Unearthing a one-night-only classic

More than 60 years ago, two pivotal figures of the Harlem Renaissance -- poet Langston Hughes and jazz composer James P. Johnson -- collaborated on a blues opera that received one performance in Carnegie Hall, then vanished.

Since that premiere, on May 31, 1940, scholars have assumed that although Hughes’ text to “De Organizer” survived, Johnson’s score was irretrievably lost.

That assumption was shattered Tuesday night, when eight vocal soloists, a 45-piece orchestra and a 40-voice choir performed a groundbreaking reconstruction of “De Organizer” in this city’s Orchestra Hall. The work proved so powerful in its melodic content and so poetic in its choral writing that it’s easy to imagine that it might have attained broad popularity had it survived beyond its one-night-only engagement.

An overflow crowd turned out for the reemergence of “De Organizer,” not surprising considering the stature of its creators.

Although not as famous today as he should be, Johnson stands as one of the most influential jazz pianists of the 1920s and ‘30s, his lightning-quick “stride” piano style inspiring Fats Waller and generations to come. But Johnson was more than just a keyboard wizard who penned such three-minute classics as “Harlem Strut” and “Steeplechase Rag.” He also blossomed as a composer of large works, his rhapsody “Yamekraw” (1927) and “Harlem Symphony” (1932) reminding listeners that black jazz and blues could be applied eloquently to vast forms once reserved for classical music.

In Hughes, Johnson found a collaborator of comparable genius whose lyric poems, such as “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921) and “The Weary Blues” (1926), tapped the mysticism, tragedy and hope of black life in America.

What little background information on “De Organizer” survives suggests that Hughes and Johnson were proud of the work and championed it after the Carnegie Hall performance, which had been organized by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

“Both Hughes and Johnson tried to have the piece performed,” University of Michigan music professor James Dapogny -- who unearthed the vocal score for the 35-minute work in 1997 -- told the Detroit crowd in his introductory remarks. “But they were told by CBS Radio, for example, that this was just too controversial a piece.”

Indeed, as its title suggests, “De Organizer” addresses the American labor movement in heroic terms, often equating it with black liberation.

At one point, the choir thunders: “If you want to be free, organize.” At another, the title character snarls that when “we got a big strong union, folks, a union of black and white, there’ll be more difference in this old South than there is ‘twixt day and night.”

In 1940, these themes of racial oppression and labor exploitation -- built into a simple story about a union man organizing sharecroppers -- were deemed too hot to handle by mainstream concert presenters, and “De Organizer” disappeared.

Had it not been for Dapogny, an esteemed jazz musicologist who has published an indispensable volume of Jelly Roll Morton’s “Collected Piano Music,” “De Organizer” still would be silent, its text preserved in Hughes anthologies but never brought to life on stage. Dapogny found the music almost by serendipity, having noticed the 51-page vocal score among papers donated by choral director Eva Jessye to the University of Michigan, where Dapogny has taught since 1966.

Jessye had rehearsed the chorus for George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” and Johnson’s “De Organizer,” but her working score contained only the vocal lines, not the instrumental support that goes with it.

Using Jessye’s score as his starting point, Dapogny launched a hunt for every scrap of paper related to “De Organizer,” eventually locating piano-vocal sketches and Johnson’s instructions on instrumentation among the composer’s papers.

Armed with all of this material, Dapogny began his attempt at reconstructing the score, deciding that the project was feasible because the most important portions of the music -- the vocal solo and choral passages -- had survived. They were the heart and soul of the piece, and Dapogny needed only to provide the instrumental support.

“If the vocal score indicated that one song was followed by six bars of instrumental music linking to the next song, I would write those six bars,” said Dapogny in an interview last week.

“I had to write in Johnson’s style. But because you already know the material in the two songs that you’re linking, it’s not necessarily so difficult to determine the melodic themes that Johnson might have used to make the transition.”

Moreover, in a score stretching 1,004 measures, only 80 measures of instrumental music were missing. The concert performance affirmed that Dapogny’s handiwork blended seamlessly with Johnson’s. Like any top-notch restorer of musical theater, Dapogny subsumed his own voice to the style of the composer at hand, ensuring that one piece flowed elegantly into the next.

Although Johnson and Hughes subtitled their work “a blues opera,” in fact the piece also embraces jazz, swing and Broadway idioms, switching easily among these styles. Listen to the resuscitated “De Organizer,” and it’s not difficult to detect the influence of Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” and “Blue Monday,” Jerome Kern’s “Show Boat,” Eubie Blake’s “Shuffle Along” and, possibly, Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha.”

Any one of these tunes surely held the potential to become a hit. Together, they represent a work of sustained melodic inspiration that, on further hearing, may persuade some listeners to reassess Johnson’s position in the jazz pantheon. This first performance of Dapogny’s restoration -- by the University of Michigan’s Symphony Orchestra and Chorus -- had its ups and downs. Most distracting was the tendency of the orchestral forces to obscure the vocal soloists, while listeners surely would have benefited from a program that included all of the lyrics and song titles.

Nevertheless, “De Organizer” emerged as an instantly attractive work steeped in the black vernacular of the first half of the 20th century.

It deserves to be heard across the country and to be documented on a recording.

“All I can say is that it’s really nice music that people will be interested in hearing,” said Dapogny, whose assessment may be too modest.

“De Organizer” is so beautifully crafted by Johnson and so adroitly restored by Dapogny that it may yet earn a place among key dramatic works in the jazz-blues repertory.

At least it should.

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Howard Reich is jazz critic at the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.