George Lewis
Afterword
Joelle Lamarre, Gwendolyn Brown, Julian Terrell Otis; International Contemporary Ensemble/David Fulmer
Tundra TUN015 118:13 mins (2 discs)
In 2010, composer George Lewis noted that, ‘Communities provide access. They provide access to history, they provide access to key individuals and traditions … How to provide access to tradition and history is extremely important.’ Five years later, Lewis explored these themes and more in his first opera, Afterword.
The work’s focus is the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), the Chicago collective formed in 1965 (by pianists Muhal Richard Abrams and Jodie Christian, drummer Steve McCall and composer Phil Cohran) to support Black experimental performers and composers in the face of oppression, social injustice – and musical stereotyping. Drawing on interviews from newspapers and A Power Stronger Than Itself – Lewis’s book on the AACM, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2008 – an unnamed soprano, contralto and tenor evoke its backstory, formation and purpose, embodying multiple community perspectives through a series of historical episodes. From life in the Jim Crow deep South via the Great Migration north, thence Paris and a return to consider achievements and ongoing difficulties, ‘music, collectivity, ethical action, and self-realisation’ are cast as ‘keys to the future.’
Ruminative, discursive and sometimes didactic, it’s a cerebral work – and, at a slow-moving two hours, a rather taxing one, the weight leavened by the inventiveness of the instrumental writing and by astute performances from the cast and International Contemporary Ensemble under conductor David Fulmer. Most striking is the furious delicacy that underpins the often languid vocal lines, with spiky, finely drawn dissonant textures and motifs rippling to and fro the seven players, as if in musical manifestation of the ideas debated.
Those ideas remain central to Black musicians’ ongoing struggle for creative freedom and identity. Afterword demands that we hear those not just bearing witness to that struggle, but living it. Steph Power