DETROIT — As the Detroit Opera orchestra tuned itself in for a recent rehearsal, the outline of a huge spacecraft loomed over the well.
Below that ship you could see a contrasting image: a pastoral painting, of a mountain range, with a river cutting a path between peaks, reminiscent of the background behind Malcolm X as he spoke at the Audubon Ballroom in New York on Feb. 21. . , 1965 – just before his murder.
Even before a single note was drilled to Anthony Davis’ opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X”—which opens Saturday at the Detroit Opera House here and will travel to the Metropolitan Opera in 2023—there was already a conversation. moving between imaginative and historical ways of thinking.
When conductor Kazem Abdullah began leading the company’s orchestra through the work’s overture—a civil rights bio-opera rarely revived since its landmark 1986 premiere at the New York City Opera—a similar conversation unfolded in the score. . The layers of soaring figures in ostinato patterns, rapidly changing time signatures, percussive passages with an almost airy swing feel, along with others haunted by grim disaster, evoke elements of music history in unexpected ways.
That’s fitting for Davis, 71, who as a student at Yale University in the late 1960s and early 1970s studied opera scores by Wagner, Berg, and Strauss, as well as attending concerts by leading jazz artists. He later witnessed some early rehearsals of Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians”, while simultaneously playing with Rashied Ali, a drummer best known for his work with John Coltrane.
The score for “X” is in multiple modernisms. One scene, in which a social worker visits Malcolm’s childhood home and finds it chaotic, is driven by complex polyrhythms. Yet a pianist is also instructed to play tone clusters behind an improvised trombone solo. Later, when Malcolm first learns about the Nation of Islam and Elijah Muhammad in prison, Davis writes dissonant harmony that serves as a recall to a previous traumatic scene, while also acting as an interrogative, ambient premonition of the murder of the main character.
“With some composers, you hear everything as one line,” Davis said. “With me it always competes with different voices.”
THIS PRODUCTION is a first for Robert O’Hara, the Tony Award-nominated director of ‘Slave Play’, who had only worked in opera in ‘X’. In an interview during a rehearsal break, he said the idea of the spaceship “is that it comes from the future, that we are told the Malcolm X story by people who are beyond us.”
After that day’s rehearsal, Davis said, “It’s so funny because I like science fiction, and I wrote a science fiction opera” – 1989’s “Under the Double Moon” – “but I never thought of ‘X’ like that. .”
In the opening scenes, “X” introduces a black community in Michigan as they process the news of the murder of Reverend Earl Little – Malcolm’s father, and a preacher in the form of Marcus Garvey. During an aria for Malcolm’s new mother Louise, she recalls local Ku Klux Klan terrorism on the eve of her son’s birth. Rings of fire engulf the spaceship’s surface.
A new staging like this, Davis said, could represent “how people in the future will see it, see Malcolm, and see the whole story.” And it also provides a new way to hear the music. “It’s not about this completely realistic rendering,” Davis said, before comparing the work to magical realism.
But to O’Hara, the spaceship means even more than that. It’s a symbolic critique of the opera world, which rarely takes stock of black composers and only got serious about programming their music after the murder of George Floyd and a new wave of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. The Met, the largest performing arts institution in the United States, it was only this season that it programmed the first work by a black composer, Terence Blanchard’s ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones’.
“We are actually saying that this space cannot contain the opera; we need to crash and take over space,” O’Hara said. “It costs us something to tell the story in which a black man is murdered at the end. And it should cost you something to witness it.”
Many people will probably witness it. After the premiere of the new staging in Detroit, it will travel through Opera Omaha (the city where Malcolm X was born) and the Met, as well as Seattle Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago — all partners in what has become a coast-to-coast co-production.
“X” has never been played so much. And interest in it would pay off in greater visibility for Davis himself, who may be the least known of the great living American composers, but whose career is ripe for attention and reappraisal.
DAVIS ALSO HAS roots as a pianist. Thulani Davis — the poet and scholar, as well as Anthony Davis’ cousin, who wrote the librettos for “X” and his 1997 opera “Amistad” — recalled a time in her twenties when she realized he was building a formidable reputation in jazz clubs .
“I’d go to the Tin Palace and Cecil Taylor could be at the bar,” she said. “One night Anthony was playing. And Cecil is a very harsh critic. At one point he leaned over to Anthony and said, ‘You don’t have to play blah blah – a famous pianist from the 1940s – you don’t have to play him.'”
She continued: “If I was Anthony, that would have terrified me. But Anthony really has a lot of guts, and he kept going. Later in the evening I realized that Cecil respected him and thought he was a good player, otherwise he wouldn’t have said anything.”
Trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith, an early mentor of Anthony Davis, said in a recent telephone interview that he considered “X”, “Amistad” and “Lear on the 2nd Floor” – a riff on Shakespeare – to be works on an equal footing. with John Adams’ Nixon in China, one of the most important and well-known American operas of the past half century.
“They address issues that are vital and important to American history,” Smith said. “But also, if America wants to survive – and that’s a big question, because nobody knows if it will survive the next 10 or 15 years – but if it wants to survive, then his work is critical as motivation and inspiration for that level.” of survival.”
That said, Davis isn’t the best champion of his past works, as he admitted in a recent interview. Nine of his essential composer-performer albums on the Gramavision label from the 1980s and early 1990s — including “X”‘s first commercial — are now out of print.
“At some point, I was drawn to the idea of being this ‘underground’ person,” he said. “When you do this work, not everyone sees everything. It’s just funny because I was touring Europe – and they have no idea I’m doing opera.”
It’s also been a long time since Davis listened to some of his earliest recordings that are still in print, such as 1978’s “Past Lives.” On that album, he covered music by Thelonious Monk and debuted some of his own compositions – sounding sometimes as someone eager to inherit the piano chair in Charles Mingus’ group from Don Pullen, another avant-garde with showman flair.
During his early development as a keyboardist, Davis studied Monk and Bud Powell, as well as Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner. As a classical composer he did not close that part of his life. “Categories can trap you, really stifle creativity,” he said. “I like to imagine they don’t exist.”
DAVIS’S SPACIOUS STYLE reached new heights in his 2019 opera ‘The Central Park Five’, based on the true story of the black teenagers who were wrongly convicted of assaulting a white female jogger, which won him the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for music. Here Davis’s modernist classical language clashed with references to both Duke Ellington and Parliament-Funkadelic. But these weren’t tips of the hat for their own good; the music always shifts in the service of the story.
In “Central Park,” while the teens are caught in rhetorical webs spun by ambitious investigators and prosecutors — not to mention a real estate developer named Donald Trump making headlines — the boys’ access to that huge library of musical references are taken from the score just as quickly as their freedom is revoked in the plot. The sweet mix of their common voices, which Davis considered to be the a cappella group Take 6 as arranged by Gil Evans, is replaced by more angular music of relentless questioning.
A blistering new production of that opera, directed by Nataki Garrett and conducted by Abdullah at Portland Opera this spring, will stream on demand from that company’s website until May 20. Elsewhere, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project will give its own semi-staged concert performance of “X” on June 17, conducted by Gil Rose – a longtime champion of Davis’s music – in Boston.
Between the much-documented Boston Modern Orchestra Project and the Met’s Live in HD series and album output, we’re pretty much guaranteed to see multiple new recordings of “X.” But what about the rest of his catalog? While other former Gramavision artists such as La Monte Young and Jamaaladeen Tacuma have reclaimed the rights to their ’80s recordings — making them newly available on the digital platform Bandcamp — Davis’ in-print discography remains frustratingly slim. (The most desperately in need of reissues, outside of “X,” are the chamber music of “Hemispheres” and the violin concerto on “The Ghost Factory”.)
Davis acknowledged that for a long time he had not prioritized recordings, nor possible recordings, nor previous efforts. “My focus was more on the operas, to develop my own musical language,” he said. “But that’s definitely because of all my experiences playing creative music. That’s been a big part of that.”
On his development of that language: A pair of chamber dramas from the past few decades — “Lear on the 2nd Floor” and “Lilith,” a bawdy, biblical operetta — reveal a quirky and exciting new aspect of Davis’s art: namely, experimental writing. show tunes.
The first hint that Davis had a Broadway side to him may have come with the satirical aria “If I Were a Black Man,” sung by a white Symbionese Liberation Army terrorist character in “Tania,” Davis’s comedy opera about Patty Hearst. , from 1992 Once an outlier in his toolbox, these unruly show tunes have become a fascination through and through.
If you watch a YouTube video of a “Lear” production from the University of California, San Diego — where Davis has been teaching since 1998 — you might be shocked to see that you’re only one of about 1,500 viewers. And the SoundCloud playlist of “Lilith” indicates that only a few dozen listeners sampled it.
But that could change. With the revival of ‘X’ at Detroit Opera, we may be on the cusp of a broader reappraisal of Davis’s body of work. We should be sure, at least. As O’Hara said in an interview, “I just think it’s Anthony’s time. It’s already over before its time.”