Two Mail & Guardian reviewers offer differing opinions on the black consciousness `conceptual concert’ The Biko Project
* Bongani Ndodana
AFRICAN-American bass Kevin Maynor has put together this meditation on black consciousness, interweaving spirituals, new compositions, poetry and extracts from speeches made by black visionaries like Paul Robeson, Malcolm X and Steve Biko.
The recital, in terms of the quality of the performance, has substantial musical merit but the appropriateness of the theme in 1990s South Africa is problematic – it comes a decade too late. This might be a reflection of how out of touch South Africa is with the socio-political woes of black America.
At the moment, we are preoccupied with pouring balm on old wounds and the whole truth commission healing number, while Maynor’s effort is caught up with unresolved baggage that black South Africans have left to the annals of history with the undoing of apartheid.
Besides the music, The Biko Project sadly amounts to a pathetic self-indulgent exercise by yet another black American trying to cope with his skin colour. Everyone has suffered and was humiliated by legalised racism and even Nelson Mandela, after 27 years of incarceration, is concerned with the way forward and the advancement of black people – not flogging the dead horse of playing victim legitimised by using Biko’s name.
The recital offers a varied programme that marries the old and the new. The progression from spirituals, blues, jazz and modern works by American and South African composers is effective and a fair representation of music written by black composers, both known and anonymous, in the past two centuries.
The South African component of the programme includes a stirring work by jazz pianist Denzil Weale, that sadly gets a snow white clinical treatment by Maynor’s pianist.
The same goes for St Louis Blues, which is played dead straight, without imagination or even a hint of a rhythmic lilt. Perhaps that’s the danger of jazz at the hands of “serious” artists in a prim and proper song recital.
Another sour point was the drummer on congas, who was either nervous or under- rehearsed but managed to redeem himself in the extemporised solo tribute to the memory of Biko.
Maynor has a rich bass that would fit Prince Igor or Boris Godunov like a glove. His range is staggering, stretching from a basso profundo to a delicate and pastel-coloured top register. The quiet yet well-controlled tones from his top register during the Lullaby are perhaps the best features of his instrument.
This came across quite well in the soft and slow middle section of the spiritual Daniel, where both music and performance were emotionally very evocative.
But Maynor has a tendency to make the sonority of his lower register cloy by forcing the voice. As a result, Old Man River suffered some unpalatable moments. The versatility of Maynor’s talent shows itself in the impassioned readings of extracts from Malcolm X, Robeson and Biko. He speaks with an authoritative command as the portraits of the three leaders stare at the audience with timeless glances.
Their presence adds a sobering realism to the words of their speeches – the audience gets the chance to put a face to the words. Mingled with the three faces is the stark nakedness of a sculpted, anonymous black man, passively and sensuously reinforcing pride in being black.
The Biko Project is on at the Market Theatre until July 26
Too black, too proud, too late? (CONT)
* Gwen Ansell
`I BELIEVE the problem today is that musicians are not consciously programming. Movies deal with what’s going on in the world. Classical music used to do that – Mozart wrote Figaro about the class struggle. But today the classical sphere isn’t reflective of the world.”
For operatic bass Kevin Maynor, The Biko Project – three years in the planning, 18 months to pull together – is part of his mission to give classical music meaning for the modern world by creating programmes (he calls them “conceptual concerts”) that are thematically linked and relevant. It’s also a homage to South Africa’s struggle.
Maynor – based in Malvern, New York, and a soloist with, among others, the Scottish National, Bolshoi and New York Opera companies – has used the words of Paul Robeson, Malcolm X and Steve Biko, to link a range of musics dealing with struggle and identity, from labour anthem Joe Hill, through Anthony Davis’ opera Malcolm to an Amiri Baraka poem set to music by South African Denzil Weale.
The project is a world premiere for the compositions by Weale, Charles Lloyd Jr and Hale Smith. When the singer was looking for lyrics from “a South African poet of stature”, actor Danny Glover put him in touch with Don Mattera, whose words were set by Lloyd.
Other composers and poets were contacted and collaborations enthusiastically brokered. For the first act, accompanists’ scores were transcribed from the historic Robeson recordings, “but what we had were bare bones”, says pianist Jeff Middleton. “I have to improvise to fill it up – which is kind of fun for me, since I’m usually the `invisible’ classical accompanist.” On the Hale Smith song, Music for Martyrs, African percussion is scored, and provided by Ngwaku Manamela, better-known vibes player with the African Jazz Moods.
So how does it sound? Maynor has a voice of great beauty and impressive range and control. He avoids vocal acrobatics, preferring to play with the dynamics and tensions inherent in the timing. On the re- creations of the Robeson songs, he sounds movingly like those old wax disks come to life – without the scratches.
The recital succeeds in creating a powerful tapestry of verbal and musical cross- references. The words focus on the humanist side of all three men’s visions: on shared humanity and racial divides; on the need to stand up and fight; on the necessity for love in political struggle. The music is woven together in a different way, by moments like the one in Davis’s Death Song, where spirituals such as Robeson sang are recalled through the filter of modernism and serialism.
Most interesting is the Smith piece, Music For Martyrs, where layered polyrhythms are created as voice cuts across percussion and piano cuts across both, recalling the roots of African music.
Maynor’s notion of conceptual concerts stretches wider than politics. Other projects have dealt with the bass voice in Russian music, with Schubert, and with the development of African-American folk forms.
In a South Africa where the fashionable sneer at any discussion of culture as a weapon of struggle, Maynor presents a fresh and beautiful take on that agenda. And in a South Africa where black composers and poets rarely get commissioned by the classical establishment, and where the music of Davis, Lloyd and Smith is unknown, Maynor should have us all asking: why? Which perhaps indicates that his message is not a decade too late, but right on time.