Three world-premiere recordings from Grammy nominated
composer and clarinetist, Derek Bermel entitled MIGRATIONS was just released on
Naxos [Naxos 8.559871]. showcasing The
album includes his Migration Series for Jazz Ensemble and Orchestra (2006); the
song cycle Mar de Setembro (2011), with texts by Eugénio de Andrade; and the
three-movement orchestral A Shout, a Whisper, and a Trace (2009), in
performances by the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra, saxophonist Ted Nash, clarinetist
Bermel, Brazilian jazz vocalist Luciana Souza, and the Albany Symphony under
its music director, David Alan Miller.
Bermel's engagement with other musical cultures has become
part of the fabric and force of his compositional language; he grew up playing
jazz, funk, and rock; studied with a wide-range of compositional luminaries,
including William Bolcom, Henri Dutilleux, and Louis Andriessen; and traveled
extensively to absorb musical traditions from across the globe, including
Thracian folk music, Brazilian caxixi percussion music, and Lobi xylophone from
Ghana. Of the new album, Bermel writes: "Like many Americans, my family
came to the US from distant lands. Migrations is inspired by three artistic
journeys-painter Jacob Lawrence's vivid depiction of African American migration
from South to North; Portuguese poet Eugénio de Andrade's journeys across the
ocean and the soul; and Hungarian composer Béla Bartók's emigration to my
hometown of New York City-and by my collaborators Wynton Marsalis and Luciana
Souza."
Migration Series was commissioned by Wynton Marsalis, for
the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and by the American Composers Orchestra.
It takes its title from a 60-painting series by Jacob Lawrence, which traces
the movement of blacks from South to the urban North during the First and
Second World Wars (known as "The Great Migration"). Music critic
George Grella writes in his program notes: "Bermel describes his musical
thinking here as realized in the form of a mosaic; he uses various motifs that
reappear in each movement, like the repeated use of tiles to create different
combinations of patterns with the same source material. This is a visual
quality that Bermel identifies in Lawrence's work, but that's secondary to the
physical pleasure of the music." Bermel here draws freely on his training
and expertise as a clarinetist: "That feel of music coming through the
hands," Grella observes, "is plain and strong in the swing and
swagger of Migration Series." View Panels from Lawrence's Migration
Series. (Cover Art: The Migration Series, Panel 3, "From every southern
town migrants left by the hundreds to travel north" (1940-41); The
Phillips Collection. Washington, D.C. Acquired 1942.)
Written when Bermel was composer-in-residence at the Los Angeles
Chamber Orchestra, Mar de Setembro-- consists of five songs ("Prologue:
Que voz lunar," "Mar de Setembro," "Canção,"
"Ocultas águas," and "Frutas"). Mar de Setembro was composed in collaboration
with the Brazilian jazz singer Luciana Souza. Bermel commented that great
Portuguese poet Eugénio de Andrade's work "evokes saudade"-a
hard-to-translate Portuguese word with a loose meaning of longing and sadness
for lost people and lost things." The world-premiere was met with critical
acclaim, the Los Angeles Times said "Bermel . . . has produced a small
gem." Mar de Setembro, Grella writes, "is clear and upfront about its
non-classical qualities, including the rhythms, harmonies, and the graceful,
bossa nova–tinged vocal melodies." Something of a cultural travelogue, it
opens the door to further possibilities: "The one place I've always wanted
to go and have not yet been is Cuba," Bermel muses, and the country is
"still on my list."
A commission from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, A
Shout, a Whisper, and a Trace pays tribute to Béla Bartók, who spent the last
five years of his life in New York. The work
was inspired by Bartók's experiences as a New Yorker to view his own
home city from a different perspective. Bartók had a difficult time adjusting
to New York, and temporarily stopped composing; he died there, of leukemia, in
1945. "Bermel," writes Grella, "loves Bartók, whose music was
deeply informed by his study of folk music. In the final, haunting movement,
Bartók's ghost floats along the streets of Bermel's native New York, mingling
with the other residents past and present. As only music can, the piece
collapses the distance of time into the immediate present of the listening
experience."
Grammy-nominated composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel is
artistic director of the American Composers Orchestra, director of Copland
House's CULTIVATE emerging composers institute, and curator of the Gamper
Festival of Contemporary Music at the Bowdoin Music Festival. He has performed
as a clarinetist worldwide, collaborated with an eclectic array of artists, and
received commissions globally from the Pittsburgh, National, and St. Louis
Symphony Orchestras, the Pacific Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the
Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, New
York's WNYC, the Tanglewood Festival, Eighth Blackbird, the Asko/Schönberg
Ensemble, Veenfabriek (the Netherlands), the Guarneri and JACK string quartets,
violinist Midori, and the Koussevitzky and Fromm Music Foundations. His many
honors include the Alpert Award in the Arts, the Rome Prize, Guggenheim and
Fulbright fellowships, the American Music Center's Trailblazer Award, the
Academy Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and residencies at
Yaddo, Tanglewood, Aspen, Banff, Bellagio, and Copland House. He recently
served as composer-in-residence with the Seattle Symphony and as
artist-in-residence at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study.
In 1941, a 23-year-old Harlem artist named Jacob Lawrence
produced the Migration Series, 60 paintings depicting the Great Migration, the
epic movement of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North
during the early decades of the 20th century. The series was an immediate
success. Shortly thereafter, this collection was acquired by two museums, New
York's Museum of Modern Art and the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC,
which divided the panels according to their even and odd numbers.
In recent times, Lawrence's masterwork has enjoyed newfound
resonance, inspiring a multimedia dance production, a book of scholarly essays,
and an adaptation based on the Arab Spring.
It has also yielded Migration Series, composer Derek
Bermel's sweeping, five-movement concerto for jazz ensemble and orchestra.
Commissioned by Wynton Marsalis, the concerto is the centerpiece of
"Migrations," a Naxos recording of Bermel's music by the Albany
Symphony Orchestra and the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra, conducted by David Alan
Miller.
In a display of Bermel's deep eclecticism, the album also
features two other works rooted in non-Western classical forms - Mar de
Setembro (2011), written for the Brazilian singer Luciana Souza, and A Shout, a
Whisper, and a Trace (2009), about Bela Bartók's years in New York.
"I was really first intrigued and then impressed when I
heard Migration Series," says David Alan Miller, Albany Symphony's Music
Director. "It charted daring territory because few have done it
successfully - this combination of jazz band and orchestra."
Miller adds, "The idea behind the piece is so strong.
It's so clearly and beautifully inspired by the images. That helped it not seem
like a pastiche project."
Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series paintings trace a somber
yet uplifting narrative through barren Southern landscapes, gospel churches,
factories, urban race riots and a voting booth. Scenes of crowded train
stations form a recurring motif.
Derek Bermel describes its form as a mosaic. "I
realized there are different elements that ping-pong back and forth between the
different paintings," he said. "That gives you a larger composite
view of a big story that he tells through lots of smaller stories, and I just
found that fascinating. He does it with color, he does it with shape, he does
it with texture."
Derek Bermel was a young boy living on Manhattan's Upper
West Side when his mother took him to a 1974 retrospective of Lawrence's work
at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Migration Series, with its
cubist-inflected shapes and muted colors, stuck in his consciousness. Thirty
years later, when Wynton Marsalis requested a piece that would combine the Jazz
at Lincoln Center Orchestra and the American Composers Orchestra (ACO), Bermel
returned to the series. He deploys a rumbling groove interwoven with gospel
ballads, moaning blues, and sinuous solos for brass, saxophone solo (played by
Ted Nash) and clarinet (Bermel himself).
Unlike composers who dabble in jazz, Bermel spent his childhood
imitating Thelonious Monk records on the piano. "That was my way into
playing piano," he explains. "Monk was more of an influence than
probably any composer on my harmonic language." Another model was Duke
Ellington, "because he was a composer who couldn't be contained."
These influences coalesced during his graduate studies at
the University of Michigan, where his teachers were the polymaths William
Bolcom and William Albright. Bermel has also traveled to Ghana to learn the
Lobi xylophone, Bulgaria to study Thracian folk music, and Ireland to learn the
Uilleann pipes.
In approaching the Migration Series, Bermel was also drawn
to its larger, social themes. "I'm from a family of European Jews,"
he notes, "so when you think of these large movements of people who are
driven by an imperative to start anew,
in a different place, it's a very powerful work in that way as well."
Migration is also a central theme of A Shout, a Whisper, and
a Trace, a three-movement orchestral work that honors Bela Bartók's move from
his native Hungary to New York City after the outbreak of World War II. The
piece was an opportunity for Bermel to consider his hometown with fresh eyes.
"I had just picked up a copy of Bartók's letters in a
used bookstore," said Bermel. "I was fascinated, especially by the
section with the letters he wrote home from New York. Bartók's letters were
full of this longing, much in the way that Lawrence describes the South."
Bartók found life in New York rather difficult. He and his
wife lived on money from his research fellowship at Columbia University, in
which he transcribed Serbo-Croatian folksongs for cataloging and publication.
He struggled with traffic and the subway system. Though he produced a handful
of major works - including the Concerto for Orchestra - he gave few piano
performances and the effects of leukemia began to take their toll (he died of
complications of the disease in 1945).
Accordingly, the first movement of Bermel's score explores a
clash of cultures.
"Some of the harmonies don't match the rhythms,"
said Bermel. "The harmonies are a little more New York while the rhythms
are a little more Eastern Europe."
After a second movement inspired by Bartók's "night
music" sounds, the finale imagines him as a ghost-like figure, haunting
the city streets. "I thought of his ghost and then I thought of all the
ghosts of people who lived here before. So that was kind of my way into a New
York piece."
Luciana Souza, the featured soloist on Mar de Setembro.
A Portuguese Rhapsody
Just as Eastern European folk music underpins Bermel's
Bartók tribute, Brazil and Portugal are the focus of Mar de Setembro (September
Sea), a set of five songs to texts by the late Portuguese poet Eugénio de
Andrade and written for the Brazilian-born singer Luciana Souza.
One can't accuse Bermel of under-researching his subject
matter. He has made several trips to Brazil, where he studied caxixi percussion
and even learned Portuguese (his wife also hails from Portugal). Lightly
touching on bossa nova rhythms, the piece evokes Portuguese saudade, a feeling
of intense melancholy.
"Luciana, being from Brazil, is fluent in those
styles," Bermel said. "She is an inspiration in the way that it was
an inspiration to write for Wynton and his band. Like Ellington, she knows
about classical music, she's a jazz singer, and she sings Brazilian music, so
her world is very big."
Then again, given the wide-ranging influences that Derek
Bermel draws from, it's clear that his musical world is pretty big too.
- Written by Brian Wise
