It was not a sleepy Sunday. Old hymns, retooled and fortified for a small army of jazz students, rolled off the stage and blew up like grenades.
At Michigan State University’s annual jazz tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr., saxman Diego Rivera channeled the free wind of John Coltrane, whipping a 40-piece big band into a righteous cyclone.
English professor Jeff Wray praised the Haitian revolution, the “first taste of freedom” for slaves in the Western hemisphere.
Even the tender moments were tough. Willowy Sunny Wilkinson sang as if she were driving a railroad spike with her high heels: “Someday we’ll all be free.”
There’s the calendar New Year in Lansing, and then there’s the real one. Come January, the day before Martin Luther King Day, MSU’s jazz team lovingly slaps the infant year into consciousness with “Jazz: Spirituals, Prayers and Protest,” a fervent program of music and oratory at Wharton Center’s Pasant Theatre.
This year’s King tribute was both a spanking and a baptism. Riffing on the theme of “Faith,” a big band of 50-plus jazz students and serried ranks of vocalists took two full Pasant Theatre houses to the river and gave them a deep King dunking.
The musical centerpiece was an ambitious set of gospel-jazz arrangements originally recorded by Detroit-born trumpeter Donald Byrd. MSU director of jazz studies Rodney Whitaker revived Byrd’s little-heard music at the Detroit Jazz Festival last September. It proved a potent vehicle Sunday for the growing jazz program.
The music blended gospel call-and-response, orchestral swells, lyrical Miles Davis-style soloing and hard-driving swing into an overwhelming, emotional mosaic.
To fill out Byrd’s big sound, Whitaker amalgamated four MSU jazz units, packed with heavy brass, reeds and a crack rhythm section. Two vocal groups, the MSU Vocal Ensemble and Voices of Total Praise, sang stage front.
The vocal and instrumental groups sloshed the hall like two vibrating walls in a ripple tank.
Whitaker’s wife, Cookey, led the vocalists. Their conducting styles sharply contrasted — Rodney stayed rooted, Cookey sashayed sassily — but the timing was spot-on.
As last year’s King tribute was dominated by the imminent inauguration of Barack Obama, this year’s event was peppered with explicit and implicit references to the recent earthquake in Haiti.
To bring the connection home, Whitaker kicked the student big band through “Haitian Fight Song,” a rolling boulder of riffs composed by one of Whitaker’s musical heroes, bassist and civil rights firebrand Charles Mingus.
Wray praised Toussaint L’Ouverture, leader of the Haitian revolution of the late 18th century, as an early fighter against slavery and European colonialism. (By sheer coincidence, Donald Byrd, who composed much of the evening’s music, was born Donaldson Toussaint L’Ouverture Byrd II, named in honor of the Haitian leader.)
Toward afternoon’s end, the terrifying outbursts and bell-like tolling of Byrd’s “I’ve Longed and Searched for My Mother” reduced the house to a hush.
In between musical segments, a series of speakers echoed the messages of Byrd spirituals like “Brother Isaac,” “I’m Tryin’ to Get Home” and “March Children.”
Speaker Pamela Bellamy, director of MSU’s King/Chavez/Parks program, unleashed her sanctified holler to animate the words of plainspoken 1960s civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer.
“The Lord has sent me to deliver the broken-hearted, the bruised, and to deliver them into freedom,” Bellamy roared, coming down hard on the blows and bruises. Haiti seemed to be on her mind, too.
But there were healers on hand. After Rivera and the band boomed out Coltrane’s “Song of the Underground Railroad,” Wray delivered a series of meditations on a passage from the book of Corinthians.
“Faith, hope and love remain — but the greatest of these is love,” Wray read.
Wrestling directly with the evening’s theme, Wray read Pat Robertson’s now-infamous Jan. 13 statement that Haiti made a deal with the devil to win independence from France and was now “cursed.”
“Faith can be a blunt instrument, wielded like a club,” Wray lamented. He listed a few of the horrors committed throughout history in the name of faith, from terrorism to the Crusades.
Wray said he looked to King for guidance and found that in his 1964 Nobel acceptance speech, in which the civil rights leader said faith would help people navigate “the creative turmoil of a genuine civilization struggling to be born.”
It made sense, especially after hearing the creative musical turmoil unleashed by Whitaker and his young legions that afternoon.
“Now that is a faith that I choose to align myself with,” Wray declared.
