Reston Community Center Presents NYFOS: Harlem Renaissance the CenterStage Photo by Dario Acosta New York Festival of Song HARLEM RENAISSANCE Friday December 5, 2014 8:00 p.m. 2014-2015 Artist Series Touring Professional Reston Community Center Presents NYFOS: Harlem Renaissance New York Festival of Song Steven Blier ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Michael Barrett ASSOCIATE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR HARLEM RENAISSANCE Julia Bullock (photo by Christian Steiner) Darius de Haas (photo by Tess Steinkolk) James Martin (photo by Steve Godbold) Julia Bullock SOPRANO Darius de Haas TENOR James Martin BARITONE Michael Barrett PIANIST Steven Blier PIANIST & ARRANGER 2 Reston Community Center Presents NYFOS: Harlem Renaissance PROGRAM Capricious Harlem Eubie Blake The Joint is Jumpin’ (Andy Razaf / J. C. Johnson) Thomas “Fats” Waller A Porter’s Love Song to a Chambermaid (Razaf) James P. Johnson Ain’t-cha Glad (Razaf) Waller Li’l Gal (Paul Laurence Dunbar) J. Rosamond Johnson Death of an Old Seaman (Langston Hughes) Cecil Cohen The Breath of a Rose (Hughes) William Grant Still Day Dream (John LaTouche) Billy Strayhorn I’m Craving for that Kind of Love (Noble Sissle) Blake You’re Lucky to Me (Razaf) Blake I’ve Heard of a City Called Heaven Trad., arr. Hall Johnson Guiding Me Back Home (Sissle) Harry Revel INTERMISSION Mo’ Lasses (Alex Rogers) Charles “Luckey” Roberts In a Sentimental Mood (Ellington/Kurtz) Duke Ellington / Manny Kurtz I’m Just a Lucky So-and-So (Mack David) Ellington A Flower is a Lovesome Thing (Strayhorn) Strayhorn The Harlem Blues (Handy) W. C. Handy My Handy Man Ain’t Handy No More (Razaf) Blake I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town (Razaf) William Weldon Song to the Dark Virgin (Hughes) Florence Price What’s the Use (Dunbar) Price Black and Blue (Razaf) Waller/Harry Brooks What Harlem Is to Me (Razaf) Russell Wooding/Paul Denniker 3 Reston Community Center Presents NYFOS: Harlem Renaissance PROGRAM NOTE by Steven Blier In February 1919, when the all-black Fifteenth Regiment of New York’s National Guard returned in triumph at the end of the First World War, they were given a hero’s welcome. Marching to the beat (unsyncopated, for this occasion) of James Reese Europe’s band and cheered by thousands of spectators, the troop of 1,200 Negro soldiers paraded up Fifth Avenue, passed the reviewing stand at 130th Street and Lenox Avenue, and finally broke into a free-form jubilant celebration, dancing and embracing their loved ones. This proud homecoming marked a post–Civil War high point in their status and their visibility. The civic honor of this parade helped to launch a movement that had been coalescing since the beginning of the century. Under the guidance of writers like James Weldon Johnson, social leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois, philosophers like Alain Locke, organizations like the Urban League and the NAACP, rich patrons like Charlotte Osgood Mason, and intellectual socialites like Carl Van Vechten, its moment arrived. Its goal: to promote racial equality and celebrate the unique contributions of African-Americans to American culture at large. It became known as the Harlem Renaissance. A combination of factors made Harlem the capital of black culture. The Great Migration of African-Americans from the South to northern urban centers had begun before 1915; it was a response to the entrenched racism of the South and a flight from a series of natural disasters that endangered the jobs and homes of all southerners. In the North there were new industrial opportunities and the promise of a fresh start. New York was one of the most exciting and attractive options—it was “the city that never sleeps” way before Kander and Ebb wrote their famous song. At that time New York’s black population was concentrated in a crowded slum called the Tenderloin. It stretched from the West 20’s to 53rd Street. African-Americans were starting to migrate to the neighborhood just north of there, the equally congested San Juan Hill area, populated by Irish-Americans. 4 Reston Community Center Presents NYFOS: Harlem Renaissance But farther uptown, there was a real estate crisis of a different kind. Harlem had been badly overbuilt with middle-class and upper middle-class housing. Both black and white landlords needed tenants to fill their buildings. For once, real estate competition worked in the favor of African-American people, overcoming the discriminatory policies that had previously kept them out. Seeing the possibilities of the situation, a farsighted black businessman named Philip A. Payton bought up property in Harlem and then sold or rented it to blacks. As James Weldon Johnson wrote in Black Manhattan (1930): “Harlem has provided New York Negroes with better, cleaner, more modern, more airy, more sunny houses than they ever lived in before. And this is due to the efforts made first by Mr. Payton.” Racism, of course, was not confined to the South. As new black residents poured into northern cities, tensions rose, leading to a series of race riots and lynchings. The black community united to fight back, gathering strength and solidarity during the crisis. They also began to attract interest as a unique artistic culture. The New Negro Movement embraced social debate and political reform, resulting in a series of small but significant legal victories for African-Americans in the 1920s. But its leaders realized that it was their artists who would be the best emissaries from their culture to the society at large. Their agenda was to create a literary canon, spurred on with a new series of awards from the widely read black magazines of the day, The Crisis and Opportunity. The judging panels included prominent white authors and editors; authors who won prizes attracted attention and contracts from such mainstream publishers as Knopf or Boni & Liveright, ensuring a growing interracial audience. Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston were the emerging authors whose work had the greatest staying power, but many others created valuable novels and poetry about the life of Black America. The leaders of the Harlem Renaissance encouraged artists to create serious works, in order to lend dignity and gravitas to the cause. But the Harlem Renaissance was also famous for its parties: rent parties for the lower middle classes crammed into crowded apartments; hot nightclubs—both integrated and whites- or blacks- only; and high-toned evenings where white and black society gathered to drink, make music, and carry on till dawn. And accompanying the revels was a musical 5 Reston Community Center Presents NYFOS: Harlem Renaissance groundswell of jazz and blues, performed by black orchestras, singers like Bessie Smith, pianists like James P. Johnson and Fats Waller. All-black revues enjoyed runs both uptown and on Broadway. It’s not surprising that the glory years of the Harlem Renaissance coincided with the Jazz Age. Harlem musicians may not have created the Jazz Age singlehandedly, but they provided the fuel that launched one of the great periods of American popular song. This was the first time that African- American culture rose to public visibility within the larger white-controlled culture. While the literature remains fascinating, ultimately it was the music that conquered the world. The musicians we’re hearing tonight took their inspiration (and in some cases, instruction) from the black musicians who made their mark at the beginning of the century. Scott Joplin’s rags and Will Marion Cook’s vaudeville songs from In Dahomey (1903) may have seemed passé by 1920, but they had already become part of a tradition that supported a subsequent generation of musicians. In the classical field, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s success in Great Britain was as great an encouragement to serious black musicians as that of Harry T. Burleigh in America. Not only did Burleigh’s settings of Negro spirituals reach a large audience but his ballads and art songs were popularized by the greatest singers of the day, including John McCormack and Alma Gluck. The long career of W. C. Handy (1873–1958) spanned almost everybody else’s; he first went on tour at age fifteen, and he lived long enough to be a headliner on the Ed Sullivan Show. He came from an older tradition, so his songs from the 1920s have an old-timey feel to them. By synthesizing Victorian parlor ballads, hymns, minstrel tunes, ragtime, and band music—and adding his own distinctive blue notes into the mix—the father of the blues brought the sounds of African- American folk music to a larger public. His music permeated the Jazz Age, leaving its imprint on the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the repertoire of jazzers from Jack Teagarten to Fats Waller. He was also a first-rate lyricist, able to evoke powerful feelings in a few simple words. Handy made another vital contribution as a publisher of American composers, both black and white. His company is still in existence today, based in New York City. “Harlem Renaissance? Oh, you’ll have fun working on it, it was all about the 6 Reston Community Center Presents NYFOS: Harlem Renaissance piano,” said Barry Singer, a music journalist and the author of Black and Blue, a biography of Andy Razaf. Luckily for a series devoted to songs, many of its great pianists were also great songwriters. One such is James P. Johnson (1894–1955). His best known vocal is certainly “Charleston”—yes, the famous original one— but it’s probably the only one found in the songbooks these days; “The Darktown Huskin’ Bee,” “I’m Stepping Out With Lulu,” “Harlem Choc’late Babies,” “Don’t Need Nobody to Tell Me I’m Bad,” and literally hundreds of others are languishing in the archives.