Bill Lowe let out a cry from his tuba, guttural and keening, ecstatic and heartbreaking at the same time. Ken Filiano responded in kind from his bass. Hafez Modirzadeh joined in with a moan from his saxophone. Naledi Masilo unspooled a string of skittering vocalizations. Taylor Ho Bynum release a plaintive wail as Kevin Harris laid down ominous piano lines. Luther Gray arrived with a rattling drum line that solidified into a rhythm that Lowe emphasized with snapping fingers. As he directed each of the players to take solos, Lowe broke into smiles. The music may have spoken about complex emotions, but there was great satisfaction in the telling.
The group’s first number, “Us,” was part of Signifyin’ Natives, a suite of searching, excoriating, and invigorating music from composer and musician Bill Lowe that uses as its text passages from a Harlem Renaissance classic that, it turns out, has as much to say about the present as it did to its own time, a century ago. Lowe’s presentation of Signifyin’ Natives — at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library on Yale’s campus Tuesday afternoon — was a collaboration between the library and the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, running now through June 25.
Lowe introduced his work by going back to the basics of “creativity,” he said, or “making stuff.” His plain language was its own statement of intent, a way of making sure that the conversation stayed grounded. “We create stuff and some people get called names, like ‘artists,’ ” he said. “But what do we do?” And “who do we do it for?”
Lowe has been on the faculty and taught at several major universities and colleges, and said that he has told his students that “you make it for you,” which wasn’t the ego trip that it sounded like at first. He meant that “you get to find out who you is,” and that “if you share it” with others, then “we get to find out who we are.” Because, with each passing year, Lowe felt more deeply that discovering who you were was about “finding out who you fit with,” or put more broadly, “what is that little piece of the puzzle that makes us all human?”
Asserting one’s humanity, and the humanity of everyone, could seem basic, he said. But “we live in a time when the notion of ‘are you a human being?’ is not as silly as it sounds.”
That was Lowe’s connection to talking about Cane, the 1923 novel by Jean Toomer that was one of the most important literary works of the Harlem Renaissance, celebrated in its time and now. “I have been obsessed with this novel,” Lowe said, as “one of the most beautiful works of written art I have ever come across.” Cane deals with “Black life in the lethal rural South and in the loveless cities of the North,” as the New York Times wrote in an assessment of its enduring influence and relevance; it is also full of poetry and poetic prose that, Lowe realized, could be placed in a musical context. The novel’s concerns also happened to dovetail with an ongoing musical project he was working on, which he had already called Signifyin’ Natives.
Natives — which Lowe used to refer broadly to Black and Brown colonized, enslaved, and oppressed peoples — “spent a lot of time in the 20th century talking back to the Man, saying ‘we’re tired of you,’ ” Lowe said. It seemed to him that in this century, perhaps “the natives should be talking to each other,” not “behind the Man’s back,” as they had been doing for a long time, but “on his platforms,” where the conversation could be public, for all to hear.
Thus, in “finding out who I am,” Lowe said, he decided to “set those conversations to music.” In the action of the novel, emancipation from slavery is recent for its characters. Toomer’s book explores the “stress” of an enslaved people gaining their freedom, only to have oppression continue in other forms, many of them all too lethal. “What does it mean to be free” under those conditions, Lowe asked. “You work with what you have. As he saw it, there were three options. You could “fall down and die.” You could let it occupy your mind day and night. Or, he said, there was the “jazz possibility”: “you never don’t acknowledge the negative,” but “then your job as a human being is to figure out how to survive with all the negative stuff.” All of that, he added, was in the service of the goal “to find out who you is.”
Lowe’s music did as much speaking as his words. His compositions never failed to create a smoky, spacey atmosphere, shot through with lyric melodies that took surprising turns, creating passages like lanterns on a dark night. Successive pieces deployed rhythm after rhythm, ranging from slow blues to breakneck swing to heavy funk. It was at its most revelatory when it was also at its most exploratory, as the soloists eschewed more straightforward melodic improvisations in favor of modes of playing that explored tone and texture. The effect was immediate, conveying raw, intense emotions that drew spontaneous applause from the audience and left the players flush and often beaming. Its moments of greatest sadness were also its most cathartic. It showed the effective of what Lowe had called the “jazz possibility.” It drew power from survival.
For those in the audience who may not have read the book (this reporter among them), the performance also served as a rich introduction to Toomer’s gorgeous writing. In some cases, Lowe used the texts of Toomer’s poems as song lyrics, enriching and commenting on the already evocative text. In other cases, the music was a landscape for passages from the novel that described the struggles of specific characters, or described the vitality of an urban neighborhood. This taste of Cane was a convincing argument for solidifying the book and its author as forces to be acknowledged and reckoned with — not least because the passages, whether sung or read, could apply to yesterday as much as a century ago.
Or as Lowe put it, when describing the lethal oppression Black people faced in the 1920s, “that’s all coming back, y’all. That never really went anywhere.” He then added, with a sarcastic wink, “but what do I know? I’m just an old trombone player.”
Check the website of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas for more upcoming events through June 25.
