Jazz percussionist Ramón Santamaría Rodríguez—Mongo Santamaría to his legions of fans—launched his long career as a conga drummer at age 20 at the storied Tropicana Club in his native Havana. After moving to New York in 1950, he teamed up with bandleaders Tito Puentes and Peréz Prado and played a major role in the postwar Latin dance craze that made mambo, rhumba, pachanga, and other Afro-Cuban genres household words in the U.S. Afro Blue, written in 1959, illustrates Santamaría’s distinctive fusion of Cuban percussion and elements rooted in West African traditions. Buoyed by a driving rhythmic ostinato, the piece quickly became a jazz standard, taken up by artists ranging from John Coltrane to Robert Glasper. (Its popularity was later eclipsed by Santamaría’s Latin-inflected version of Herbie Hancock’s Watermelon Man.) Flutist and composer Valerie Coleman, founder of Imani Winds, writes that her arrangement for wind quintet “simulates an African call-and-response ritual and aspires to continue the celebratory tradition that Mongo gave the world.” 

© Harry Haskell, 2022

Jazz pianist and recipient of the prestigious MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellowship, Jason Moran has often mined the worlds of art and literature for his compositions, which include a sizeable number of film and theater scores. Cane, written in 2008 for Imani Winds, takes its name from the highly experimental 1923 novel by Jean Toomer, a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Moran describes his four-movement quintet as a musical analogue to Toomer’s loosely knit novelistic vignettes of African-American life. A more geographically specific source of inspiration was the land- and soundscapes associated with Louisiana’s Cane River where, in the late 1700s, Moran’s pioneering Creole ancestor Marie Thérèse Coincoin founded the first church for her fellow free people of color (gens libres de couleur). As Moran explains:

“Cane River runs through the northern town, Natchitoches, that my ancestors made home dating back to the early 1700s.  I am interested in the way that multiple periods are brought together within the same timeline, and how they interact not only aesthetically…but based on the contextual factors in which the works were written…setting up historical antipodes that swim towards conflict, then arrive at the possibility of resolution. At this point in my creative life, lineage is a key theme.  I feel this on three levels: (1) the aforementioned family lineage, (2) the jazz piano lineage, and (3) the path of American history at large. I have composed pieces that scratch the surface of these ruminations. But I’ve yet to dig that deep into the resources the southern landscape provides. What awaits me there? A beer at a blues joint, locusts and cicadas, cotton fields, fried chicken, and PLANTATIONS? As a jazz musician, interfacing with stereotypes and expectations is important. As a contemporary musician, sometimes it’s about shunning the stereotype and other times it’s about playing into the stereotype—magnifying it until it's abstracted.” 

© Harry Haskell, 2022

The Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, who wrote in a wide array of genres, is best known for his Bachianas brasileiras, a group of nine suites for various chamber ensembles that infused the forms, harmonies, and procedures of the European Baroque with the spirit of his native land. Villa-Lobos was still eking out a living as a cellist in a movie house orchestra when Artur Rubinstein visited Rio de Janeiro in 1920. Tipped off by friends, the pianist went to the cinema in hopes of meeting the young musician everyone was talking about. “One of the orchestra members, looking around the auditorium during the intermission, noticed me in the audience,” Rubinstein recalled. “When the next part began, I heard music that was completely unlike what had been played in the previous part. It was a furious, exotic dance, crazy in its ceaseless rhythmic impulse, extraordinarily colorful, clear in its harmony and instrumentation. I immediately felt a breeze of uncommon talent in this music.”

The music that captivated Rubinstein may have been an improvised version of Villa-Lobos’ symphonic poem Amazonas, inspired by folk music he had heard on his expeditions in the Brazilian hinterland. Rubinstein became one of Villa-Lobos’ greatest champions and was instrumental in securing funding for him to travel to Europe in 1923. (With characteristic bravado, Villa-Lobos announced to the press: “I do not go to France to study. I go to show them what I have done.”) A few months later, Rubinstein organized a concert of the Brazilian’s works in Paris that included the Trio for Oboe, Clarinet, and Bassoon of 1921. French critics were bowled over. Boris de Schloezer spoke for many of his colleagues when he described Villa-Lobos’ works as “music of timbres and also of rhythms. The melodic element is not very prominent and most of the themes boil down to rhythmic formulas or to combinations or oppositions of sonorities; but the metrical diversity and complexity of these works is extraordinary and the play of timbres achieves an exquisite richness and refinement.” 

Like Villa-Lobos’ Noneto of 1923, which had its premiere on the same concert, the Trio combines such modernistic elements as multilayered polyrhythms, tone clusters, and an episodic, mosaic-like structure with colorfully astringent harmonies and shifting, energetic rhythms gleaned from Brazilian folk music. The complex first movement frequently pits two players against one another in intricate cross-rhythms, incorporating recurring dissonances and even onomatopoeic effects. The second movement evokes both the style of French Impressionism and that of a South American dance. With the driving rhythms of the third movement, likely influenced by both his native Brazil and the Ballet Russe works of Igor Stravinsky, Villa-Lobos brings the work to an exhilarating close.

Like many contemporary composers, Carlos Simon is a musical polyglot. Having grown up in Atlanta and earned his doctorate from the University of Michigan, the Grammy nominee and recipient of the Sphinx Medal of Excellence was immersed from boyhood in the music of the African-American Pentecostal church, in which his father was a preacher. Early in his career he worked with the R&B singers Angie Stone and Jennifer Holliday. He describes his music as a mashup of gospel, jazz, and neoromanticism, leavened with a longstanding interest in social justice issues. “Music is my pulpit,” Simon has said. “That’s where I preach.” A case in point is Requiem for the Enslaved, which weaves spoken words, spirituals, hip-hop, and traditional liturgical melodies in a tribute to the nearly 300 enslaved African Americans who were sold in 1838 by Georgetown University, where Simon teaches. His rapidly expanding catalogue ranges from chamber and electronic music to orchestral pieces, film scores, and the chamber opera Night Trip, about an emotionally charged interracial incident in the 1950s Midwest. Simon’s characterization of himself as a musical storyteller is further borne out by two works also premiering this month: a Trombone Concerto written for Detroit Symphony principal trombonist Kenneth Thompkins based on the experiences of an Underground Railroad conductor, and Brea[d]th, an oratorio commissioned by the Minnesota Orchestra in response to the murder of George Floyd.

Giants, newly commissioned by the Imani Winds and Shriver Hall Concert Series, is at once more intimate and wider ranging than the latter two works. The composer tells us that his new wind quintet was “inspired by five Black Americans who have influenced me and my identity as a composer— Bessie Smith, Maya Angelou, Ronald E. McNair, Cornel West, and Herbie Hancock. Each movement is meant to embody the work and personality (as best as I can gather) through music. I want to not only pay homage to these giants, but offer a character study through music of their work.”

Giants deploys an eclectic array of styles and idioms, from the bluesy grace notes and vamps of “Bessie Smith” to the edgy syncopations of “Herbie Hancock,” reminiscent of “cool” jazz. (The finale is marked to be played “with swag.”) The middle movement, dedicated to Ronald E. McNair, who was tragically killed in the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, captures its subject’s identity as both astronaut/scientist and amateur saxophonist. It’s flanked by slower, more meditative portraits of writer-activists Angelou and West. “The goal of an artist is to be a voice for the present-day society,” he says. “My goal has been to have my music reflect the ideas and events of the time and hopefully make someone better.”  

© Harry Haskell, 2023

Uruguayan-American composer Miguel del Águila considers himself a musical storyteller first and foremost: “I strive to write music that is sincere and that stirs intense emotions in the performer and the listener. Music that expresses my humanity, my times, my geography, and my Latin heritage. Often rhythmically driven and virtuosic, I’m always concerned with its dramatic effectiveness. I don’t think in terms of trends or current styles of composition. The story that my music is telling determines its sound and form.” Del Águila’s stories range from historical events like the collapse of the Inca empire, evoked in his 2009 orchestral work The Fall of Cuzco, to subjective sensations, such as the recurring dream of flight that prompted him to write his 2022 Tango volante for cello and piano.

Despite its non-descriptive title, the Wind Quintet No. 2 of 1994 also has a programmatic subtext, albeit one that is more musical than narrative, much less dramatic. In the composer’s words: “The Wind Quintet No. 2 tells the events of a story which takes us to a completely different place in each movement, much the same as would four acts of a theater play. I exploited the nearly unlimited coloristic possibilities of the instruments to obtain unconventional sounds. Harmony and melody are also used to help the instruments create these particular colors. Although I made extensive use of new performance techniques and effects, I avoided making them sound ‘new’ or obtrusive by blending them with other instruments playing in conventional styles. The first movement suggests primitive ritual of a very distant past. The second is a tropical Caribbean dance. The third suggests the image of death, and the finale turns to a Middle Eastern flavor for a driving conclusion.” 

© Harry Haskell, 2022