Mark Morris and James P. Johnson

Program A opens at the Joyce tonight

Marina Harss writes about the 45th season of the Mark Morris Dance Group in The New York Times today. [Gift link.]

I fervently admire John Luther Adams, and am looking forward to that premiere in Program B next week. Tonight we open Program A including You’ve Got to Be Modernistic, set to 8 piano pieces by James P. Johnson played by myself.

[Tickets.]

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I was Mark Morris’s music director for 5 years, 1997-2002. While I did some light arranging—especially the fun suite of 1920’s songs, Dancing Honeymoon—the only original score from that era was Kolam in collaboration with Zakir Hussain. After leaving Morris I was in The Bad Plus, and during that time TBP provided two scores for Morris, Violet Cavern and Spring, Spring, Spring (Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring).

More recently are the Mark Morris scores that are “all me,” the surreal Beatles project Pepperland and the comparatively direct Burt Bacharach suite The Look of Love. Both evening-length pieces have been successful for the company (we are up to over 80 performances of Pepperland, and at least 40 for The Look of Love).

Mark Morris has done smaller things with jazz. One of his first solos in 1980 was a tribute to his late father, Dad’s Charts, danced to a tape of Milt Buckner playing Illinois Jacquet’s "Robbins’ Nest." The Dancing Honeymoon I worked on for him has early jazz songs. And the groups I lead in Pepperland and Look of Love are comprised of jazz players: the horn players even get short improvised solos. Mark himself really understands the idiom. One time, at a cabaret night, Mark sang the very long and very hard scat solo “Moody’s Mood for Love” with the Bad Plus!

However, now that I think about it, You’ve Got to Be Modernistic must be the first time there is a proper large scale Mark Morris group dance to a jazz legend, a jazz composer highlighted in the jazz history books: James P. Johnson.

James P. Johnson is a special interest of mine. I was part of Spike Wilner’s team at The Last Rent Party when we got Johnson a tombstone in 2009. (This event was written up by Ben Ratliff in the New York Times.) Around that time I wrote a substantial article, “In Search of James P. Johnson,” on my old blog, Do the Math.

Digging a bit deeper: Preparing a Johnson score for Mark Morris is part of a personal crusade to subtly recalibrate the posthumous reputation of George Gershwin vs. James P. Johnson. They were both great, but Gershwin is the pride of the land, while Johnson is all but unknown outside of a small number of jazz players and historians.

(Related: Last year I wrote a think piece in NYT that went viral, “The Worst Masterpiece: Rhapsody in Blue at 100.”)

Mark Morris has a great solo dance to Gershwin, Three Preludes. I like that music and love that dance (I played it for both Mark and Mikhail Baryshnikov), but honestly Johnson’s piano pieces are much better. There’s no comparison. Johnson rules the day in a one-to-one stare down with Gershwin’s Preludes.

However, I admit this comparison is a bit esoteric, for Johnson didn’t produce notated scores that can be played by professional pianists. Johnson did publish a prolific amount of sheet music, but those sheets were for the then-important market, the amateur home pianist. His records are vastly more complex than his published sheet music. It was a liminal moment, somewhere between written-out professionalism and folk know-how. The word “jazz” was a brand-new novelty word. Johnson was improvising a bit, but not that much. Structurally, most of his piano pieces are identical to Scott Joplin ragtimes, with three separate strains.

I have plans to release my Modernistic score to the world so any other pianist can finally play Johnson solos as easily as they play Gershwin’s Preludes.

In general Mark Morris works to a score. And god bless him for it! All musicians respond to Morris because they see the music in his dances. So while You’ve Got to Be Modernistic says “jazz” on the box, the piano part is mostly written out. While this is not really “in the tradition”—most jazzers play Johnson with improvised decoration—it is suitable for this context because the music is structurally close to Joplin (as compared to the more open forms of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, etc.).

Mark Morris doesn’t take much advice from anyone, but I did push him to do something for James P. Johnson as part of my “crusade.” He probably agreed because Pepperland and Look of Love had gone well. (Of course, James P. Johnson’s music is also suitable for dance! He even wrote “The Charleston!”)

This is the selection of music, all based on the earliest solo recordings (other than “The Charleston,” which Johnson never recorded as a piano solo).

Keep Off the Grass
Snowy Morning Blues
The Mule Walk
Worried and Lonesome Blues
Jingles
The Charleston
Blueberry Rhyme
You've Got To Be Modernistic

And my program note:

Stride piano was an update of ragtime, and heard everywhere in Harlem in the 1920’s. They called James P. Johnson “The Father of Stride Piano,” but he preferred to be known as “The Dean of Jazz Pianists.” Johnson is well-established in the jazz history books for his peerless piano playing, documented on record beginning in 1923, while the general audience remembers him for penning several hit songs, including “If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight,” “Old Fashioned Love,” "A Porter’s Love Song to a Chambermaid,” and an anthem of the Jazz Age, “The Charleston.”

For the Mark Morris suite “You’ve Got to Be Modernistic,” I transcribed favorite performances and then arranged them to be suitable for any qualified pianist. While there are a few new transitions and endings, the score is generally very close to Johnson’s original recordings, with one drastic exception: His most famous piece, “The Charleston,” has been placed in a meter unknown in social dance, 5/4, an intentionally “modernistic” touch. —Ethan Iverson