by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
In a free concert tonight at 7:30, the Oberlin Sonny Rollins Jazz Ensemble, Bobby Ferrazza, director, will play original works by members of the band and fresh arrangements of Rollins’ compositions along with jazz standards at the ’Sco (Dionysus Club) in Wilder Hall.
For details of these and other classical events, visit the ClevelandClassical.com Concert Listings.
INTERESTING READ:
The New York Times sent David Allen to sit in on rehearsals by The Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Music Center in advance of their concerts this week at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Read How the Cleveland Orchestra Stays at the Top of Classical Music here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
By Jarrett Hoffman
Born on this date in 1895 in Coffeyville, Kansas, Eva Jessye is known as the first Black woman to achieve international recognition as a choral conductor.
Founder of the Eva Jessye Choir (at first named the Original Dixie Jubilee Singers), she and the group frequented the silver screen, the stage, the radio, and the record booth as their renown grew and grew. Two of their most famous performances came in New York. She directed her choir in the 1935 premiere of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (and then in every incarnation of the show for 30 years), and in the 1934 Broadway production of Four Saints in Three Acts, an opera by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein.
The latter was of industry-wide importance, not only musically — a departure in style from what the public expected of Black musicians — but also economically. The choir was paid for rehearsals after Jessye demanded it, pushing back against a tradition of discriminatory salaries and, more simply, the nonpayment of choruses for rehearsal.
Continuing her commitment to civil rights, Jessye was part of a Porgy and Bess cast strike in Washington, D.C., forcing the management of the National Theatre to temporarily desegregate its seating. In that same city, decades later, the Eva Jessye Choir was named the official choral ensemble for the 1963 March on Washington, giving performances including We Shall Overcome.
Listen to the Eva Jessye Choir in a 1940 Decca recording of “Clara, Clara” from Porgy and Bess here — they enter at 1:10.
Jessye published My Spirituals in 1927, a cross between a book of arrangements and an autobiography. Soprano Marti Newland gives a live performance of I’m a Poor Li’l Orphan from that book here.
She taught at Pittsburg State University (Pittsburg, Kansas) and the University of Michigan, although in her letters she expressed frustration at being under-appreciated in Ann Arbor, and at being remembered only for her work on Porgy and Bess rather than her other activities, including her mentorship of young artists.
Her own compositions include The Life of Christ in Negro Spirituals, The Chronicle of Job, and the oratorio Paradise Lost and Regained, which drew on spirituals as well as on John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
We’ll end with a quote from Jessye:
“If anything is going to bring this world together, it’s going to be music. It’s going to be music, and it’s going to be the arts. Nothing else will accomplish this. Because nothing except the arts will reach the people. It must be communication spirit to spirit.”
