1955 photograph of Rosa Parks with Martin Luther King, Jr. on the left (photographer unknown, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
Regular readers may know by now that avant-garde trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith has been recording his albums with TUM Records Oy, which is based in Pohjankuru, Finland. In December of 2017, this site reported on his solo album Alone: Reflections and Meditations on Monk; and this past Friday TUM released a more extensive retrospective project. The title of the album is Rosa Parks: Pure Love, which Smith describes as “an oratorio of seven songs.” Smith himself prepared the words for six of the seven songs; the remaining one, “No Fears,” sets the words of Parks herself.
As might be guessed, the resources for this oratorio are far more extensive than that of the Monk album. Smith selected three vocalists, each with a different ethnic background, to perform the songs themselves: African-American Karen Parks (whose biographical statement does not indicate any relationship with Rosa), Asian Min Xiao-Fen, and Latina Carmina Escobar. Instrumental resources are relatively extensive. Smith himself leads the BlueTrumpet Quartet, whose other members are trumpeters Ted Daniel and Hugh Ragin and cornetist Graham Haynes. They are complemented by a string quartet called the RedKoral Quartet, consisting of violinists Shalini Vijayan and Mona Tian, violist Andrew McIntosh, and cellist Ashley Walters. (Readers may recall that Walters performed compositions by both Smith and McIntosh on her debut album, Sweet Anxiety.) In addition, Min contributed to the instrumentation with performances on a pipa. Finally, rhythm is provided by the Janus Duo, consisting of Pheeroan akLaff on drums and Hardedge on electronics. Finally, the score also calls for the insertion of excerpts from recordings made between 1969 and 1977 by members of the Creative Construction Company: Anthony Braxton, Steve McCall, Leroy Jenkins, and Smith himself.
Given the tensions that arose as a result of Parks’ refusal in Montgomery, Alabama to give up her bus seat (in the “colored section”) so that a white passenger would not have to stand, it is impressive noting how much of Smith’s oratorio involves a rhetoric of calm serenity. However, by all accounts, this would be consistent with Parks’ own personality. Yes, there are no shortage of dissonances among the instrumentalists; but the vocal lines seem to rise above those tensions, as if to evoke the spirit of non-violent protest espoused by Martin Luther King, Jr. and his colleagues.
It would be fair to say that Parks herself has become an iconic representative of the struggle for equal rights for all in a supposedly democratic society. Last year she even received the honor of being the subject of a Doctor Who episode, in which the Doctor (played by Jodie Whittaker in her first season as the Thirteenth Doctor) and her companions were faced with the task of making sure that she boarded that bus in Montgomery at just the right time. This left me wondering, however, whether Parks is now more recognizable as part of popular culture in the United Kingdom than she is in the United States, particularly at a time when the hostility of unbounded nativism has become more hostile than it has been for about half a century.
I used to know a futurist (yes, that is what he called himself), who said that he liked to believe in “strong opinions weakly held.” We now seem to be living in an age of strong opinions held with even greater strength; and, more often than not, those opinions are grounded in unbridled malice. Where civil rights are concerned, I doubt that Smith’s music will have much impact on those malicious opinions. On the other hand it may remind the rest of us that trying to fight fire with fire just gets more things burned.
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