Up From The Underground

By Michael Walsh

It's the slurs that are bothering Anthony Davis. Not racial cracks or snooty disparagement -- not those slurs at all. No, the slurs that have drawn his ire are the little hemispheres that composers write over groups of notes to indicate a phrase. Musical slurs. Value-free slurs. And, insists Davis, they are all wrong.

"No!" Davis exclaims, sitting in an empty Midwestern concert hall listening to the first rehearsal of his new Violin Concerto by the Kansas City Symphony. "I know I wrote slurs over those eighth notes, but they're all jumbled together. They sound like mush." Davis jumps up and heads toward the conductor, score in hand. "We need to hear each one separately," he says. "Dig-a-da-dum!" he scats, his right hand punching the air in emphasis. All at once, something that had been mumbled turns articulate as the strings bite into their parts.

"Sometimes I forget when I'm notating that not everybody hears the music the way I do," says Davis, 37. But hearing it they are these days, and cheering it as well. The Manhattan-based composer is enjoying acclaim for the recent premieres of his two latest works: the concerto, subtitled Maps, performed in Kansas City, and Notes from the Underground, an orchestral piece, in New York City. Two seasons ago, his powerful first opera, X (The Life and Times of Malcolm X), caused a sensation at the New York City Opera, and Davis is now at work on a science-fiction opera called Under the Double Moon (with a libretto by his wife Deborah Atherton), scheduled for production in St. Louis next year. A brilliant pianist, Davis tours regularly with Episteme, his crack avant-garde jazz ensemble.

He would, in other words, seem to embody the notion of a crossover artist. With his jazz background, he calls up visions of the Third Stream, that brief confluence of jazz and classical music long thought dried up. In works like Black, Brown and Beige, Duke Ellington bravely but cautiously ventured across the border that separates the big band from the orchestra; playing with the Modern Jazz Quartet, Pianist John Lewis pushed out the frontiers of his art while still remaining within its bounds. Now Davis, the New Jersey-born, Yale- educated son of a college professor, has gone a step further. Bright, articulate and accomplished, he is an important young American composer who happens to be -- a jazzman.

As such, he represents one of the salient trends in modern American music, the fusion of the pop vernacular with the mainstream classical tradition. He is not alone: Rock Musician Glenn Branca writes raucous symphonies for electric guitars, and the Chinese-American Lucia Hwong brings a cross-cultural sensibility to bear on her wistful New Age musings. But although Davis' orchestral music may contain improvisatory sections reminiscent of jazz, it is carefully controlled and expertly planned. Imagine Ellington's lush, massed sonorities propelled by Bartok's vigorous whiplash rhythms and overlaid with the seductive percussive haze of the Balinese gamelan orchestra, and you will have an idea of what both the Concerto and Notes from the Underground sound like.

In both his jazz and his "serious" music, the composer is fascinated by structure; "the ultimate freedom," Davis has proclaimed, "is to command form." Notes from the Underground, handsomely performed by the American Composers Orchestra under Conductor Paul Dunkel at Carnegie Hall, is driven by irregular rhythmic patterns, superimposed over one another until the music threatens meltdown. There are no melodies, but short, tight melodic fragments: the orchestra jumps in, riffing away at groups of three, four and five beats, with sharp accents thrown like sucker punches.

By contrast, Maps is a gentler, more melodic work. Performed by Violinist Shem Guibbory, a member of Episteme, with William McGlaughlin conducting the Kansas City Symphony, it is in three movements, each one based on a fanciful drawing by Davis' eight-year-old son Timothy. The composer's passion for ostinatos (repeated notes or phrases), a legacy of his jazz playing, is evident in the first movement, called "Timothy Island." "The Ghost Factory" is a shimmering fantasy for the solo violin, vibraphone, marimba and harp, while the finale, "Planet J," evokes the concerto's opening as it settles into an irresistible ostinato -- "groove music," Davis calls it -- then gathers steam for lift-off.

The growth of Davis' technique since X has been impressive. X, the story of the fiery Black Muslim leader assassinated in a Manhattan ballroom in 1965, had a daunting subject, and it got a vivid, unflinching but rather harsh treatment from the composer and his librettist cousin Thulani Davis. Both Notes from the Underground and the Concerto, on the other hand, are more relaxed and assured -- evolutionary, not revolutionary. This is not black music, but music written by a composer who happens to be black.

Still, race informs Davis' art. Despite its Dostoyevskian title, Notes is a homage to Writer Ralph Ellison; its two movements are called "Shadow" and "Act," after Ellison's book of essays. Says Davis: "Notes for me was a double pun. It's like, as a jazzman, I'm from the underground, and as a black man, I'm the invisible man." These are the slurs that sting.

Says Davis: "I resent it when people expect me to be a 'black composer.' After X, I had a lot of people come up to me and say, 'Who's next? Marcus Garvey? Martin Luther King?' I wasn't ready for that." Instead, he says, he is contemplating an opera about the kidnaping of Patty Hearst. "Tanya," he says. "It makes a nice title." No slurs there. No typecasting either. Just a talent worth watching, and listening to.