Though he’s best known for his operas X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, Amistad, and the 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Central Park Five, composer Anthony Davis is also a brilliant pianist, a musician who has collaborated with the likes of Wadada Leo Smith, George Lewis, and Leroy Jenkins and whose avant-garde jazz recordings—many of which are sadly out-of-print—eschew conventional instrumentation in favor of more unusual combinations. (Take, for example, his 1980s trio with flutist James Newton and cellist Abdul Wadud.) So it’s not surprising that, nearly five decades into his career, his latest album Vertical Motion is the first to employ a traditional piano-bass-drums setup. Made with double bassist Kyle Motl and drummer Kjell Nordeson, the album allows Davis to push into new territory both as a pianist and as an improviser.
“We had these great sessions, working with Kyle’s music and my music,” Davis recalls. “It was a great, great thing.” Davis was interested in “figuring out ways to use space and silence and different textures that would open up the music, then at times more explosive energy.” Davis’s playing retains the dexterity and polyrhythmic drive that he displayed on early albums like 1978’s Past Lives, but there’s an elegance and restraint that allows his playing to sit beautifully alongside Motl’s rangy bass and Nordeson’s unpredictable volleys.
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Former students of Davis’s at the University of California, San Diego, Motl and Nordeson are distinguished creative musicians in their own right. Working between jazz, free improvisation, and new music, Motl is a member of Treesearch with violinist Keir GoGwilt and French horn player Nicolee Kuester, and has collaborated with the likes of Peter Kühn and Patrick Shiroishi. Nordeson came up in the ‘90s Swedish improvised music scene, working with Mats Gustafsson in the AALY Trio and going on to perform with such heavyweights as Peter Brötzmann, Ken Vandermark, and Martin Küchen.
The album features two compositions by Motl and a version of Davis’s “Lady of the Mirrors” alongside two free improvisations. “The line between improvisation and composition is this whole grey area,” Davis says. “When you really think as an improviser, you’re listening and trying to solve this puzzle of deciding where the music can go. The spatial elements allow you to think of the piano as a tonal resource—not necessarily the traditional way of left-hand chord, right-hand melody, but to open up the instrument, and then open up the trio to a different kind of collaborative model.”
“Lady of the Mirrors” first appeared on Davis’s 1980 solo piano album of the same name, and was later reworked by his trio with Newton and Wadud. As Davis explains, the piece was written during a period when he was collaborating with dancers. “Dancers always have mirrors in their studios so they can see themselves. But I thought of it in a fragmented way, like what would happen if you think of those mirrors as broken and shattered, and the music is built on little bits and pieces of thematic material? Also, you can employ space and silence in between, and then look at them as harmonic areas too, like each little section has its own harmonic profile. In a way, you’re giving them little fragments—hints of other worlds.”
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Motl offers further insight into the trio’s reimagining of the piece. “Anthony’s tune more or less was [the foundation]. But we set it up in such a way where there could be interaction in between all these spaces, because there’s a lot of open space in the melody. So we did a few different versions of it with either bass playing in between, or with Kjell adding accents. The way that Anthony develops that material is improvisation. Even when we’re really far away from where we started, you still hear those ideas come back, while relating to the stuff that we’re playing. Every time I listen to it there are new things that I didn’t quite pick up on before. When you’re improvising, you’re in a different physical and mental space. It takes a while to understand everything that you intuitively knew was happening then.”
As Motl explains, his own writing has moved away from the traditional jazz structure of a head followed by solos. “It’s more like intro, development of material, space for improvisation…a combination of thematic material and instructions on how things are organized.” The title track is built around a bassline, “a melodic sequence for Anthony to riff on” and a set of polyrhythms “that keep moving up.” Motl’s experience of playing with the trio allowed him to tailor his writing accordingly. “I was like, okay, this doesn’t need to perfectly snap into a grid. And that wouldn’t be really interesting in this context, because the way that things fall around each other works really well. You hear this steady thing, Anthony’s twisting these melodies around and then it just starts falling over itself and keeps moving.”
“I’m super excited to have the album out, because a lot of people haven’t heard Anthony play this way,” Motl adds. “Kjell is fantastic. And I think the group interplay is really nice.” Davis hopes he, Motl, and Nordeson can find the time in their busy schedules to play some live dates, but for the immediate future, his focus is on his operatic and orchestral works. Following the Covid-19 pandemic, Davis was approached by director Yuval Sharon about reviving X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X. While he made some revisions, the object was to remain true to his original score. The new production debuted in Detroit last year with Davóne Tines in the title role. A recording was released via Boston Modern Orchestra Project, who previously issued Notes From The Underground, a selection of Davis’s orchestral works.
Davis praises Tines’s “wonderful performance” and is excited to see how the opera “travels to a new generation of singers.” The opera’s themes take on fresh resonance in what Davis calls “the post-George Floyd reality,” where “the classical world had to grapple with structural racism and looking why works like mine, and other people, have been excluded.” Case in point: When X made its way to the Metropolitan Opera in New York in the Fall of 2023, it was only the second work by a black composer to be performed there, following Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up In My Bones in 2022.
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Davis studied classical piano from an early age and came to jazz via Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington, and John Coltrane. He had long harbored the idea of writing an opera, having grown up with his father’s recording of Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera and studied the works of Wagner, Strauss, and Berg. In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Davis was active on the Downtown New York scene, working with poets and dramatists such as Ntozake Shange, Jessica Hagedorn, Victor Hernández Cruz, and his cousin Thulani Davis, who would go on to write the librettos for X and Amistad. Through these “choreopoems,” Davis developed his skills at setting words to music.
In the early ‘80s, Davis’s brother played the role of Malcolm X in a play called El Hajj Malik. “I went backstage after the play, and he said to me, you should do a musical about Malcolm X. And I thought, ‘Well, I didn’t really see it as musical, I see it as an opera, because he’s a tragic hero.’ Looking at all the references to music in the autobiography, I began to think about the parallel between the development of his political thought and his evolution as a person with the development of the music.” When Mary MacArthur (now Griffin), artistic director at avant-garde incubator The Kitchen, told Davis they were looking to commission new operas, he took his chance. “We were able to workshop it in 1984. It was an incredible experience, learning how to deal with a large form like that, and also working with my cousin Thulani Davis, who was writing the libretto and figuring out how we could create an opera in our own musical language and also our own literary language.”
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In telling stories like Malcolm X, Amistad, and the Central Park Five, Davis wrestles with the issue of racism and its relationship to American culture. “You can look at a lot of American music as a response to and release from the pressures of racism,” he adds. This is reflected in the way he weaves jazz, blues, hip-hop, and country into a modernist operatic idiom. To bring “the improviser’s mentality into the creation of opera,” as Davis puts it, he integrates improvisers into the orchestra, “so that no performance is the same.”
The jazz elements in X are particularly vivid in the scenes depicting Malcolm’s life hustling on the streets of Boston, with the saxophones breaking into bebop licks and the character of Street—the first of Davis’s operatic Tricksters—charming the audience with hip repartee. “I wanted to make the music seduce the audience, to realize the attraction of playing beyond the rules, beyond the morality and the social constructions of segregation, the allure of being a hustler. I was interested in the idea of music as being that bridge, the emotional connection.”
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In depicting Malcolm’s spiritual journey from the Nation of Islam to his pilgrimage to Mecca and adoption of the name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, the only part of the Qu’ran Davis could set to music was the morning prayer, and in Act III, he has the chorus take on the role of pilgrims to Mecca, chanting “Bismillah hirrahman nirrahim,” before Malcolm steps forward to reflect on his faith. “He’s literally learning how to pray, listening to the morning prayer, and then feeling so alone, because he’s in Saudi Arabia far away from his home. Then finally, [he sings] ‘My name is Shabazz.’ So that to me was a really important scene, because of this idea of how music can transform you, from one place to another.”
Following the Met’s production of X, Davis travels to London to present his clarinet concerto, “You Have The Right To Remain Silent,” with soloist Anthony McGill and the ensemble Britten Sinfonia. Hearing Davis’s operas beyond the concert hall hasn’t always been easy, but a recording of The Central Park Five is ready to be released. Upcoming projects include a book on the music of Charles Mingus, an orchestral song cycle for the soprano Latonia Moore, and a children’s opera based on Duncan Tonatiuh’s book Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote: A Migrant’s Tale. “I have a lot of projects going on,” he smiles, “Hopefully I’d like to do some playing too.”
