Jazz drummer and 1920’s playwright?
Posted on Nov 25, 2009 in Reviews | Comments Off on Jazz drummer and 1920’s playwright?
By Philip Elwood
Max Roach, jazz percussionist, looked more dapper and enthusiastic than he had any right to be when he arrived at the office of Sharon Ott, artistic director of the Berkeley Repertory Theater. We met there to talk about his writing the score for Berkeley Rep’s presentation of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Hairy Ape,” which opens Friday at Theater Artaud in San Francisco.
Roach had been up much of the night reworking his score, evaluating musicians’ auditions and talking out some problems but, as is his style, he arrived rarin’ to go for our midmorning conversation.
“I know, I know,” he said, pulling up a chair, sipping some coffee, “lots of people see, ‘MAX ROACH, EUGENE O’NEILL,’ and they wonder what’s happening.”
“Actually, my writing a score for an O’Neill play – especially when it’s directed by George Ferencz shouldn’t come as a surprise.” George has asked me to score lots of his productions, from Sam Shepard to Shakespeare,” Roach noted.
In 1985, Roach received an Obie Award for music written for three Shepard plays presented at New York’s LaMama Theater.
“Shepard is a drummer, you know,” Roach continued. “Back in the early ’60s, I helped him a little with his drumming. He was writing, even then, and played with jazz and folk-rock groups on the side. (Shepard recorded with the Holy Modal Rounders in 1967.)
“Anyway, when I scored Sam’s plays I had to underline, to punctuate, the powerful emotions. One of the plays was Suicide in B Flat,’ which had roots in jazz; Sam has the feel for instrumental freedom and that’s the way I hear his plays.
“Now, O’Neill is something else again,” he said. “Whereas Ferencz’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream: which I scored, allows me to treat the long monologues as jazz solos – not the text you see, but the production, the way Ferencz directs, it – when you get into O’Neill, especially ‘Hairy Ape,’ you’re getting into surrealism.
“Ferencz considers O’Neill to be the father of the American theater’s avant-garde movement, and ‘Hairy Ape’ (written in 1922) comes from O’Neill’s abstract period.
“Hairy Ape’ might well be retitled ‘Harry Goes Into Outer Space” Roach laughed.
“Shakespeare’s lines were right-on, rhythmically – bang, bang, bang. It’s been said that his verse is his music; that’s why writing a score for ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ came very easy, There’s music behind nearly an hour and a half of the San Diego production. ”
“George contacted me months ago and asked me to work with him on ‘Hairy Ape.’ That’s the way George does things – we talk through the whole project, then get to work independently, but we’re always in contact.
He selects his cast, I construct a loose score, then when he goes into rehearsal I have to revise my score (and the complement of the band) to fit the actors’ and actresses’ moods – their style.
”Duke Ellington composed with certain soloists in mind – Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams, you know. I have to compose with both the spirit of the author and the style of the performer in mind” Roach said.
Roach also noted that Ferencz, a distinctive, imaginative director, has his own musical ideas. In ‘Roach’s mind, the play’s director is comparable to an orchestra’s conductor – he interprets the playwright’s ”score”.
“We got the ‘Hairy Ape’ in place in Pittsburg — it’s running there, now. My score emerged as played by a two-man ‘orchestra’. They’re stationary, but in costume, as it were – and on stage. Here, I’m using an electric guitarist – Dimitri Vandellos – who works with (and through) a synthesizer, and a percussionist – Michael Bruno who has no drums.
“There is no musical conductor, as such,” Roach stated “no need for one – O’Neill’s lines, the voices of the actors, George’s direction, my score all flow together; melody, lyrics, harmony, rhythm – it’s all there”
“My score has to be balanced with the actors and their actions. It cannot be distracting. George loves jazz for its improvisations; on stage he gives his cast a lot of space, at first. But as rehearsals continue he begins to cut things off. I’ve learned a lot about composing and editing from him.
“Ferencz draws out what people really are, what he interprets O’Neill had in mind for each of his characters.” Roach said.
Roach’s involvement with the theater goes back to the late 1940s when, as a teen-aged student of theory and composition at the Manhattan School of Music, he played drums with the reigning royalty of bebop. (Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, et al.) He also took turns with the DeParis Brothers Dixieland group, Coleman Hawkins’ combo, Gil Evans’ rehearsal orchestra (which included Miles Davis, Lee Konitz, Gerry Mulligan and other’s), the Brooklyn Museum Orchestra and other ensembles.
“We were concerned with all the arts – we’d go to modern dance performances, Bird (Parker) got into Ravi Shankar’s Indian music, Diz was an authority on the music of Cuba, Latin America, Africa.
“Drummers have to play all kinds of music – I searched out new art forms. A creative artist is not allowed to repeat – I learned that early, and I still believe it. Way back there, I worked with Maya Angelou, Godfrey Cambridge and Cicely Tyson on a production of Jean Genet’s ‘The Blacks,’ then, later on in the 1950s, Oscar Brown Jr. and I wrote the ’Freedom Now’ suite for the NAACP’s Philadelphia Convention celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation.
“I scored the ‘Trail of Tears’ documentary for NET and then went to Japan to write the music for a wonderful TV production called ‘Black Sun.’ While there, of course, I became fascinated with Japanese percussion instruments, and Japanese music,” Roach said.
“What we’re doing, now, is working with the whole world of sound – a small part of which is the organized sound we call music” Roach noted. “Music as we knew it is changing, expanding. “When we listen to the old European masters, or the old jazz masters for that matter, we say ‘Wow, listen to what they’re doing but what we really mean is, ‘Listen to what they’re doing with the known ingredients.
“Music in the traditional sense has been pretty much taken to its limits – now we can deal with new sounds as music. Electronics for instance, have created new sounds that cannot be dealt with within the traditional music system.
“Sometimes,” he said, a new music emerges out of a new cultural setting. A good example: After all the cultural enrichment was taken out of the New York City public school curriculum, the kids evolved a new ‘school of music’ that we call ‘rapping.’
“Folk music, the people’s music, is the source of most of our traditional structured music, after all.
“Sam Shepard wrote some essays about sound, did you know? He’s got a brilliant, analytical, theoretical mind. He talks about sound having its own personality and he reminds us to listen to music, to sound, in its owu context.
“Don’t judge it by what you think it ought to be, or ought to sound like – listen to it for what it is, and how it is used,” said Roach emphatically, focusing in on the critic as he spoke.