If you see names like Scott Joplin, Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Django Reinhardt together with those of Erik Satie, Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy on a Klarafestival programme, you wonder how such a mix will sound. Plus then the performers: pianist Claire Chevalier and singer Claron McFadden.
There were many curious visitors for that cross-pollinating combination. The festival even had to upgrade a planned rehearsal to a full-fledged extra afternoon concert. So two women stood on the small stage of the Terarkenzaal in Bozar. One dressed in white, the other in black. Claire Chevalier sat at her 1920 Erard, soprano Claron McFadden stood with her voice. Both welcomed us to the "nightclub" named Chez Bricktop after the red-haired ("bricktop") Afro-American dancer/singer Ada Smith. An expat who traded the US for Paris in the twenties of the last century. The two artists feel related to her and gladly tell their own contemporary expat story.
The French Claire Chevalier found the French music education she received in her country too rigid. It was more relaxed in neighbouring Belgium. The American soprano Claron McFadden moved to Europe in 1984 and experienced less racism here than back home. Would it be a "Black and White Minstrel Show"? Not at all. McFadden: "I'm black and I can say that, but you can't". By way of introduction, authentic Django Reinhardt plays from the speakers with a song that Cole Porter wrote for Lady Bricktop. Then follow the songs that the two expats chose together for their show. There are compositions by Poulenc, Ravel, Debussy that Chevalier accompanies with remarkable ease. In those by George Gershwin and Cole Porter there is more of the classical fingerprint than the jazziness we are used to. But when we hear McFadden with hits like Sophisticated Lady, Ain't misbehavin' and Lady Be Good we are right in the middle of that jazz idiom. The song they closed the radio show with was truly wonderfully beautiful. A piece by Duke Ellington, TGTT or Too Good To Title, from one of his Sacred Concerts but in a magnificent arrangement by Afro-American Jannell Gill, played languorously by Claire Chevalier, sung delightfully clearly by Claron McFadden.
The late evening happening was yet to come! While waiting, a group of young people from the Ghent and Brussels Conservatorium experimented in and around the halls and corridors of Bozar, partly with composed music, partly improvising, including choreography. The performances bore names like Sculpture musicale, Deconstructed music, Fauno… Almost impressionistic in appearance. They were supposed to put us in the mood for the evening's concert. That was of course the moving "Jesus Blood never failed me yet… for he loves me so". Setting the sigh of a homeless beggar to music was not in vain either. Because British composer Gavin Bryars composed a soft booming drone under that beggar's hymn, put it in a loop and wove an moving and rising and falling musical structure around it. It has truly become an iconic monument from the minimalist and ambient music genre. Even now (the work dates from 1971) you get shivers when you hear that vulnerable voice almost chanting and especially when the strings, the other instruments and the choir begin to underscore the power of that message, for minutes.
Claron McFadden sang along with the social choir Les Choux de Bruxelles. Together they had indeed very intensely prepared that project so that the whole evening breathed even more deeply in the engaged spirit of the work. McFadden also sang beforehand a new creation by Gavin Bryars on a sonnet by Petrarch. Bryars summed up its content succinctly: love is not a blessing but a curse.
A few days later at Flagey this European Afro-American Klarafestival artist sang songs by another composer from the (post)minimalist music scene, David Lang. But to set the mood there was first that spectacular Aria, which John Cage once wrote for that spectacular soprano Cathy Berberian. A score, not in notes but recorded graphically, in colourful drawings with text in five languages. Claron McFadden drew from it with ease all the vocal registers—from falsetto to baritone—that Cage put into it. She glided effortlessly through those different vocal styles and sounds.
Then she immersed herself together with the French Ensemble TaCTUS in that wondrous David Lang world. An ensemble with passion for percussion but we also heard sax, vibraphones, accordion, clarinet and all that packaged in a serene live video staging and then that impressive Claron McFadden. They are almost always incantatory songs in that repetitive Lang idiom with as a highlight of course that multi-voice Song of Songs Just. It became overknown because Lang used it when Paolo Sorrentino asked him for the soundtrack of his successful film Youth from 2014. With her friends Claron McFadden sang this sensual and enchanting love song as it should be: touchingly beautiful.
On one of the cards with audience comments that slid past the video camera you read: I would simply love to breathe. A fitting illustration to refer to both what all these artists can do with their breathtaking voices and to their engagement, to the I can't breathe of the Black Lives Matter movement.
- WHAT: Chez Bricktop, Happening: Jesus Blood Never failes me yet, David Lang's World
- WHO: Claron McFadden (vocals), Claire Chevalier (piano), Gavin Bryars, Ensemble TaCTUS, Les Choux de Bruxelles, students Conservatorium Brussel and Gent
- WHERE: BOZAR (Terarken and Henri Le Boeuf hall); Flagey (studio 4)
- WHEN: Saturday, March 9, 2024 (Bozar); Tuesday, March 12, 2024 (Flagey)
- PHOTOS: © Erik de Jong, © Hanneke Kuijpers, © Sergei Shauchenka, © Sergei Shef; © own photo - RC/KC
