Saturday, November 9, 2024
8:00 PM
The BSO and Thomas Wilkins mark the 50th anniversary of Duke Ellington’s death with four of this American musical genius’s symphonically ambitious works, beginning with the orchestral Three Black Kings and Night Creature. Then, pianist Gerald Clayton is the soloist in the optimistic New World A-Coming. And Renese King leads a cast of incredible vocalists in selections from Ellington’s Sacred Concerts, conceived as a parallel to traditional European church music, featuring styles at the core of jazz, including gospel, the blues, and spirituals in a multi-dimensional, oratorio-like presentation.
Thomas Wilkins, conductor
Gerald Clayton, piano
Renese King, vocalist
The Duke Ellington Tribute Singers: Christina DeVaughn, Amy Onyonyi, Carolyn Saxon, Renese King, Karen Tobin-Guild, Laura Vecchione, Michael Bradley, Daon Drisdom, Philip Lima, Davron Monroe, Samuel Moscoso, Donnell Patterson
Duke Ellington Anniversary Celebration
ALL-ELLINGTON PROGRAM
Three Black Kings
Night Creature
New World A-Coming, for piano and orchestra
Selections from the Sacred Concerts
In a preview of this program, conductor Thomas Wilkins describes the way each piece reflects particular aspects of Duke Ellington's musical expression and perspectives on life, spirituality, and art. To listen, use the player below, and read the transcript underneath.
TRANSCRIPT (lightly edited for clarity):
Brian McCreath I'm Brian McCreath at Symphony Hall with Thomas Wilkins, who's back here with the Boston Symphony for a really, really special concert. Thom, thanks so much for your time today. And thanks for talking about Duke Ellington, a fantastic program this week.
Thomas Wilkins Duke Ellington is a great guy to have to talk about, I got to tell you.
Brian McCreath Absolutely. So, let's talk about Duke Ellington in the context of these pieces that you have programmed for this, a kind of specific look at Duke Ellington as the concert composer. You know, we think of Cotton Club and "Mood Indigo," these fantastic parts of the Duke Ellington story. But this is a little different: major pieces that were conceived of as concert pieces, and even with full orchestra in a couple of cases and arranged for full orchestra in every case for the concert. So, tell me about the first piece on the program, Three Black Kings. This comes from very late in his life, so late that he actually didn't even complete it. His son Mercer completed Three Black Kings. But tell me why this was the important piece to you to start this Duke Ellington tribute concert.
Thomas Wilkins It's a very special piece for me because I've lived with it a very long time, and I love the fact that he chose these three particular kings because of the nature of who they were. The first was the black King of the Magi, that's Balthazar. And then Solomon, and what he does with Solomon is place that emphasis not so much on his wisdom, but on his love of love. And then he was a very good friend of and admired very much Martin Luther King. And so, the third one is an homage to Martin Luther King, which I thought was kind of clever to actually do two kings and then Martin Luther King. But I think it's a great way to open the program because, in a sense and it's kind of a weird sense, but I feel like in the opening of that first one, we get not just Balthazar, but we get a little Africa in there, with the percussion instruments, you know, the conga and the marimba. And it just feels like, and the rhythm that's played, it just sort of unwinds our experience right away from the very beginning. And in very short order, you know you're not necessarily in Africa, but you're certainly in the world of Duke Ellington. By the time the full orchestra comes in, we know where we are. And I just think it's a great way to start.
Brian McCreath And a great way to connect the entire Duke Ellington story, because that sound of Africa that you're talking about, that stretches way, way back to those Cotton Club years in the 1920s, right?
Thomas Wilkins And, you know, he was breaking ground. He was playing in clubs where he wasn't supposed to be. And I think that's part of the thing, too. And to your earlier point, the things that are on this program, this represents that period in Duke Ellington's life when he literally fell in love with the orchestra, and he literally fell in love with this whole idea of writing for the orchestra. He said it was an expensive toy, but because there's so many voices in the orchestra, I think that was part of the joy that he had of writing for the orchestra. And, you know, he said, there's only two kinds of music: good music and the other kind. And so, with this endeavor, or these endeavors, as it were, he essentially rips away all the labels and categories and said, "Let's just let music just be music."
Brian McCreath And so Three Black Kings, coming from very late in his life in the early 70s, ripping away those labels, though, began really in the 1940s, at least, then, when he had a series of concerts at Carnegie Hall. And that's where New World A-Coming comes from. He wanted to write a piece that wasn't another dance band gig piece. This was something that he wanted as a concert piece. So, tell me about New World A-Coming and what your particular perspective is on that.
Thomas Wilkins There's a part of me that wants to say it's a conversation between the orchestra and the pianist. But rather, I think it's just a series of reflections. You know, he wrote the piece for himself, obviously. I love the fact that the orchestra invites the pianist to come in to play. In fact, I even said it in rehearsal that that very first sound has to be warm and beautiful at its inception, not after you've already started moving the bow because it's a fresh hug in that opening with that music. Then he comes in and he just talks. And then when he's done, the orchestra comes back in and says, "Well, how about considering this?" And then the pianist comes back and does it again. And over and over again, we do it this way. And Gerald [Clayton] and I have worked together quite a lot and we've done this piece quite a lot together. And we just kind of know where each other is going because he's not playing what's on the page. For the most part. He's not playing what's on the page, but he always comes back to the page. So, I know he's done by going off on his own world. And he says, "You know, my biggest challenge is to make sure that when I go off on my own, it still sounds like Duke Ellington, because this is Duke Ellington's piece not Duke Ellington piece that he wrote. This is Duke Ellington's piece."
Brian McCreath And I got to imagine that Duke Ellington would appreciate exactly this, that there is a performer bringing his own self to this in the context of Duke's own compositions.
Thomas Wilkins Yeah, absolutely. Without question.
Brian McCreath So then another piece on this first half of the program, Night Creature, honestly, wasn't a piece that I knew before, and it is just rollicking good fun. So tell me about the place of this and what this piece tells you about Duke Ellington.
Thomas Wilkins Yeah, this is early, as you said. I hadn't heard of this either. And what happened was, when I was asked to do a Duke Ellington festival in Los Angeles, I just started scouring, and then I ran across Night Creature and I went, "Where's this piece been? How did I not know this piece existed?" It's three dances, basically, and one says, there's a bug who is blind, right? And he can exist during the daylight, but when it's nighttime, he feels like he's on equal footing because no one can see. But he's got these feelers, so he knows that if he's nearing danger, he can just go off in another direction. But he enjoys the night because it frees him up to dance. And the second movement, the same thing: everyone is dancing in some form. And there's a queen in there somewhere that everyone's trying to impress with their dancing. And so, it's just clever. And talk about Duke Ellington's grasp of what the orchestra sounds like, even where he has the keyboard play in the second movement, it sounds like bugs, high up, and the notes kind of flitter by. And then when the woodwinds come in, he uses the upper woodwinds, and they also flitter by. And then all of a sudden, the dance starts and it's just rocking.
Brian McCreath It is. It's just a really, really fun piece, but also one that Duke Ellington conceived to be with a full symphony orchestra, written for Symphony of the Air. So, what does the symphonic setting do for Duke Ellington's voice? You said he was falling in love with the orchestra at one point. But what does that setting really do for his music that the traditional, if you want to put it that way, the original Duke Ellington big band sound didn't do.
Thomas Wilkins Adds. I was trying to think of a single word. I was going to say "legitimizes," but that's not fair. It adds. You know, I had someone say to me once, "I don't know how you could come up with the country's ten top American composers and not have Duke Ellington on that list." So even if you're talking about all of his big band stuff, that's still composition. And so, what this orchestral stuff does is adds to that canon that already existed, but with a whole different voice. And so, two kinds of music...
Brian McCreath Sacred Concerts. Was it four of them overall that he did, right? Right. And so, you've curated a set of seven selections drawn from those Sacred Concerts, these, not liturgical, but spiritual experiences that he wrote for specific churches, beginning with Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, also Saint John the Divine [in New York City]. They're all meant to be performed in sacred spaces, and they tap into the sense of the sacred that he himself felt. So just tell me about your own way of curating this and how you decided on which selections... Were you looking for some sort of arc through seven particular selections?
Thomas Wilkins That was exactly it. There were three that everyone knows about, these Sacred Concerts, and I heard about them, geez, 40 years ago. But when I heard them, I thought, "Well, that's not going to work with the orchestra." So, I didn't pay much attention to them. But then I thought, "Wait a minute, what if I could figure out a way?" In fact, no. I think I was even asked if there was a way we could do some of the Sacred Concerts because we had engaged these singers. So, I started combing through. And one of the reasons that I chose what I chose is because they're all pointing to the story of the truth of God. And this was Duke Ellington's desire. He wanted everyone to believe that there is really a God. People say, "Well, yeah, but he played in a big band. He drank and he smoked and he was a womanizer and all that stuff." Well, yeah, but that's what we are as Christians. We're a bunch of hypocrites, right?
But in reality, he was religious for almost all of his life. One of his parents was Methodist, one was a Baptist. And he was attending church services with them. And what he was forming was a sense of how different those two church services were. One was kind of sustained and held back, and one was full of energy and and vitality. And he thought, "I want to combine those two things with these Sacred Concerts." And so, in each of those songs that we chose, his point is, there ain't but the one God. And [the songs], "My Love," "Ain't but the One God," "Something 'bout Believing," there's something about this, "Listen, guys. There's something about believing that just makes your soul sing." Right? And so constantly he's trying to make the case. Then, the penultimate one is "Tell Me It's the Truth." I wanted that in that spot because it was the last doubter saying, "Of all the stuff that you've said in your previous songs, tell me those things are true." And then finally, at the end, it's the picture of God, "The Majesty of God." And so that's how I got to those particular ones.
Brian McCreath That actually, again, connects back to New World A-Coming. What he said about that piece is that I'm portraying a place where God accepts everyone, no matter who they are, what they are, where they come from. We're all in this together. And that same theology, really, is behind the Sacred Concerts.
Thomas Wilkins Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad you made that point, because he wished for a world with a moral fiber in its being, and a sense that we actually need to behave in a manner that says that we belong to each other. What we see with this music period is the desire of an artist to help people be better human beings throughout the course of the whole concert.
Brian McCreath I think that's a concert that couldn't be better timed in our moment right now. So I'm really happy that you're doing it, and I appreciate your time today, Thomas.
Thomas Wilkins It's my great pleasure. Always fun to be with you.