On An Overgrown Path

A child prodigy fêted by Leonard Bernstein and Virgil Thomson, her music performed by five leading American orchestras while still a teenager, as a pianist accompanied by the New York Philharmonic at age 16, ranked alongside Aaron Copland and Marc Blitzstein as a composer, mourned with a Pontifical Requiem Mass in St Patrick's Cathedral, New York, and rumoured subject of a Hollywood biopic. That is the executive summary of a mercurial but forgotten American music legend. Child prodigies, female composers and musicians of colour have become classical click bait fodder. But the story told in this post is still important. Because the forgotten figure was a woman who had a black father and white mother. It is also important because she experienced the barriers to musicians of colour that still linger on today away from the celebrity circus. But most importantly, despite acclaim in her lifetime just half a century ago, until an earlier version of this post was published in 2011 her...

That photo of Dean Dixon was taken during his tenure as music director of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra from 1964 to 1967*. Despite being a maestro abroad but a Negro in America , Dean Dixon's conducting was, thankfully, captured on numerous recordings . Just one example is his 1969 interpretation of Haydn's Symphony No 53 with the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks which can be heard online through this link provided by stalwart Overgrown Path reader Antoine Leboyer. Sadly Guyanese Rudolph Dunbar, who became the Berlin Philharmonic's first black conductor before his career was sabotaged by racism in the BBC , was not well served by recordings. There are a few of him playing jazz clarinet . But I have no knowledge of any recordings of Dunbar as a conductor. A report reached me of a researcher claiming that recordings of Dunbar conducting exist in an unnamed archive, but so far that has not been substantiated. Recordings of Dunbar's broadcast concerts ...

David Munrow is best known as an early music virtuoso but his genius knew no bounds. His producer at EMI Christopher Bishop mentored both Riccardo Muti and André Previn early in their careers, and therefore his view that had David Munrow not died tragically young he could have become a great conductor cannot be dismissed easily. That view was expressed by Christopher in a 2007 radio interview with me - sound file via this link . Below is my transcription of that radio interview, see footer photo taken at the time. Christopher Bishop is best known for his work with Sir Adrian Boult, and the interview touches on the recording he produced of the Brandenburg Concertos conducted by Sir Adrian with David Munrow and John Turner playing the recorder parts. That recording was reissued in the 2012 EMI Classics box ' Sir Adrian Boult from Bach to Wagner ' which was lovingly curated by my EMI colleague Richard Bradburn . Richard died last week of a Coronavirus-related illness and th...

Two of the albums that I return to time and time again during my explorations of mystic turuq  are Brian Jones Presents the Pan Pipes at Joujouka from 1971 and Bill Laswell 's 1992  Apocalypse Across the Sky , both of which capture the literally entrancing sound of the legendary Master Musicians of Jajouka in their home village in Morocco's Rif Mountains. Six years ago I collaborated with Led Zeppelin biographer and Michael Jackson ghost writer Stephen Davis on a two-part profile of the Master Musicians. Between 1973 and 1989 Stephen made a number of visits to Jajouka, and he is therefore an important and reliable source on an important cultural tradition in which the music is sometimes drowned-out by the sound of axes being ground . When I asked Stephen to choose between the Brian Jones and Bill Laswell productions he plumped for the more atmospheric and authentic 1971 recording, but conceded that Apocalypse Across the Sky "sounds great". Personally I love Brian...