JP Johnson: De Organizer; The Dreamy Kid (excerpts)
Rabihah Davis Dunn, Olivia Duval, Emery Stephens et al; University of Michigan Opera Theatre and Symphony Orchestra/Kenneth Kiesler
Naxos 8.669041 66:01 mins
Musicologist Cody M. Jones tellingly describes these works – one complete, the other receiving its world-premiere recording in linked excerpts – as ‘Two operas of the “Shadow Culture”’. The term was coined by Naomi André for the Black opera tradition longstanding in America and elsewhere, parallel to – but effectively excluded from –dominant white opera narratives.
Both pieces were written by the distinguished jazz composer-pianist James P. Johnson (1894-1955) in the late 1930s, and lovingly reconstructed from partial scores by his equally notable younger peer, James Dapogny (1940-2019). Their passionate performances by Kenneth Kiesler’s University of Michigan Opera Theatre and Symphony Orchestra will undoubtedly help bring Johnson’s work, and the wider culture of which he was part, to greater attention.
From hope to tragedy, De Organizer and The Dreamy Kid paint vivid pictures of Jim Crow-era African-American life. The former’s libretto, by Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes (1902-1967), relates an optimistic tale of community solidarity: the eponymous Organiser is eagerly awaited at a sharecroppers’ gathering, which Johnson depicts in evocative jazz- and spiritual-inflected – often paradoxically jaunty – numbers including the ‘Hungry Blues’. Brushing aside the Overseer’s threats, the uplifting outcome is the formation of a union amid vows to bring about workers’ freedom.
Painfully – yet with nimbly varying genre-defying styles – The Dreamy Kid heads in the opposite direction. A setting of Eugene O’Neill’s 1919 play, the intrusion of brutal injustice into its family deathbed scene is all-too redolent of today’s ‘persistent racist structures that devalue Black lives’. Dreamy has killed a white man in self-defence but chooses to stay with his dying Mammy, knowing he’ll be caught by the police, who are finally – ominously – heard storming the stairs. Steph Power