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Photo by Andy Tennille
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Photo by Andy Tennille
We take people on a journey that might be something of a surprise,” bandleader Gerald Clayton says of “Piedmont Blues: A Search for Salvation,” an ambitious musical flashback coming to the Carpenter Theatre on April 13. “There will be moments of nostalgia that will make sense to fans of the Piedmont blues, but the piece we are presenting is more than that.”
Clayton, a respected pianist and the son of legendary jazz bassist and arranger John Clayton, developed the multimedia production after earning a commission from Duke Performances. The idea of the show — this will be its third iteration — was to highlight the history and influence of Durham, North Carolina's African-American community, and the vibrant scenes of life and creative expression that once surrounded the city's thriving tobacco warehouses.
At the center was the Piedmont blues, a rich East Coast offshoot of country blues distinguished by syncopated guitar and ragtime rhythms, a regional style that developed in the ’20s and ’30s across a wide area from Virginia to the Carolinas to Georgia. “Piedmont blues is sort of a forgotten language, compared to Chicago blues and Delta blues,” Clayton says by phone from California.
If you are familiar with the form, the “Piedmont Blues” program may seem like an odd marriage of styles; Clayton will lead his large jazz band, the Assembly, through a three-part musical reimagining of a genre best known for solitary, one-man fingerpickers such as pioneers Blind Blake and Rev. Gary Davis. “I would challenge the word ‘odd,’ ” Clayton says. “For me, my first influence was music that came from the blues expression, and I think a lot of jazz music really came out of the blues." This won't be a pastiche or mere nostalgia, he maintains. “If someone is coming to the show to hear our best impression of Rev. Gary Davis, they will be disappointed. I do try to put my feet in the shoes of these masters, to understand the details of the music ... The goal is not necessarily to recreate, but to get to the essence of what the music is about.”
And, he says, historically, there were more sounds to consider. “You had big bands traveling through Durham to play in those tobacco warehouses, too, and you'd have spirituals being sung by African-American women while they were de-stemming tobacco leaves. My vision of the music, and arranging it for the group I assembled, definitely includes what we think of as the Piedmont guitar picking style, but I also wanted to challenge people, to put a question mark on what their notions of history are.”
Along with the celebrated tap dancer Maurice Chestnut, and a small gospel choir, “Piedmont Blues” will also feature René Marie, a Virginia native and another jazz explorer, on lead vocals. “The performance is going to take listeners on a journey,” she says, speaking from her Fredericksburg home. “It's such a bold and epic look at the culture. It's emotional and involving.” As for her own connections to the music: “I didn't really know what the ‘Piedmont blues’ was when I got into it, but I soon realized that this was the music I had heard as a child and have known all my life.”
The show was directed by Christopher McElroen, a co-founder of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, who weaves period stage design with archival photography and film clips that provide musical context, such as a sequence with John Dee Holeman, one of the last of the old-time Piedmont blues stylists, performing in front of a former slave house. “We spent a lot of time working on the narrative arc, gathering the visual elements, meeting with the elders ... and weaving it in with archival footage we were able to access,” Clayton says. The result will be more than a musical performance and different from a musical – it will be an immersive experience.
In the end, Clayton hopes blues fans listen to the music in a different way. “The blues hasn't gone anywhere," he says. “The barometer is just how honest someone's expression is. I'm just looking for the truthfulness in somebody's voice or playing and so the thread is easy ... to connect the music of the Piedmont blues with the music we play today. It's good to remind the people who love this music that it's a living, breathing thing and to search for more.”
Gerald Clayton's Piedmont Blues: "A Search for Salvation" will be performed Thursday, April 13, at 7:30 p.m. at the Carpenter Theatre. $32-$40. 600 E. Grace St. WCVE's Peter Solomon leads a preshow discussion with Clayton at 6:30 p.m.
