In the late 1980s, a sensational case in Georgia caught the attention of Paul Carter Harrison, a playwright and director who’s taught at Columbia College for the past 20 years. “A beautiful young black woman revealed that she’d had carnal relationships with three white priests,” he says. “What’s more, she also had intercourse with a black archbishop, who might have secretly married her. She claimed that one of them was the father of her child. Needless to say, the church eventually paid her off.”
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At the time, Harrison was looking for a story that he and saxist-composer Julius Hemphill and sculptor-designer Oliver Jackson, both of whom he’d known since the early 70s, could turn into a jazz opera. “We settled on this one,” he says, “because we were fascinated by how a woman can wield power over men to make them violate a sacred commitment.”
Hemphill had composed only half an hour of the music by the time the opera was given a workshop performance at Columbia College in 1995. Then in April of that year he died. Harrison quickly recruited Wendell Logan, an Oberlin professor and composer whose work he’d long admired, to finish the score. “Both have highly theatrical dynamics in their works,” Harrison says. “But Julius would make music with only six saxes and not include any swing or bebop, whereas Logan is more conventional. His score calls for a large chamber ensemble and is filled with 20th-century signatures tied closely to African rhythms.”
