Blueprint for an An Architect of Sound

Anthony Davis’ music is an aural portrait of 20th century America. Filled with rhythms and melodies seasoned by a melting pot mixture of jazz, classical music and pop, it is music that catches the ear, stimulates the emotions and excites the mind.

And, like all music that touches its audience, it is uniquely personal, definable only in its own terms.

“You have to make your own place,” says Davis, 44, who was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for his music for Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” and whose critically praised 1986 opera, “X, the Life and Times of Malcolm X,” played to capacity audiences at the New York City Opera.

“The plurality of tradition is exciting,” he says, “but there has to be one vision within the plurality, and that’s the hard part. It’s like Duke Ellington once said, you have to be ‘beyond category.’ Every African American composer has to carve out their own category, build their own house.”

Davis has been building his own musical house for more than two decades, freely mixing materials, style and architecture. The structure is eclectic enough to accommodate a series of cutting-edge jazz albums, a variety of classical chamber and orchestral compositions and several operas.

A recording of “Malcolm X” received a Grammy nomination in 1992. His two other operas are “Under the Double Moon,” which opened at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis in 1989, and “Tania,” based on the kidnapping of Patty Hearst and which premiered at the American Music Theatre Festival in 1992. Saturday night at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, Davis and the String Trio of New York will perform the West Coast premiere of “Happy Valley Blues,” a new piece for piano, violin, bass and guitar, co-commissioned by the Cerritos Center.

The piece was originally called “Sounds Without Nouns,” a title Davis formulated before he actually began to compose.

“The idea,” he says, “was that the work would not be an object, something fixed, the way a classical piece is, but changeable or malleable. In other words, not a noun. But when I wrote it, it turned out to have this kind of nostalgic blues in the middle. We premiered it at State College, Pennsylvania, where I grew up, an area we always called, facetiously, Happy Valley. So ‘Sounds Without Nouns’ became ‘Happy Valley Blues.’ ”

As with many Davis compositions, improvisation plays a vital role. And he could not have asked for more compatible associates than the String Trio of New York (Regina Carter, violin; John Lindberg, bass; and James Emery, guitar), a group that actively has been exploring the length and breadth of acoustic instrumental music since its formation in 1977.

Defining the work of an artist whose craft moves so gracefully from the complex harmonies and structures of European music to the open-ended spontaneity of free jazz does not come easily. And that’s fine with Davis, who rejects stereotyping.

“No matter how it’s labeled,” he explains, “I think of improvisation and notation as being two means to the same end of creating music, of organizing sound. To me, the formal possibilities that we get from Europe, and the passion and the innovation of improvisation that we get from our African heritage are what define American music as an idea.”

*

Davis and the String Trio are veterans of New York City’s adventurous Loft Jazz scene of the late ‘70s--an extension of the heady avant-garde jazz of the previous decade.

“That’s where my roots are,” Davis says, “that’s when I first emerged as a jazz musician, performing with people like Leroy Jenkins, James Newton and Anthony Braxton. But also reaching back to Monk, Ellington, Mingus and Cecil Taylor.

“What I attempted to do was to take that language, and what I learned from it, and expand upon it--do more written music in which a lot of the boundaries between what was written and what was improvised were not so apparent. I’ve tried, even in the operas and the symphonies I’ve written, to make sure that the aesthetic of the improviser is still at play.”

He views the ‘60s and ‘70s as a period of significant change in American music, essential to his own creative growth. The genre-stretching aspects of his quest for the integration of written and improvised elements represent, for Davis, a major shift from the inward-looking attitudes of the ‘50s.

“For my generation, it’s much more about music that has a relationship to what’s going on in society, about the creativity of the individual. And it’s about freedom, too. Freedom, for us, is not something that can be found, just by nature. It’s something that we have to fight for.”

Born in Paterson, N.J., on Feb. 20, 1951, Davis is a 1975 graduate of Yale. His father was one of the founders of the university’s Black Studies Department. His sister, Village Voice editor and writer Thulani Davis, has served as librettist for his most recent operatic works. He has balanced his activities as a composer and pianist with teaching stints at Yale, Cornell and, currently, at Harvard, where he is a visiting lecturer in Afro-American Studies.

He feels a strong linkage between performance and education.

“Performing and teaching are both about immediacy,” he says. “On the one hand, you have the immediacy of performing and having your ideas presented to a public. Like what Ellington had--that interaction with the audience, as well as the demand of having to create, in the moment, every night.”

Beyond his teaching and performing, Davis’ schedule of activities is overflowing in what he describes as a “very exciting period.” Among his important commissions are “The Circus of Dr. Lao,” for New York’s Public Theatre, and a new opera, “Amistad,” based on a slave rebellion in 1839 and scheduled to be premiered by the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1997.

But his quest to create “music that seems to be influenced by different things, yet still speaks in your own unique musical language” continues unabated.

“I have this concept of looking for the fresh pitch,” Davis says. “Some pitch that hasn’t been there, that you don’t expect to be there. And sometimes that’s the one that gives you the resolution you’re looking for.”