NEW YORK, NY.- In fall 2018, Esperanza Spalding had just released 12 Little Spells, a bold foray into using music as a healing practice, and a significant creative leap in her career. She was a newly minted professor at Harvard University, and thriving in the role.
But Spalding the virtuoso bassist, vocalist and four-time Grammy winner who is on the shortlist of young musicians representing jazz to the greater public was worried.
Her concern was Iphigenia, the opera that she was working on with her musical hero-turned-mentor-turned-collaborator, saxophonist-composer Wayne Shorter. His health was fading fast, and the opera was threatening to become his Sagrada Familia: a monument to what might have been.
Shorter had a long-simmering dream to produce a full opera, eventually landing on an update of the ancient Greek myth of Iphigenia. When he mentioned it to Spalding, she felt a stirring in my spirit, she said.
We should make that happen, Spalding remembered thinking, in a phone interview last month. Hes your mentor, your elder. You just want to do whats needed. She pledged to make it a reality and ultimately agreed, at Shorters urging, to write the libretto to go with his music, and to sing the lead.
But the writing proved slow-going, and she churned through countless drafts without finding a connection to the subject matter. By late 2018, Shorter was in a bad way: He could no longer really play the saxophone, and a metabolic tremor left him unable to write music by hand. Spalding was starting to see a version of reality in which he doesnt get to have this thing made, she said. So then we kicked into overdrive.
She checked in with Shorter, to make sure he still felt enough passion for the project. His response was classic Shorter: indirect, poetic, but clear. I want to make real magic, he said. No tricks, no gimmicks.
Spalding took the cue. She asked for a year off from Harvard and decamped to Los Angeles, where she and Shorter collaborated on the opera each day. They decided that working with an opera company was too constrictive, so they amicably parted ways with Opera Philadelphia, which had initially agreed to mount the production, and set about building their own team.
Famed architect Frank Gehry came on to draft the set designs, and director Lileana Blain-Cruz came aboard to bring the story onstage. They named the company Real Magic.
In an interview, Shorter said he had been lifted by the dedication of Spalding, a fellow traveler. Esperanza has a mission, he said, punctuating each word, his 88-year-old voice crackling with excitement. I dont know exactly what it is, but it couples with my mission and the mission that I think a lot of people should discover within themselves.
Shorter learned in mid-2019 that his house was riddled with toxic mold, worsening his decline, so he and his wife, Carolina, moved into Gehrys empty home in Santa Monica. Spalding moved in as well, and it became a habitat of music-making, movie-watching (Shorter is an intense buff) and trading ideas. Collaborators dropped in often, including the members of Shorters longtime quartet, whom he wrote into the score as a kind of counterweight to the full orchestra.
This was all about invention: Esperanza was inventing, Wayne was inventing, and I got to invent alongside of them, Gehry, 92, said in an interview. It was really a jazz concert, from the beginning to end.
And somehow, the experience seemed to restore Shorters health. He regained strength, and his tremor subsided. Dosed up with inspiration, he would often rise at 3 a.m., wheel himself to his writing desk, and continue composing the music to Iphigenia by hand with pen, Wite-Out and a ruler.
Iphigenia, eight years in the making and decades in the dreaming, will begin a run of performances this month, starting with open rehearsals at Mass MoCA on Thursday and Friday, a full debut in Boston on Nov. 12 and 13, and performances in the coming months in Washington, Berkeley and Los Angeles.
Shorter, broadly understood to be the foremost living composer in jazz, often talks about the need for bravery, in art and life. (A definition of faith is to fear nothing, he said in our interview.) And he speaks of starring in the movie of your own life, by which he basically means taking control.
He has been enamored of comic-book heroes since he was a child, and his most recent album, the triple-disc orchestral behemoth Emanon, came packaged with a comic that Shorter had helped create, about a rebel hero fighting off evil in a dystopian world.
To him, the Iphigenia character is a figure whose heroism has gone unsung. In Iphigenia in Aulis, the last great work by the Athenian playwright Euripides, she volunteers to be sacrificed in order to help her countrymen wage war, but shes mysteriously saved by the goddess Artemis. I think he wanted to send a message, Shorter said of Euripides, calling the play a subtle comment on the barbarity of war, and pointing out that the women characters both the heroic Iphigenia and the pestilent Helen are actually positioned as convenient distractions from the male characters greed.
Social critics have long turned to Euripides plays, especially Iphigenia in Aulis, Iphigenia in Tauris and Medea, which also features a woman tangled up in the whims of the gods. In the wake of the Protestant Reformation, Dutch playwright Samuel Coster mounted a production of Iphigenia that mocked the Calvinist clergy of his day, who ultimately had it banned. Costers adaptation, in turn, fed inspiration to painter Jan Steen, whose 1671 canvas The Sacrifice of Iphigenia contained within it a sardonic critique of the religious and political powers of the time. Shorter is also fascinated by a version of Iphigenia in Tauris which tells of Iphigenias life after she escapes from sacrifice that was translated in the 1700s by German poet Goethe. Not long after Shorter and Spalding decided to take on Iphigenia, writer Rachel Cusk put out a wrenching, modernized telling of Medea that won critical praise.
But as Spalding read versions of the Iphigenia myth, she had a hard time finding any kind of heroism that she could relate to. Every version I read, I was not finding that, she said. The layers started to peel away, and I was like, Oh, right, the protagonists didnt write the story.
She started to think about how she could craft a fuller version of Iphigenia, perhaps by unloosing more of her internal monologue, and even by refusing to present her as a single, straightforward character.
A breakthrough came, midway through the writing process, thanks to a series of workshops at Harvard, co-led by musicologist Carolyn Abbate and including a small group of student collaborators. Spalding brought bits of Shorters composition-in-progress to the group, and they developed those pieces in community.
As she heard various voices responding to the parts that Shorter had written, Spalding said, the shapes that were in the music started to seem very clear to me.
Abbate had recommended that Spalding read a 1979 book, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, by French philosopher Catherine Clément, which reckons with the ways that operas splendors are so often masks for simple chauvinism. (The prima donna is the prisoner of a machinery, Clément writes, attacking the standard female lead in opera. She is a living doll to be carried off and taken around for ones personal pleasure.)
That book encouraged me to be like, Actually, my gift is that Im not in opera. My gift is that I dont know how to write these stories. My gift is that I dont know the tropes, Spalding said.
Spalding decided to include entire passages in the libretto contributed by other writers: musician-scholar Ganavya, and poets Joy Harjo and Safiya Sinclair. She had sought them out for advice, but ended up seeing no reason not to add their words in full.
She distributed the Iphigenia character across five different voices, allowing for conflicting feelings to be expressed under the same persons name, and removing the pressure for a lone figure to take a leap against impossible odds.
And of course, Spalding ultimately changed some things about how Iphigenia handles the question of her own sacrifice.
On a recent Monday afternoon in Manhattan, Spalding glided about the rehearsal studio at the Park Avenue Armory, sliding and stretching and perpetually moving like a cat limbering up after a long nap. Her voice joined four other Iphigenias as they let loose the mix of sung and spoken words that start Act 2. A rehearsal pianist swept through Shorters fast-moving, venturesome harmonies, holding the place of the orchestra, as conductor Clark Rundell guided the vocalists along.
Rundell has been working with Shorter for close to a decade, and he peppered his instructions with awe-struck asides about how marvelously Wayne all these shifting harmonies were. At this stage in Shorters career, he often changes chords and even entire keys on virtually every beat and this music was no exception.
Uncomfortable is a given, but if it gets too uncomfortable let me know, Rundell said jokingly, making it clear he was willing to bargain with the vocalists on questions of tempo and dynamics. Shorters handwritten scores are done in painstaking detail, but they generally dont prescribe the speed or volume at which the music is to be played. Its really much more like playing Handel and Purcell, music that was written with no dynamics, in which you need to use your own taste and judgment, Rundell said in an interview.
Blain-Cruz, the director (who was awarded a Doris Duke Artist Award last month; Shorter received an award in the same batch), said that the score and libretto were filled with Easter eggs. Although the music is extremely difficult, she said, which can make blocking and flow a challenge, it lends itself to an atmosphere of playfulness: Cool, were going to try this, and why dont you pick your notes? That freedom is invigorating to the process.
Shorter has stayed home on the West Coast while the company rehearses, but he tunes into rehearsals via Zoom. And until a couple weeks ago, he was still feeding new sheet music to Spalding and Rundell, continuing what has been a collaborative, evolving process throughout, in which every new addition or change be it from Shorter, Spalding, a cast member or someone else is worth responding to.
Watching the rehearsals at the Armory on video, Shorter was having a full-circle moment. In the 1950s, when he was an undergrad at New York University, he went to weekly ROTC drills at the very same Park Avenue Armory, which was then still a military building. Around that time Shorter first hatched the idea to write an opera, titled The Singing Lesson, about a girl in New York City whose brother is in a motorcycle gang. When West Side Story came out, he ditched the idea.
Soon he became a known saxophonist around town, and a writer with a special voice. He became the main composer for whatever bands he joined, from Art Blakeys Jazz Messengers to the Miles Davis Quintet. Boldly declarative but coolly farseeing, his compositions expanded the range of harmonic possibility in jazz. Then, in the 1970s and 80s, he jumped outside of it, playing with jazz-rock fusion band Weather Report and delving into Brazilian traditions and electronic-music frontiers.
Throughout the 21st century he has maintained a steady acoustic quartet (Danilo Perez on piano, John Patitucci on bass and Brian Blade on drums) for the first time in his career, and he has stepped more fully into orchestral writing. Iphigenia wont be the first time he has paired the quartet with a Western orchestra.
One particularly successful orchestral composition was Gaia, a major work that debuted in 2013. Also conducted by Rundell, it was Shorters first collaboration with Spalding, and its probably what gave both him and Spalding the confidence to undertake something as ambitious as Iphigenia.
For her part, Spalding might see all the work of the past few years as feeding into a larger project, given how much the collaborative, antiheroic approach of Iphigenia comports with her solo work. Earlier this year, she released Songwrights Apothecary Lab, a collection of music that grew out of a residency she began during the pandemic in Oregon, bringing out musicians, healers and other artists of color to create something together.
Though she collected the results as an album, she sees the Songwrights project as existing in the real world as a place, and as a practice more than being summed up in a recording. And when she presents the music live after the pandemic, she said, she wont simply be playing it at festivals and clubs.
Its not the festival 70-minute slot, she said. I definitely am more interested in a longer-form performance model, where we set up shop somewhere and I can do listening and learning in conversation.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.