’ new book, Eyeminded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (Duke University Press);  and the UCLA’s Hammer Museum’s upcoming and historic exhibition, “Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980.

Luciano Pavarotti – Nessun Dorma

I get the same feeling each time my Grandmother plays her favorite recording of Paul Potts’s reverberating performance of the aria at our family’s holiday celebrations.  Potts became famous after his performance of “Nessun Dorma” on the popular TV series Britain’s Got Talent.  The aria’s presence is not that of an unapproachable operatic intellect, but that of a pop song.

Paul Potts – Nessun Dorma

The popularity of the aria, despite its operatic status, is astounding when one considers the cultural pedestal upon which opera is often placed.  As a genre, opera is intimidating to much of the American public.  This fact has a great deal to do with the foreign languages, such as Italian and German, in which many famous operas are written; Puccini’s Turandot among them, which is written in Italian.  To many of today’s music listeners, opera is fundamentally nothing more than classical music – alone, often considered an intimidating European art form – paired with incomprehensible singing and fantastical theatrical sets.  How can the average person discourse on such a topic?  It is, after all, considered “art;” not understood by the masses, but by those who have had the necessary training and who can recognize the genius of the music.  Such individuals are permitted to attend performances in great concert halls with polished banisters; only individuals such as these are expected to be enthralled by the enormous sounds and trembling vibratos that escape the lips of highly trained opera singers.  What one often forgets is the history of the pre-canonized opera.

At the time of such famous composers as Mozart and Wagner, opera was the music of the masses.  Although opera was originally confined to the royal courts of Europe, it soon became the “pop” music of the Baroque era (the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century) and beyond.  Opera singers became celebrities and many operatic performances were salted with a flavor of spectacle to entertain common European audience members.  Although Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot was not performed until 1926, it was still considered popular music by musicologists of the time.  In fact, Puccini’s style was often dismissed by musicologists as shallow because of its emphasis on melody for popular appeal.  My Grandmother herself, when playing her recording of “Nessun Dorma,” once told me that although Puccini’s operatic compositions were not considered “mature” – or elitist – operas, she could not help going weak at the knees when listening to Paul Potts.  And indeed, behind the intimidating Italian jargon lie the breathtaking words of a common young man in love:

No one shall sleep!…
No one shall sleep!
Even you, o Princess,
In your cold room,
Watch the stars,
That tremble with love and with hope.
But my secret is hidden within me,
My name no one shall know.
No!…No!…
On your mouth I will speak it when the light shines.
And my kiss will dissolve the silence that makes you mine!…
No one will know his name and we must, alas, die.
Vanish, o night!
Set, stars! Set, stars!
At dawn, I will conquer! I will conquer! I will conquer!

Lauren Corallo