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    Elayne Jones, Pioneering Percussionist, Is Dead at 94

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    She challenged racial barriers when she joined the San Francisco Symphony in 1972. But she became embroiled in a legal battle when she was denied tenure two years later.Elayne Jones, a timpanist who was said to be the first Black principal player in a major American orchestra when she joined the San Francisco Symphony in 1972, and who mounted a legal battle over racial and sexual discrimination when she was denied tenure two years later, died on Saturday at her home in Walnut Creek, Calif. She was 94.Her daughter Cheryl Stanley said the cause was dementia.The charismatic, Juilliard-trained Ms. Jones was not only a rare woman among the orchestral percussionists of her time; she also helped lead a generation of Black musicians in confronting the pervasive — and enduring — racism of the classical music industry. Her appointment in San Francisco, under that ensemble’s modish music director, Seiji Ozawa, “projected a forward-looking vision of classical music,” the scholar Grace Wang has written.Admired for her lyricism and finesse, Ms. Jones was an instant hit in San Francisco. “Her playing is so outlandish in quality, one gets the titters just thinking of it,” the critic Heuwell Tircuit wrote in The San Francisco Chronicle of her debut. Arthur Bloomfield of The San Francisco Examiner wrote that her work in a seemingly straightforward passage of “Norma,” at the San Francisco Opera, was “so rounded and suave I just about fell out of my seat.”Once described in a headline as “the groovy tympanist,” Ms. Jones had seen the San Francisco auditions as a last chance to win a permanent post, a success that had been denied her during the two decades she spent toiling to challenge the color line as a freelancer in New York City.“I had to prove that music could be played by anyone who loves it,” she said in 1973. “It’s been a terrible burden because I always felt I had to do better, that I wouldn’t be allowed the lapses other musicians have. It’s true even now.”Orchestral musicians typically serve probationary periods before being granted tenure. Approval seemed a formality in Ms. Jones’s case, but a seven-man committee of the San Francisco players voted against her — and a bassoonist, Ryohei Nakagawa — in May 1974, despite Mr. Ozawa’s advice to the contrary; two rated her competence at 1 out of 100.As audience members launched pickets and petitions, many white critics portrayed the incident primarily as a challenge to Mr. Ozawa’s authority; though the conductor denied any link, he soon quit. Ms. Jones saw things differently.“I’ve had good vibes everywhere. Now I wonder what the hell is wrong and what do I do that’s so wrong?” she said that June, announcing her intention to sue the orchestra and the musicians’ union. “Was it because I was a woman or a Black? Or both?”Ms. Jones played on for a season while her lawsuit made its way through the courts. But when a judge ordered a second, supervised vote in August 1975, a new committee of players turned her down again, citing concerns about her intonation. Although she performed, tenured, in the pit of the San Francisco Opera until 1998, her effective firing at the symphony stayed with her.“It has been quite difficult,” she said in a television interview in 1977, “not only playing but trying to live through all this, and living with myself too, which is kind of hard because you begin to question, well, am I really a good performer, am I worthy person?”But, she went on, “I listen to other people, and I have more confidence in myself.”Ms. Jones looked on as the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and the conductor Seiji Ozawa acknowledged the audience’s applause after a performance by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory in 1973.Bruce Beron, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony ArchivesElayne Viola Jones was born on Jan. 30, 1928, in Harlem, the only child of immigrants from Barbados. Her father, Cecil, was a porter and then a subway conductor; her mother, Ometa, dreamed of becoming a professional pianist, but had to enter domestic service. They had a piano in their apartment, and Elayne used it to play along with the big-band jazz she heard on the radio. She was 6 when her mother introduced her to classical music.“At first, I thought it was strange to have music that people didn’t dance to, because we all loved dancing to swing music,” Ms. Jones wrote in her autobiography, “Little Lady With a Big Drum” (2019). “However, I didn’t reject this different kind of music and practiced it every day, growing to enjoy its irregularities.”She qualified for the High School of Music & Arts (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and the Performing Arts), and she hoped to add the violin to her studies on the piano; she was given drumsticks instead. “We all know that Negroes have rhythm,” she recalled a teacher saying.Ms. Jones was sufficiently talented to win a scholarship to the Juilliard School in 1945, under the sponsorship of Duke Ellington. Her tutor was Saul Goodman, the storied timpanist of the New York Philharmonic, and after she graduated, in 1949, he persuaded New York City Opera to hire her as its timpanist.But the City Opera season was limited, and she had to scrounge for jobs for much of the year; on tour with the company, she was forced to sleep in separate hotels from the other musicians, stopped at stage doors as white colleagues walked through, and told to perform hidden from view.Politically a leftist, Ms. Jones became an insistent activist. When the critic Howard Taubman wrote in The New York Times in 1956 that “if there are capable Negro musicians” they would deserve major-ensemble jobs, she visited him to demonstrate that such musicians did, in fact, exist. She worked on an Urban League report about racism in the music world; within weeks of its publication in 1958, she found herself filling in at the New York Philharmonic. Although the Philharmonic’s records of substitute players are sparse, archival documents name her as the first Black musician to perform as part of the orchestra.Ms. Jones left City Opera in 1960 at the request of her husband, the doctor and civil rights activist George Kaufman, who asked that she spend more evenings with him and their three children. But Leopold Stokowski, long a fan, quickly tapped her for his American Symphony Orchestra, for which she performed until 1972. She was one of the driving forces behind the founding of the integrated Symphony of the New World in 1965, and she joined other Black musicians to urge that the initial rounds of auditions be held blind, with the musicians behind a screen, to reduce bias. The San Francisco Symphony was an early adopter of that approach.“I wouldn’t have gotten the job if the screen wasn’t in play,” she later told Dr. Wang. “I’m the recipient of a thing that I worked on.”Ms. Jones’s marriage to Dr. Kaufman ended in divorce in 1964. In addition to her daughter Ms. Stanley, she is survived by her son, Stephen Kaufman, a violinist and performance artist also known as Thoth; another daughter, Harriet Kaufman Douglas; and three grandchildren.As a single mother, Ms. Jones often had to take her children to rehearsals, she told The Times in 1965. She hoped, she said, that she offered them an example.“All youngsters need an image to project to, Negro youngsters even more than white,” she said. “When they can see Negroes playing in the orchestra, they may feel that they can get there someday, too.” More

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      Review: An Orchestra Manages to Capture That Ellington Swing

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      At Carnegie Hall, the American Symphony Orchestra and Leon Botstein made a case for Duke Ellington works still rarely heard from classical ensembles.What should America’s major orchestras do with the genius of Duke Ellington? Should they program his music in pops concerts, or on their main classical series?And when they play him, which of the messy labyrinth of editions of his symphonic pieces should they use? Will they need to hire ringers from the jazz world to take on solo parts?Many big ensembles dodge Ellington entirely, or marginalize him: The New York Philharmonic, for example, tends to play his works at community events or Young People’s Concerts, but only occasionally as part of its subscription season.Even if Ellington’s legacy hasn’t really suffered for this, given his extensive catalog of recordings and worthy interpretations by jazz groups past and present, there’s still ambiguity about how his orchestral music — a body of work he created alongside his compositions for jazz band — should sound and be presented.So give the conductor Leon Botstein and his American Symphony Orchestra credit for bravery as he and his players offered a concert of Ellington at Carnegie Hall on Thursday.The program wasn’t much of a surprise: essentially a mix of selections from the 1960s album “The Symphonic Ellington” and pieces from the conductor and arranger Maurice Peress’s later recording with the American Composers Orchestra. (While Ellington’s best music fulfills his own ambitions of being “beyond category,” the Peress arrangements can sound more syrupy, with a mid-20th-century “pops” orchestral sound.)But in a smart move, Botstein also engaged the pianist Marcus Roberts’s trio for the second half, which gave the evening a sense of occasion — and, at times, fresh insight.Was it faultless, judged next to recordings that included Ellington as a participant? No, though that’s a high bar. The performance of the first movement of “Black, Brown and Beige” (in Peress’s arrangement) was full-throated but not ideally balanced — the strings sodden in a way that dampened the blues feeling, particularly during the rousing, complex finish.I remain convinced that orchestras should learn and play something closer to the original version of “Beige” that Ellington premiered with his leaner orchestra at Carnegie Hall in 1943. (This notion isn’t so far-fetched at a time when conservatory graduates move between jazz and classical styles with greater ease than ever before.)A similarly string-heavy ensemble at first threatened to bog down Thursday’s performance of “Harlem” (in Peress’s arrangement with Luther Henderson). But midway through, some graceful descending patterns in the winds aided soulful, delicate interplay between a pair of exposed clarinets. Later, when the strings came back in force, they enhanced the glow, instead of washing out the color.It was a turning point for the concert, which got stronger as it went on. Before intermission, the take on “Night Creature” — once again in Peress’s arrangement — exuded brassy confidence. (A recording of Ellington’s 1955 premiere of the piece at Carnegie, with the Symphony of the Air Orchestra, can be found online.)Russell also joined, from left, the drummer Jason Marsalis, the bassist Rodney Jordan and the pianist Marcus Roberts for a set of Ellington songs without orchestra.Matt DineAfter intermission, Roberts, the pianist, took the stage with the bassist Rodney Jordan and the drummer Jason Marsalis. The trio played a short, vivacious set of Ellington tunes — without orchestra but with the vocalist Catherine Russell, who had been already heard with the American Symphony in a somewhat muted take on “Satin Doll.”Speaking from the stage, Roberts encouraged the audience to listen to the music as though it were written “last week.” A tempo-switching take on “Mood Indigo” brought that point home nicely. Russell was properly featured during the set; her improvisatory exclamations at the close of “It Don’t Mean a Thing (if It Ain’t Got that Swing)” inspired a mighty, deserving ovation.When the orchestra returned to join Roberts’s trio, it seemed swept up by the energy. Crucially, both “New World A-Comin’” (arranged by Peress) and “Three Black Kings” (completed by Mercer Ellington and arranged by Henderson) featured new piano solos arranged by Roberts. His playing — often denser than Ellington’s own — helped to establish a new way of hearing this music, outside its creator’s looming shadow. The drumming by Marsalis was likewise individual in character, particularly during “Three Black Kings.” (At one point, he made a simple-sounding pattern progressively complex in its syncopations, until he stirred the crowd to applause.)The commitment from Botstein and his players was gratifying. And as usual with this conductor, there was a pedagogical aspect to the proceedings. A question hung in the air: Why is Ellington still a relative symphonic rarity?In some places, he’s not. One of the best streaming concerts I have seen during the pandemic came from the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, which played a joyous version of Ellington’s “Night Creature” (David Berger’s transcription) on a program that also featured music by Copland and Gabriella Smith and a premiere by Christopher Cerrone. I also have fond memories of a Schoenberg Ensemble album that featured John Adams conducting Ellington’s spellbinding, through-composed “The Tattooed Bride” alongside his own “Scratchband.”So putting Ellington into his proper place, at the heart of the American classical music canon, can be done successfully. Other groups coming to Carnegie would do well to remember that.American Symphony OrchestraPerformed on Thursday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Review: To a Rare King Arthur Opera, Bard Says ‘Welcome Back’

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      Superb singers and a clear production make a strong case for Ernest Chausson’s seldom heard “Le Roi Arthus.”ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — It took just two words over the loudspeakers for the audience at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College on Sunday evening to break into vigorous applause: “Welcome back.”Welcome back, indeed, to Ernest Chausson’s seldom heard opera “Le Roi Arthus,” being presented as part of Bard’s SummerScape festival. And welcome back to many in the audience, for whom being in a theater for live opera with a full orchestra and chorus, after such a long deprivation, was truly something to cheer.“Le Roi Arthus,” based on the legend of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, proved a powerful work for this fraught, polarized moment in American life. It is the story of an idealistic ruler who fails to bring about the era of enlightenment he strives for, but whose principles will endure, as an angelic chorus assures him at the end of an often ravishing score. The production is the latest project in the conductor Leon Botstein’s long campaign to break classical music from its fixation on repertory staples and call attention to neglected works.This remarkable opera, first performed in Brussels in 1903, four years after its composer’s death in a cycling accident at 44, is especially deserving. Chausson, who also wrote the libretto, labored on it for almost a decade — not because he was stuck, but because he wanted to get it right. He did. The Bard production, directed by Louisa Proske, is scenically spare but richly costumed and dramatically effective. And Botstein, leading the American Symphony Orchestra, an impressive cast and the excellent Bard Festival Chorale, made a compelling case for the piece. (How has it languished when many lesser scores by French composers of Chausson’s era — especially, for me, Massenet — keep returning to international stages?)The Bard production, directed by Louisa Proske, is scenically spare but richly costumed and dramatically effective.Maria BaranovaThe influence of Wagner, especially “Tristan und Isolde,” looms over “Le Roi Arthus.” Chausson was a Wagner devotee, no question: For his honeymoon in 1883, he took his wife to the Bayreuth Festival to see “Parsifal.” As he worked on “Arthus,” Chausson exchanged letters with his friend Debussy, who had a love-hate relationship with Wagner. In one letter Chausson wrote that the similarity of subject matter between his opera and “Tristan” — both concerning overpowering feelings of love that lead to betrayals of marriage and duty — would not matter to him if he “could only successfully de-Wagnerize myself.”Wagnerian strands run through the music, even hints of motifs from “Tristan” and the so-called “Tristan” chord. Yet the score also comes across as beholden to the French heritage Chausson was born into, especially Franck and Massenet. His use of thick chromatic harmonies is less dark and elusive, more ludic and radiant, than Wagner’s writing. The score is rich with lyrical stretches that almost break into song.The orchestral prelude teems, at first, with swashbuckling music that suggests the triumphant battle the king’s forces have just waged over the invading Saxons. We meet Arthur, with his wife, Guinevere, at his side, presiding over a celebratory gathering of his court. The baritone Norman Garrett, in elegant robes and gold crown, looked and sounded splendid as Arthur. His voice, deep-set but capable of lightness in its high range, easily conveyed authority and dignity. Yet even in his opening monologue he plumbed the music for hints of the king’s vulnerability.The opera’s illicit lovers, Lancelot (Matthew White) and Guinevere (Sasha Cooke), are reminiscent of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.Maria BaranovaWhen the king singles out the valiant knight Lancelot (the ardent tenor Matthew White) as a “true victor,” the other knights mutter their resentments, especially the menacing Mordred (Justin Austin, a youthful baritone). In this telling of the story, Lancelot and Guinevere are already deeply consumed by illicit love. As the queen, the mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke brings gleaming sound and a touch of self-destructive volatility to her singing. Unlike Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, this couple is fully aware that they are betraying their king and their oaths. But, as Guinevere sings, “love is the only law.”The singers brought dedication to an important project, learning these demanding roles for this production. Botstein’s enthusiasm for a score he has long championed came through — sometimes too much. In bringing out the brassy richness and intensity of the music, he sometimes let the orchestra overpower the singers. Still, he brought urgent pacing and color to this nearly three-hour score.The opera ends with a series of death scenes, one for each of the principal characters — a dramatically risky move that Chausson handles deftly. In a daringly slow, mesmerizing monologue, Guinevere strangles herself with her own long hair. Lancelot, having offered no defense in a battle with former comrades who are avenging their king, comes back to the castle mortally wounded, living long enough to ask Arthur’s forgiveness in anguished yet noble phrasesThe shaken Arthur, seeking death, is greeted by a group of heavenly maidens who offer to take him away — not to death, but to eternal sleep. Chausson turned this sequence into a shimmering, harmonically lush double chorus, performed here by choristers in celestial white robes. “Your name may perish,” they tell Arthur, but “your ideas are immortal.”Let’s hope this production helps Chausson’s opera thrive as well.Le Roi ArthusThrough Sunday at Bard College; fishercenter.bard.edu. Also streamed at that website on July 28. More