‘This story deserves the most we can give’

There’s a story Michael Dease wants to tell, and now he can tell it his way.

The Michigan State University-based trombone professor, composer and educator was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship this month.

“I’m still pretty shocked by it all,” Dease said last week.

He’s earned his share of accolades in recent years, including being named Trombonist of the Year in DownBeat magazine’s Critics Poll in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024, but this is different.

In the fellowship’s 100th year, Dease joins a select group of 198 artists, scholars and scientists across 53 fields, chosen from nearly 3,500 applicants.

The stipend will enable Dease to concentrate this fall on an ambitious, 28-part suite for jazz chamber ensemble and vocals that will tell the story of MacNolia Cox, the first Black American to finish in the top five of the National Spelling Bee.

It’s a story Dease has longed to tell ever since he read poet A. Van Jordan’s bittersweet cycle of verses tracing Cox’s uphill struggles, historic breakthroughs and late-in-life slide into undeserved obscurity as a cleaning woman.

“I think that if more people know about it, they can relate to it,” he said. “It cuts to the heart of the question of equity and fairness, the challenges you can face that are no fault of your own.”

The idea for the project was seeded two years ago, when Dease got an email from Jordan, an English professor at the University of Michigan, asking for trombone lessons.

The name rang a bell, but Dease couldn’t place it for certain.

When Jordan arrived at the house, Dease recognized him right away.

“Aren’t you A. Van Jordan, the poet?” he asked.

Dease, a poetry lover in his private hours, was familiar with Jordan’s virtuoso verse cycle “M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A.” (The title is meant to be read letter by letter, as if spelling the protagonist’s name.) Jordan’s four full-length collections have earned him numerous national awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007.

Dease studied Jordan’s poetry in a general education class at Florida State University.

“To meet him in my house — wow,” Dease said. “I didn’t know he was interested in the trombone.”

Dease wasn’t surprised to learn that Jordan, a master of tone and rhythm, was also a musician. Critics have likened Jordan’s poetry to the music of jazz icons John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk.

After spending time with Jordan, Dease reread “M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A,” and it put a hook into him.

“This story deserves the most that we can give it,” Dease said.

He submitted a synopsis to the Guggenheim Foundation, explaining why the project is unique, timely and important, and the organization agreed.

“I don’t have anything nearly as hard as MacNolia had to deal with,” Dease said. “But being a biracial person on the color line, so to speak, it’s made it more clear to me what people of different colors, backgrounds and genders have to deal with.”

The suite will trace Cox’s trajectory to fame and beyond, beginning with a grand sendoff and triumphal train ride in 1936 from her native Akron, Ohio, to the National Spelling Bee in Washington.

As soon as the train passed into Maryland, the eighth grader had to sit in the back and eat separately from the other contestants — and that was only the beginning of her disheartening encounters with racism and sexism.

Still, she reached the final round, only to be thwarted by the word “nemesis” under circumstances that are still debated.

“She was almost superhuman at learning vocabulary and performing under pressure in the 1930s, when Black women got it doubly bad from both Jim Crow segregation and living under a male-dominated culture for hundreds of years,” Dease said. “Other stories overshadowed hers through the decades, but when do we tell a Black woman’s story? When do we tell a child’s story?”

Cox returned to Akron and lived a life of “pretty mundane experiences,” Dease said, making ends meet as a cleaning woman and dealing with an abusive husband.

It sounds like a straight-up civil rights saga, albeit an obscure one, but Dease said he hopes “people on both sides of the DEI movement” will relate to Cox.

“Feeling like you’re not being seen is something we’ve been reckoning with as a country,” he said. “How do people left out of DEI initiatives feel? It’s not a monolithic answer. You don’t have to adopt a point of view to understand it.”

Dease hopes to create a dramatic, historic and spiritual musical experience, “something more interactive and conversational among the musicians. Something sonically special, not simply setting poems to music.”

Jokingly citing his tendency to suffer from “ADHD,” he’ll draw freely from styles and genres, from the big-band sounds evoked by a train trip in 1936 to abstract meditations on loss, grief and the arc of justice.

“That’s what the award will give me time to think about,” he said. “With a bigger orchestration, I’ll use instruments like the oboe, the French horn and strings that are new to my palette. I’m excited to have some time to focus on it and make something special with the poetry.”

In addition to a recording next spring, he envisions assembling an ensemble of top Midwest musicians, touring the state and taking the suite to workshops at schools and universities. In time, he hopes professional and student ensembles will bring the suite to life across the nation.

The potential for national exposure is there. In the past 100 years, Guggenheim Fellowships have supported the work of more than 19,000 brilliant and creative minds, including poet E. E. Cummings, environmentalist Rachel Carson, author James Baldwin, choreographer Martha Graham and chemist Linus Pauling.

In 1936, author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston wrote her classic Harlem Renaissance novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God” with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship and dedicated it to the foundation’s first president, Henry Allen Moe.

No pressure there, right?

“Maybe I’ll feel the pressure later, but I don’t feel it yet,” Dease said. “My life, day in and day out, I’m already the hardest person on myself. Right now, I just feel gratitude and excitement about doing the work. It’s going to push me to do things I’m uncomfortable with, but I like that uncomfortable feeling because it lets me discover new things about making music.”