Continuing an exploration of Black Music of the 1970s, we have Minnie Riperton today.
Riperton was a native of Chicago who tragically hit it big with her soprano voice, enormous range, and an airy tone that gave her songs an ethereal tone and then died of breast cancer when she was just 31. Her legacy endures, not just because of her music, but because of her influence on artists after her like Michael Jackson and Tupac Shakur. Her legacy also endures because her daughter is famed actress and comedian Maya Rudolph.
Maya Rudolph, daughter of Minnie Riperton, in a SNL portrait. Apparently Ms. Rudolph looks amazing in overalls.
Here is Minnie Riperton’s biggest hit, “Loving You”.
Jonathan Bailey Holland is a composer originally from Flint, MI who is currently the Dean of the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University. According to his bio, he has had music performed by ensembles all over the world, and he has taught at a number of universities as well as at many music festivals and arts schools. And like many of the other composers in this ongoing mini-series of mine, I never heard of him until now. I have thus far only heard the work presented below, so I can’t discuss Dr. Holland’s general approach, but this work is minimalistic and haunting in its evocative use of a very small ensemble (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, percussion) and its use of moody dissonances throughout. The work is chillingly meditative, befitting its title: The Clarity of Cold Air. This work does seem to me to fit the mood of the streetscape photo I posted the other day….
I couldn’t decide which of three pieces to feature today, so I said to myself, “Why limit myself to one?” That’s right, you get all three.
Composer and flautist Valerie Coleman has had a deeply impressive career already. A native of Louisville, KY, Coleman was steeped in music from an early age, and her trajectory seems to have mainly pointed in one direction her entire life, as far as I can tell: up. She has been an accomplished performing flautist as well as a highly-regarded composer; her work Umoja–which began as a work for woodwind quintet but then was re-arranged by the composer for many varying ensembles–eventually became the first work performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra by a living Black woman composer. Honestly, I’m not even going to try to sum up Coleman’s life; for more on her, I highly encourage visiting her official website. I’m just going to feature some music.
First, we have a work for an ensemble I’ve never encountered before: the flute choir. The piece is called Juba, and according to Coleman’s site, “JUBA for flute choir gives homage to its namesake: a rhythmic dance found in the origins of both African-American and West African cultures.” It is certainly rhythmic and dancelike…and the melding of various tonal colors of different kinds of flutes creates a unique kind of magic here.
Next is a work that is obviously inspired, at least in part, by the example set by Aaron Copland. Coleman provides a fanfare for brass and percussion, called Fanfare for Uncommon Times. That certainly captures the era in which we live, doesn’t it? Also from her site:
It begins not with a typical fanfare salute, but a quizzical, searching line for solo trombone that soon is cushioned by pungent, soft-spoken brass chords. Unrest amid determination stirs as the music shifts into agitated episodes for percussion. The mood seems at once reflective and restless, uplifting and ominous. The elements of the Black experience during a challenging time that Coleman described come through during a passage alive with riffs for mallet percussion instruments, hints of dance and bursts of anxious frenzy. By the end, with spurts of four-note brass motifs, echoes of Coplandesque affirmation arise, but also a breathless flurry that feels bracing yet challenging.
Finally, what is likely Coleman’s most well-known and performed work to date, the afore-mentioned Umoja. Subtitled “Anthem of Unity”, I found this work challenging and contemplative and moving as I listened to it several times in the last few days alone. The notes on Coleman’s site are well-worth reading:
In its original form, Umoja, the Swahili word for Unity and the first principle of the African Dispora holiday Kwanzaa, was compose a simple song for women’s choir. It embodied a sense of ‘tribal unity’, through the feel of a drum circle, the sharing of history through traditional “call and response” form and the repetition of a memorable sing-song melody. It was rearranged into woodwind quintet form during the genesis of Coleman’s chamber music ensemble, Imani Winds, with the intent of providing an anthem that celebrated the diverse heritages of the ensemble itself.
Almost two decades later from the original, the orchestral version brings an expansion and sophistication to the short and sweet melody, beginning with sustained ethereal passages that float and shift from a bowed vibraphone, supporting the introduction of the melody by solo violin.
There’s more there, go read it…but listen to Umoja. This is music as balm for the soul.
Oh, is THIS piece a “banger”, as the kids say! (A really good song is a banger now. Up ’til now, if you said “banger” to me, I’d have assumed you were talking about a British breakfast sausage.) Composer Kevin Day‘s Concerto for Wind Ensemble is a thrilling virtuoso showpiece that puts every section of the wind ensemble on full display. It is energetic and jazzy and rhythmic and lyrical, and it’s one of the most purely enjoyable pieces I’ve listened to as a new (to me) work in a long time. I have really enjoyed hearing this piece, and I’m sure I’ll be returning to it and to Dr. Day’s music quite a bit moving forward.
From Dr. Day’s bio:
Dr. Kevin Day (b. 1996) is an award-winning, multi-disciplinary composer, jazz pianist and conductor based in Las Vegas, Nevada. Internationally acclaimed as one of the world’s leading musical voices, Dr. Day’s work is known as a vibrant exploration of diverse musical traditions from contemporary classical, cinematic, jazz, R&B, Soul and more. A unique voice in the world of classical music, Dr. Day takes inspiration from a broad range of sources, including romanticism, late 20th century music, jazz fusion and gospel. Across all areas, his work explores the complex interplay of rhythm, texture and melody across genres.
After several fruitful conversations with Dr. Cynthia Johnston Turner, director of bands at the University of Georgia, the concept for the Concerto for Wind Ensemble began to take form. We had talked about doing a potential commission for the UGA Hodgson Wind Ensemble, and ultimately the conversation led to the idea of doing a substantial work to further the wind band repertoire. I knew off the bat that I wanted to write something that reflected my upbringing as a young black man and the musical culture that I grew up in, which hasn’t always been represented in concert band music.
My experience and the inspiration for this work come from a world of various intersections. My father, born in West Virginia, was a hip-hop producer in the late 1980s who worked in Southern California, and my mother (also from West Virginia) was a gospel singer. During my childhood, I grew up listening to hip-hop, R&B, jazz, and gospel music. Simultaneously, I was learning classical music through playing in band, and later orchestra. I was playing jazz and gospel music on piano, while also playing classical music on euphonium and tuba. This dual learning environment had a huge impact on my musicianship and my development as a composer. While these words had been separated in my head when I was growing up, in this work I intentionally wanted to merge them together in new fusions, paying homage to my parents, the culture I grew up in, and to the wind band world.
What came from this concept is this Concerto for Wind Ensemble, a five-movement work for band that is my most ambitious composition to date, and a work that took almost two years to compose. The movements entitled Flow, Riff, Vibe, Soul, and Jam reflect the various musical styles that I have been immersed in. Vibe and Soul are specifically dedicated to my parents, without whom I could not have made it this far. I am immensely grateful to Dr. Turner and to the consortium members of this work, who believed in my vision and sought to bring this work to life. I’m happy to share this contribution and love letter to the wind band and to the culture.
Once again I note that the concert band and wind ensemble never seem to get the respect they are due as expressive music ensembles in this country and maybe beyond. Wind ensembles are typically seen as “student” groups, and professional ones are few and far between. I truly wish that would change, and works like Kevin Day’s Concerto for Wind Ensemble are a big reason why. This is fantastic music!
The other day, someone posed an interesting question over on the Threads platform:
Dear white people, It’s Black History Month. Who made you see us? Who was your first Black celebrity crush?
It didn’t take me long to figure out my answer, because it was Donna Summer. What follows is the post I wrote when Donna Summer died. I remember that day very well, and when I learned she was gone, I had to go outside and…well, here’s the post.
Donna Summer was my Whitney Houston.
I never realized that, until earlier today, when I went outside toward the end of my work day for a last brief break. I pulled out my phone, and before I even realized I was doing it, brought up “Last Dance” on it. And then I stood there, listening to that great disco song, for all eight minutes of its long version. It was a gorgeously sunny day, and there in the cool shade I listened to a song that I’ve loved since I was seven or eight years old, over the tiny speakers on my phone. The sound wasn’t very good, of course. The phone’s not designed for that. It sounds nice as a portable music player over earphones, but the speakers on the phone don’t produce any bass to speak of. It did not do Ms. Summer justice.
And she still sounded utterly, utterly astounding.
Because of my unusual relationship with pop music, I never owned a recording of Donna Summer’s, aside from “Last Dance”, until only just in the last few years. I rarely listened to rock or pop as a kid, preferring to stick with film music and, later on, classical. In fact, I didn’t really start to engage with pop music until I was already actively engaging with classical music. Interesting that both interests blossomed right around the same time…but just because I wasn’t buying pop and rock records or tapes until I was 14 doesn’t mean that I had zero idea of what was going on, mainly because of my sister, who listened to a lot of pop and rock (in addition to classical herself). The soundtrack of my world back then had that music in it, and I keenly remember hearing a lot of Donna Summer for a few years.
But she’d first come to my attention cinematically, through her acting debut in the disco movie Thank God It’s Friday (which I may well watch again this weekend in her memory). In the movie Ms. Summer plays Nicole Sims, an aspiring disco singer who is trying to get her big break by getting the deejay at the disco in the movie to let her sing. He refuses, and refuses, and refuses; he tries to kick her out of the disco and she keeps getting back in. Of course, there’s no doubt in our minds that she’s going to get her shot, but Summer plays her ably as a kid with some skill and just enough confidence to stick with it but also a bit of fear that once her shot is done, that’s it. Finally, the deejay realizes with horror that he has to kill a few minutes of airtime until the Commodores show up, and he’s got nothing to fill it with…so Nicole takes over and starts singing. What’s she singing? “Last Dance”. And of course, after a rough start, she comes into it, and it becomes a performance that has the entire disco dancing and cheering and so on.
Yeah, it’s predictable as hell. But Donna Summer is so beautiful and vulnerable and cocky and confident and willing to stake her life on this one opportunity that doesn’t so much present itself as make itself available to be stolen, that the moment totally works.
And it helps, of course, that “Last Dance” is such a great, great, great song.
Yes, it is. It really is.
Look, it’s fun to laugh at disco, and for a whole lot of reasons. It was music of excess and rhythm-above-all, music that seemingly existed for no reason other than to trumpet a very casual approach to sex that would seem not just quaint but downright dangerous just a few years later. The music, the clothes, the discos with their glowing lights in the darkness, all of it. But there’s never been anything, not one thing, that no matter how fierce the backlash against it, didn’t produce at least something worthwhile. And that was Donna Summer.
“Last Dance” has been a favorite song of mine ever since I saw that bad-but-fun movie (that a seven-year-old kid probably shouldn’t have been watching, but thank God for liberal parents). It sounds like typical overlong disco, with its throbbing beat. But it has real melody behind it, and its master stroke lies in its slow introduction, where Ms. Summer imbues the lyrics with more than a touch of sadness.
Last dance Last dance for love Yes, it’s my last chance For romance tonight
I need you by me Beside me, to guide me To hold me, to scold me ‘Cause when I’m bad I’m so, so bad….
The way Ms. Summer sings this, it’s not a woman trying to be seductive. It’s a woman feeling desperate. She is being seductive, but she’s also pleading. How many others have there been this night? It doesn’t matter; this is the last one. She needs you, but not because of anything special about you…it’s just the fact that the place is closing and they’re playing the last song of the night. This is it — last call, the last dance.
The beat starts now, and the dance part of the song begins.
So let’s dance the last dance Let’s dance the last dance Let’s dance this last dance tonight
The lyrics repeat, now over the thumping disco beat and the synths and the strings and the brass. This all plays out like a dance on the floor, quick and thumping and seductive, but then there’s a very brief B section where Ms. Summer sings this:
I can’t be sure That you’re the one for me But all that I ask Is that you dance with me….
That bit right there, that brief, brief moment, elevates the song to something more than just a “Hey let’s dance and then go screw” kind of song. (And the fact that the short version that you hear on the radio omits that part is a major reason why that short version should never be listened to by anybody.) The song takes on a secondary melody, with a break of several seconds in the singing between the second and third lines. What Ms. Summer is saying here is: “I’m looking for someone, I’m looking for the one…and I don’t know if you’re the one and for right now, I’m not asking you to be.” The dance is all there is…the dance on the floor, and maybe the dance to come, the one in bed.
That tiny B section is so blunt in its desperation, and Ms. Summer sounds so vulnerable as she sings it, that “Last Dance” rises, right there, above its genre and its poor reputation that lingers to this day.
The song includes a second slow section, which repeats the lyrics of the opening. It’s an interesting structural shift, and I wonder if it’s not partially meant to depict that second dance, the one that the singer hopes the last dance is leading to. As the song shifts back yet again to the faster tempo, Ms. Summer delivers one of the most amazing high notes I’ve ever heard from a singer (at about the 6:20 mark in the song). It’s the perfect, glorious, vocal climax of a wonderful song.
Donna Summer’s voice was an absolute miracle, as was the complete and utter command she had of that instrument when she was at the peak of her powers. Here’s how good she was, just three years ago, performing “Last Dance” live:
And here she is performing The Star-spangled Banner before a Red Sox game. I didn’t know this performance existed until just tonight.
Donna Summer was a beautiful, transcendently wonderful singer and artist. I truly, deeply hate that she’s gone from this world, and it’s people like her that make me wish so hard that there’s a next one.
I kind of screwed up my calendar this year, which means that I missed the start of Black History Month when posting last week’s selection. For the last bunch of years I’ve been using this month to feature Black music in this space, and I’ll be doing that for the balance of February here (and probably into March). As is often the case, I’ll be featuring composers I’m not familiar with but should be. I’m starting with a work that is featured on an album that was suggested to me by the YouTube Music algorithm, and now, reading about the composer as I write this, I’m struck by the sad experience of this composer’s life and the fate of her music after her life ended. The composer is Margaret Bonds, and the piece is Montgomery Variations (1964).
Margaret Bonds (1913-1972) was among the first generation of great Black American musicians to achieve genuine renown in the classical music world. She was a close friend of Langston Hughes as well, to the point that his death plunged her into a depression that she never really managed to overcome. Bonds died of a heart attack at only 59 years of age, and because she had no will, the disposition of her archives–her compositions and her papers–was messy, to put it mildly. Many of her compositions were lost and some were literally rescued from refuse piles. To this day the copyrights of Bonds’s surviving works are murky, providing a stark example of the absurdity of extending copyrights as long as we have. Margaret Bonds has been dead for over fifty years, and she has no living descendants or heirs…and yet, we are still over a decade from the earliest her works might reach the public domain.
The work today, Montgomery Variations, is just that: a series of variations on a theme, in this case the Black spiritual “I Want Jesus To Walk With Me”. Bonds composed this work as tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. after visiting Montgomery, AL in 1963. Montgomery was a key location in the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s, and the Montgomery Variations are a meditation on those struggles and the way they played out. Bonds wrote her own program notes for the work (via):
“The Montgomery Variations” is a group of freestyle variations based on the Negro Spiritual theme, “I want Jesus to Walk with Me.” The treatment suggests the manner in which Bach constructed his partitats – a bold statement of the theme, followed by variations of the theme in the same key – major and minor.
The words are as follows:
I want Jesus to walk with me. I want Jesus to walk with me. All along my pilgrim journey, Lord, I want Jesus to walk with me.
In my trials, Lord, walk with me. In my trials, Lord, walk with me. When my heart is almost breaking, Lord, I want Jesus to walk with me.
When I’m in trouble, Lord, walk with me. When I’m in trouble, Lord, walk with me. When my head is bowed in sorrow, Lord, I want Jesus to walk with me.
[Bonds continues:] Because of the personal meanings of the Negro spiritual themes, Margaret Bonds always avoids over-development of the melodies.
“The Montgomery Variations” were written after the composer’s visit to Montgomery, Alabama, and the surrounding area in 1963 (on tour with Eugene Brice and the Manhattan Melodaires).
In December 1960, “The Ballad of the Brown King” was dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr., and presented at Clark Center, YWCA in New York, by the Church of the Master and Clark Center as a benefit to Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Langston Hughes, the author of the text, was present on this occasion.
Decision Under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. and SCLC, Negroes in Montgomery decided to boycott the bus company and to fight for their rights as citizens.
Prayer Meeting True to custom, prayer meetings precede their action. Prayer meetings start quietly with humble petitions to God. During the course of the meeting, members seized with religious fervor shout and dance. Oblivious to their fellow worshippers they exhibit their love of God and their Faith in Deliverance by gesticulation, clapping and beating their feet.
March The Spirit of the Nazarene marching with them, the Negroes of Montgomery walked to their work rather than be segregated on the buses. The entire world, symbolically with them, marches.
Dawn in Dixie Dixie, the home of the Camellias known as “pink perfection,” magnolias, jasmine and Spanish moss, awakened to the fact that something new was happening in the South.
One Sunday in the South Children were in Sunday School learning about Jesus, the Prince of Peace. Southern “die-hards” planted a bomb and several children were killed.
Lament The world was shaken by the cruelty of the Sunday School bombing. Negroes, as usual, leaned on their Jesus to carry them through this crisis of grief and humiliation.
Benediction A benign God, Father and Mother to all people, pours forth Love to His children – the good and the bad alike.
Here are the Montgomery Variations by Margaret Bonds.
It’s February and Black History Month, a time when I try to spotlight works by Black composers. We start this time with Hannah Kendall, a British composer born in 1984. From her website bio:
Known for her attentive arrangements and immersive world-building, Hannah Kendall’s music looks beyond the boundaries of composition. Her work bridges gaps between different musical cultures, both honouring and questioning the contemporary tradition while telling new stories through it. Contrasting fine detail with limitless abandon, she has become renowned both as a composer and a storyteller, confronting our collective history with narratively-driven pieces centred on bold mission statements.
Marked by striking and often polarising dynamics, her large-scale work simmers on the surface, and is upturned by the briefest moments of bombast. Ensemble piecessubvert audience expectations of ‘quiet and loud’, ‘still and moving’; scattering those musical opposites unexpectedly. The sounds are visceral, but their placement is complicated, disclosing the detail that exists beneath. While hinging on intense moments, Kendall’s music is also staggeringly intricate, manoeuvring tiny decisions that reveal themselves on further listens.
The piece here is Spark Catchers, which she describes thusly:
The Spark Catchers was commissioned and premiered at the Proms in 2017. The piece opened Chineke!’s debut concert at the festival. The group is majority minority ethnic players, and it was such a momentous occasion, and a privilege to have written the piece for the occasion.
It takes inspiration from Lemn Sissay’s poem with the same title, which he wrote for the 2012 London Olympics, and is permanently etched into one of the transformers at the stadium. It depicts the working lives of the women who worked in the Bryant and May match factory, which once stood on the edge of the Olympic Park, and how they had to keep a watchful eye, catching any stray sparks that might set the factory alight.
It’s an interesting piece, contrasting rhythmic passages that suggest industrialism with meditative passages that seem also vaguely industrial, like the floor of a factory at night when all the machines have been shut off and the shadows are slowly moving….
I have just finished reading James Baldwin’s powerful essay-book No Name in the Street, in which Baldwin describes his early life and his encounters later with many figures, some seminal and some less-so, and how he relates all of this to his larger experience as a Black man in 20th century America. It does not come as a surprise to observe how many of his observations can be, and are being by others, advanced as true to this very day. For all that we, for certain definitions of “we”, like to pat ourselves on the back for how far we’ve come, it’s very much worth the effort to look at history from the vantage point of those who don’t think we’ve come very far at all. And that view is absolutely justified, which goes a long way toward explaining the vehement degree to which many in power now are working hard to make sure this view is as hard to hear as possible.
I could say more, but…no. Better to listen to the voices we’re shouting down, and to amplify them, if possible. Here are three excerpts from Baldwin. (Page numbers are from the Library of America edition of No Name in the Street, which appears in their volume, James Baldwin: Collected Essays. (A word about usage: Baldwin wrote fifty years ago, well before some aspects of terminology were settled or adopted, such as the recent standard of capitalizing Black. Opening capitalizations of these passages are added to differentiate one passage from the next.)
WHEN THE PAGAN and the slave spit on the cross and pick up the fun, it means that the halls of history are about to be invaded once again, destroying and dispersing the present occupants. These, then, can call only on their history to save them–that same history which, in the eyes, of the subjugated, has already condemned them. Therefore, Faulkner hoped that American blacks would have the generosity to “go slow”–would allow white people, that is, the time to save themselves, as though they had not had more than enough time already, and as thought heir victims still believed in white miracles–and Camus repeated the word “justice” as though it were a magical incantation to which all of Africa would immediately respond. American blacks could not “go slow” because they had made a rendezvous with history for the purpose of taking their children out of history’s hands. And Camus’ “justice” was a concept forged and betrayed in Europe, in exactly the same way the Christian church has betrayed and dishonored and blasphemed that Saviour in whose name they have slaughtered millions and millions and millions of people. And if this mighty objection seems trivial, it can only be because of the total hardening of the heart and the coarsening of the conscience among those people who believed that their power has given them the exclusive right to history. If the Christians do not believe in their Saviour (who has certainly, furthermore, failed to save them) why, then, wonder the unredeemed, should I abandon my gods for yours? For I know my gods are real: they have enabled me to withstand you. (p. 382-383)
THIS IS A FORMULA for a nation’s or a kingdom’s decline, for no kingdom can maintain itself by force alone. Force does not work the way its advocates seem to think it does. It does not, for example, reveal to the victim the strength of his adversary. On the contrary, it reveals the weakness, even the panic of his adversary, and this revelation invests the victim with patience. Furthermore, it is ultimately fatal to create too many victims. The victor can do nothing with these victims, for they do not belong to him, but–to the victims. They belong to the people he is fighting. The people know this, and as inexorably as the roll call–the honor roll–of victims expands, so does their will become inexorable: they resolve that these dead, their brethren, shall not have died in vain. When this point is reached, however long the battle may go on, the victor can never be the victor: on the contrary, all his energies, his entire life, are bound up in a terror he cannot articulate, a mystery he cannot read, a battle he cannot win–he has simply become the prisoner of the people he thought to cow, chain, or murder into submission. (p. 406-407)
THOSE WHO RULE this country now–as distinguished, it must be said, from governing it–are determined to smash the Panthers [the Black Panther Party] in order to hide the truth of the American black situation. They want to hide this truth from black people–by making it impossible for them to respond to it–and they would like to hide it from the world; and not, alas, because they area ashamed of it but because they have no intention of changing it. They cannot afford to change it. They would not know how to go about changing, it, even if their imaginations were capable of encompassing the concept of black freedom. But this concept lives in their imaginations, and in the popular imagination, only as a nightmare. Blacks have never been free in this country, never was it intended that they should be free, and the spectre of so dreadful a freedom–the idea of a license so bloody and abandoned–conjures up another, unimaginable country, a country in which no decent, God-fearing white man or woman can live. A civilized country is, by definition, a country dominated by whites, in which the blacks clearly know their place. This is really the way the generality of white Americans feel, and they consider–quite rightly, as far as any concern for their interest goes–that it is they who, now, at long last, are represented in Washington. (p. 462-463)
TO BE AN AFRO-AMERICAN, or an American black, is to be in the situation, intolerably exaggerated, of all those who have ever found themselves part of a civilization which they could in no wise honorably defend–which they were compelled, indeed, endlessly to attack and condemn–and who yet spoke out of the most passionate love, hoping to make the kingdom new, to make it honorable and worthy of life. Whoever is part of whatever civilization helplessly loves some aspects of it, and some of the people in it. A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one’s compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of the people, even their hatred, is moving because it is blind: it is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction. I think black people have always felt this about America, and Americans, and have always seen, spinning above the thoughtless American head, the shape of the wrath to come. (p. 474)
That last passage is one that haunts me especially, because I’m not sure that Baldwin’s “wrath to come” has unfolded yet.
