Destiny Muhammad’s SoundBox Program

Daniel Stewart conducting SFS musicians in their performance of William Grant Still’s “Serenade” (screen shot from the video being discussed)

This past Thursday the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) launched its fourth SoundBox concert, which, like its three predecessors, had a one-word title. Harpist and vocalist Destiny Muhammad curated the program, giving it the title Resilience, which she reinforced with verbal commentary of such elegance that it could easily be taken for a prose-poem. The musical selections combined William Grant Still’s “Serenade,” conducted by Daniel Stewart, together with Matt Wong’s arrangements of a variety of different jazz styles, ranging from the “historical perspective” of Mary Lou Williams to the “immediate present” of Ambrose Akinmusire. As usual the performances were situated in the context of projections designed by Adam Larsen.

I have to confess that, in the context of the sharp-edged perspective on resilience that emerged from Muhammad’s narrations, I found both the repertoire and its delivery to be a bit too smooth for my own jazz tastes. Back in the Twenties, Eddie Condon supposedly criticized Paul Whiteman for trying to “make a lady” out a jazz when making jazz as about as removed from “ladylike behavior” as one could imagine. Wong’s arrangements ran the risk of being sternly haunted by Condon’s ghost. Whether those arrangements arose out of a need to provide the SFS musicians with something more like chamber music or Wong just felt they made the best match for Muhammad’s harp work is left for the listener to decide. Perhaps Wong just wanted to follow in the footsteps of Still’s calmly serene rhetoric (which, through Frank Zamacona’s direction, provided the best views of the SFS musicians at work).

Another perspective on the lack of sharp edges may have to do with why I did not watch this particular video when it was first released this past Thursday. That was the day when I viewed the new video of Danny Clay’s Music for Hard Times, based on a score that the composer described as “a series of composed ‘calming exercises.’” Perhaps Muhammad’s verbal account of resilience ultimately set it in the context of perseverance; and the context was reinforced by the “inner calm” established through the music she had selected for her program. From that point of view, one might almost consider interleaving Clay’s calming exercises with the through-composed selections on Muhammad’s program, encouraging synthesis to arise from Muhammad’s “thesis” and Clay’s “antithesis!”