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The endeavor to challenge the limiting way in which music history is appraised, to promote diversity in music and to bring the work of African American composers, both living and deceased, back into popular imagination is no easy feat.
For the team that runs the African American Composer Initiative (AACI), it is nothing short of a mission, one they have been devoted to since the initiative was co-founded in 2010, by Josephine “Jodi” Gandolfi, retired Judge LaDoris Cordell and Deanne Tucker. The initiative is a fiscally sponsored affiliate of InterMusic SF, a Bay Area nonprofit focused on supporting musicians in the region.
Every year, the AACI team hosts a benefit concert to celebrate the music of African American composers whose names have faded into oblivion over the years, and in some cases, generations. The 14th such concert will be held at East Palo Alto’s Eastside College Preparatory School. All ticket proceeds from the concerts will benefit the school.
This year, the concert is themed around the multi-generational sharing of musical traditions, including spirituals, concert music and jazz.
Composers represented in this year’s program include a mix of creative innovators of yore, such as Margaret Bonds, Duke Ellington, William Grant Still, Zenobia Perry and Sister Sledge, and present-day musicians who include Regina Harris Baiocchi, Valerie Capers, John H. Robinson and Joshua McGhee.
This year’s performers include soprano Yolanda Rhodes, tenor Othello Jefferson, soprano Mikayla Dones, pianists/vocalists LaDoris Cordell and Deanne Tucker, pianists Josephine Gandolfi and Jansen Verplank, cellist Victoria Ehrlich, violist Paul Ehrlich, clarinetist Carol Somersille, percussionist Jim Kassis, trumpeter John Worley, saxophonists Oscar Pangilinan and Tod Dickow, and bassist Charlie Channel.
Baiocchi, one of the featured composers in this year’s concert, who is also a poet and novelist, describes spirituals as “a three-way conversation between the past, the present and the future.”
For this year’s program, she has written a piece called “Cain’t See to Cain’t See,” which, she said, is a combination of a spontaneous spiritual and an arranged spiritual. The title, she explained, is a phrase enslaved people used to describe their long working hours in the fields; they started working before sunrise, when it was still dark, and worked beyond sunset, when it was dark again.
“They used music to make it through,” Baiocchi said. “Even though there are no physical chains, the world is still hell-bent on enslaving Black people, people of color, women; and this music is so important because we have to stay inspired, because eventually we are going to experience freedom as a people.”
Her own relationship with spirituals, a genre she believes has tremendous “power,” has been layered. “As a child, spirituals were very frightening to me; it wasn’t until I got a little bit older that I realized that they all have encoded messages,” she said about these centuries-old songs that were created in the face of unthinkable adversity.
For instance, the song “Wade in the Water” was about African American captives wading in the water while trying to escape so that the dogs on their trail couldn’t pick up their scent. Similarly, “Follow the Drinking Gourd” was about looking at the Big Dipper in the night sky as a way to orient oneself with the North Star and stay on course while trying to escape.
“That is one of the ideas that inspired me to write the piece that I wrote,” she said. “It’s important to me to not only celebrate that which I learned from my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, but to share that with younger generations, students, family members, keeping that part of our tradition alive.”
Baiocchi appreciates the effort being taken by the AACI team in keeping the work of African American composers alive in present day consciousness. “Sometimes there’s so much noise in the world that it’s easy to forget how powerful this music can be,” she said. “A lot of times ‘popular’ music tends to get more attention than, say, classical music.”
That’s why music composer and teacher Joshua McGhee gives his students “listening homework” to help familiarize them with older music and the work of composers from different countries and languages.
For this concert, McGhee has composed a tribute to William Grant Still, 20th-century composer known as the father of African American music.
About his homage to Still, McGhee said, “I studied a lot more of music that I didn’t know; he does have a very specific style, so what I wanted to do was to really create something that was in his vein rather than kind of use his material as a muse or do variations. I kind of wanted to just take his style but just interpret it in my own way.”
Among musical traditions that inform McGhee’s art today are classical, romantic and folk music. Besides Still’s compositions, the work of 20th-century British composer Vaughan Williams has also been a “huge influence” on his music.
“These concerts really give a voice to people who otherwise probably would not have one,” he said about the AACI’s work over the last 15 years, which has been consistently pulling names of talented African American composers from the archives and bringing them into the present so that they can claim their rightful place alongside their better known white counterparts such as Mozart, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff and Debussy.
“Jodi’s going back in history and bringing these names forth again and saying — ‘hey, these people are just as brilliant,'” said McGhee. “She’s giving them a platform.”
The African American Composers Initiative Concert takes place Feb. 1-2, 3 p.m. at Eastside College Preparatory School, 1041 Myrtle St., East Palo Alto. Tickets are $5-$20. aacinitiative.org/concerts.
Read our 2024 story about the creation of AACI.
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