Anthony Davis
A quick review of particulars: In February 1974 the 19-year-old granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst was abducted from the apartment she shared with boyfriend Steven Weed by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a small cadre of armed lefties with code names like Teko and Cinque Mtume. Ten weeks later she helped the SLA rob a San Francisco bank, and was immortalized by security cameras as the rifle-toting, beret-wearing reborn revolutionary Tania.
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Anthony Davis, whose little-heard 1992 opera Tania is finally out on two CDs, knows something about duality. Twenty years ago he made his reputation as a smart jazz pianist and composer who collaborated with other savvy conceptualists like Leo Smith, Anthony Braxton, George Lewis, and James Newton. Now he’s known primarily for his operas, including X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X and Amistad, which the Lyric Opera of Chicago premiered in 1997. But Davis didn’t trade in one life for the other. The motherlode of inspiration for his mature style was his 80s orchestra Episteme. It was populated by improvisers who could breathe life into his complex rhythmic figures, audibly inspired by the quilted 12/8 dances of Indonesian or West African percussion choirs. (You can hear the resemblance between Davis’s music and postminimalist works like Tehillim by Steve Reich, who was drawn to those musics too.) Davis’s style emerged back in naive “world music” days, but it was no one-world mush. Instead he focused on the elements that set those musics apart, reimagining them on his own terms: log drummers’ avoidance of a synchronized downbeat, so the time flows like a river you can dip into anywhere; the shimmering timbres of Balinese gamelans, in which intersecting instrumental layers move at various speeds–low instruments slow, high ones fast.
The infantilized context doesn’t flatter the subject, but little here does. In bed in scene one, Patty fantasizes about mild celebrity pitching snack foods on TV, and Tania’s revolutionary pronouncements later appear to be the flip side of that; the TV reporting on her case is yet another variation, echoing the banal language of her imaginary commercial. She’s easy to sway because there is so little in her world to anchor her. There was no love at home, as Dad (Thomas Young, who as in X sounds oddly like Sammy Davis Jr.) helpfully reveals: “It’s easy to give away a house / It’s easy to give away a car / But love: Love you mustn’t part with.”
The juxtaposed musical styles and the multiple layers of musical activity (moving at halved or doubled speeds in relation to each other, making the basic pulse ambiguous at times) amplify all the dualities: the waking and dreaming worlds, good girl and bad girl, the clash between the shallow denizens of her two worlds. Other realities are always intruding–the first-act finale is an Ivesian hubbub of intersecting musical spheres. Patty chants a message for tape in the background, echoed or prompted by Cinque; in the foreground, over a backbeat, the SLA’s Gelina (Jana Campbell Ellsworth) sings a melody paraphrasing “Amazing Grace” in a voice recalling privileged protest singer Joan Baez. It’s dense and stirring and it all fits, one way or another–Ives despised William Randolph Hearst, for one thing.
