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    Review: After 36 Years, a Malcolm X Opera Sings to the Future

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    Anthony Davis’s “X” has stretches of incantation that, in person, turn it into something like a sacred rite.DETROIT — “When a man is lost,” sings Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s wife, “does the sky bleed for him, or does the sunset ignore his tears?”The start of a smoldering aria, these words may be the most poetic and poignant in Anthony Davis’s opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.” Especially poignant because, for several decades, “X,” too, has been ignored.The work, with a libretto by Thulani Davis, the composer’s cousin, from a story by his brother, Christopher Davis, premiered in the mid-1980s, first in Philadelphia and, officially, at New York City Opera. And then … largely silence.For the past 36 years, it has been more talked about than heard. (An excellent studio recording from 1992 is now out of print.) And it was obvious, at the opening of a new production on Saturday at the Detroit Opera House, what “X” gains from being taken in live: Its stretches of incantation turn into something like a sacred rite.In these passages, over carpets of complex, repeating rhythms in the orchestra, the ensemble chants short lines — “Africa for Africans,” “Betrayal is on his lips,” “Freedom, justice, equality” — again and again, building and overlapping. The opera is at its best in these long swaths of music poised between churning intensity and stillness. Without copying the prayer practices of Malcolm’s Muslim faith, the work evokes them.Bringing “X” back to the stage is a coup for Detroit Opera, which has recently rebranded itself after 50 years as Michigan Opera Theater, inaugurating a new era under the artistic leadership of Yuval Sharon.Sharon came to prominence as the founder of the experimental Los Angeles company the Industry, and he is swiftly bringing ambitious, inventive programming to Detroit, like a “Götterdämmerung” in a parking garage and a “La Bohème” whose four acts are played in reverse. The field is noticing what he’s up to: As part of a widespread effort to belatedly present more works by Black composers and librettists, this “X” will travel to the Metropolitan Opera (in fall 2023), Lyric Opera of Chicago, Opera Omaha and Seattle Opera.In biopic style, the libretto sketches an outline of a short but eventful life: the murder of Malcolm’s father when Malcolm is a boy in Lansing, Mich.; his mother’s mental breakdown; his move to live with his half sister in Boston, where he falls in with a fast crowd and ends up in prison; his jailhouse conversion to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam; the success of his Black nationalist ministry; his rift with Muhammad over tactics; his pilgrimage to Mecca; and the glimmers of a more universalist ideology of peace and racial unity, which he barely gets a chance to expound before his assassination in 1965, at just 39.Clint Ramos’s set for Robert O’Hara’s production evokes the Audubon Ballroom in New York, where Malcolm was killed, while introducing an element of sci-fi Afrofuturism.Micah ShumakeAll this is conveyed in the heightened register of opera. Even the dialogue is pithy and exalted: “I come from a desert of pain and remorse.” The music is varied and resourceful; Davis won a Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for his most recent opera, “The Central Park Five,” but “X” is a deeper score.It begins in a mournful, noirish mood, the moments of anxiety flirting with blues and subtle swing. Guided sensitively by the conductor Kazem Abdullah, the music goes on to swerve from punchy modernism to lyrical lushness, from peaceful worship to nervous energy and stentorian forcefulness.An essay in the program describes how Davis’s original contract specified that “the word ‘jazz’ should not be used in any connection with this piece,” though an innovation here was to embed an improvising ensemble within a traditional orchestra. This works smoothly, as when a saxophone aptly depicts Malcolm’s new life in big-city Boston, or when a wailing, longing trumpet accompanies prayer in Mecca. The prisoners’ choral dirge is heated by squeals of brass, smoking underneath; along with Betty’s enigmatically tender aria, this is the most intriguing music of the opera.The new production, directed by Robert O’Hara (“Slave Play”), has a unit set, by Clint Ramos, that evokes the partly ruined Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, where Malcolm was killed. (The mountain pass mural painted on the back wall of the ballroom’s stage depicts an idyll that seems like it’s almost taunting the opera’s characters.)Above hover some big, swooping curves, used as a projection screen for textures, animated designs and a scrolling list of names of victims of white violence, before and after Malcolm. The staging is inspired by Afrofuturism, the attempt to conceive new — often fanciful, sometimes celestial — circumstances for a people suffering under crushing oppression.“Imagine a world where Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line is a spaceship,” O’Hara writes in a program note, referring to the “Back to Africa” movement in which Malcolm’s parents participated. But it is when the curves take on the literal flashing lights of such a ship that things turn a bit risible, conjuring the vessel in “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” more than noble dreams of escape and revision.More effective is the introduction of four male dancers — their sinuous choreography is by Rickey Tripp — who snake through the production, sometimes as guardian angels looking over Young Malcolm (Charles Dennis), sometimes as squiggly punctuation to scenes. The spare flexibility that O’Hara introduces mostly works, even if the libretto’s specificity of place and situation gets sacrificed in this more abstract vision. Malcolm’s basic progress is still clear — less so the particulars of where he is and to whom, exactly, he’s speaking. The result, not unpleasantly, is more dream ballet than CNN.In the production, four dancers — their sinuous choreography by Rickey Tripp — snake through the production, sometimes as guardian angels looking over Young Malcolm (Charles Dennis), here with his mother (Whitney Morrison).Micah ShumakeMalcolm, though, still wears his distinctive browline glasses. He is played here with superb control by the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, steady, calm and committed in both his physical presence and grounded voice, with a fiery core that seethes in his main aria, “I would not tell you what I know,” at the end of Act I.As Malcolm’s mother and his wife, the soprano Whitney Morrison sings with mellow strength. Charming as Street, who spiffs up Malcolm in Boston, the tenor Victor Ryan Robertson largely handles Elijah Muhammad’s muscular high lines but strains to convey his magnetism.“X” sometimes hypnotizes but sometimes sags. Like Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha,” about Gandhi’s early years in South Africa, the opera is conceived as a steadily progressing account of a historical figure’s ideological evolution, dispensing with traditional dramatic tension. The main human conflict, between Malcolm and Elijah, is only lightly touched on; it’s not the plot.“Satyagraha,” though, fully gives itself over to stylization, its Sanskrit text detached from the action, its scenes pageantlike. The music and libretto of “X,” by contrast, keep promising crackling drama without quite delivering; there can be a sense of falling between the stools of trance-like repetition and standard storytelling.Scattered throughout are interludes that musically feel like vamping and that offer little obvious pretext for action. After so many years, the creators seem to have perceived the need to do something with these expanses — “We have added a few lines of singing in places that were musical interludes,” Thulani Davis writes in the program — but they remain, and sap the energy.Still “X,” for all its obvious admiration for its subject, is admirably resistant to mawkishness or melodrama, particularly in avoiding an operatic death scene: At the end, Malcolm takes the podium in the Audubon Ballroom and briefly greets his audience in Arabic. Then there’s a blackout as gunfire rings out.For all the talk of spaceships and a better tomorrow, it is an inescapably stark conclusion. There will always be gifted, visionary boys and men, the work seems to say in this new staging, but their futures are hardly assured.X: The Life and Times of Malcolm XThrough May 22 at the Detroit Opera House; detroitopera.org. More

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      The Vitality of Black Criticism

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      Before his death, Greg Tate spoke with four other critics at the Pop Conference about the need for Black writers to face down racist institutions and take the lead in cultural conversations.Last month, popular music lost one of its greatest philosophers and storytellers: The critic, scholar, teacher, musician and New York City grass-roots cultural icon Greg Tate, a towering intellect and a modern-day griot, died at 64. His singular critical prose — in The Village Voice and Vibe, among other outlets, and collected in two anthologies — seamlessly fused dense, dazzling vernacular wisdom and street corner wit with equally intricate ivory tower analytic discourse.When I set out to organize the “dream team” lineup for a round-table session titled “Black Critics Matter” for the 2021 Pop Conference — an annual gathering of journalists, academics, musicians and other creatives — Tate was the first person I contacted. In his 40-year career as a working critic, he revolutionized the form and content of music journalism by centering Blackness as both the analytic framework to engage and experience popular music as well as the language to tell the story of the music itself in living color.Our April session included three other pioneering writers: the critic, poet, novelist, playwright, librettist and scholar Thulani Davis; the New York Times critic-at-large Wesley Morris; and the veteran music journalist Danyel Smith, the host of the “Black Girl Songbook” podcast and author of the forthcoming “Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop.” Below are edited excerpts from the hour-plus panel. (The full conversation is available here.)The conversation was wide-roving: at turns, intimate and candid, funny and incisive, moving and brutally honest, and consistently reflective and mindful of the under-acknowledged import of Black critical voices and the role that they play in challenging the racism at the foundations of cultural institutions, and the taste-making power those institutions continue to wield.We started by affirming simple truths: that Black critics have been setting the record straight and engaging Black citizenry “in the making of its own story,” as Elizabeth Méndez Berry and Chi-hui Yang wrote in 2019, across the centuries, from Frederick Douglass’s sharp observations about blackface minstrelsy to the barrier-breaking journalism of theater and music columnists like Pauline Hopkins, Sylvester Russell and Lester Walton in the late 19th and early 20th century. The long Harlem Renaissance gave us figures like Nora Holt, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. And Amiri Baraka and Phyl Garland wed Black nationalist desire with fierce, experimental music criticism in the Black Arts era.Their work helped lead an intellectual revolution in writing and thinking about the importance of Black sound, but also more broadly showcased the meaning of being an informed, opinionated and passionate listener dedicated to inviting readers into felt and meaningful conversations about the culture that matters to them. Greg Tate carried that tradition forward with a combination of potent love for Black peoples and a swagger fueled by that same deep and unbridled affection. In April, when the annual PopCon holds its 20th anniversary gathering in Brooklyn, it’ll be a second-line lovefest for one of its greatest voices.DAPHNE A. BROOKS Many of us have been thinking for some time about the absolutely crucial role that critics of color, that women critics, that L.G.B.T.Q. critics can and have played in shifting and opening up and challenging the kinds of conversations, the value systems, taste-making, and gatekeeping rituals and processes that have long dominated mainstream popular music criticism. If 2020 reminded us of anything, it’s that the struggle for African American autonomy in the American body politic is a multifaceted one tied to necessary and interlocking social, political as well as cultural revolutions in valuing Black life. Culture critics, we know, play a pivotal role in identifying and narrating the dimensions of that value. But in the history of popular music culture across the 20th and 21st centuries, how often have we extensively imagined Black folks as critics, as knowledge producers in relation to their own expressive cultures?GREG TATE I discovered that music critics existed because I was doing research for a comic book I wanted to write back in the early ’70s. I went to the library and got all the books about music that I could find, one of which was Amiri Baraka’s “Black Music.” And after that, I exchanged comic book superheroes for great Black music superheroes, because the way Baraka wrote about Sun Ra, Archie Shepp and Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor elevated them to the level of superheroes to me.The way he was able to bring his poetics into writing about music and left these indelible lines — these things, they’ve formed my own critical perspective, my own critical understanding of the way in which the opportunity to talk about the music is of course the opportunity to bring our whole lives to who we are. And it’s also the reason that most of us who were writing in the ’80s and ’90s really became, or were, multidisciplinary artists. We never thought that criticism was the be all and end all of what we had to offer.Between I’d say 1977 and 2000, there was a community of Black writers in New York: The Voice first, but then The Source and then Vibe. So all of us come into the game thinking of Black criticism is something we do as a gang. And because you had the near instant gratification of response from the community, you knew what you were writing was having impact. With The Voice, if it came out on Wednesday, you knew by Saturday what people were thinking of it.WESLEY MORRIS At some point I figured out that there were definitely some gaps in terms of who was speaking and who was writing about what. I would spend hours on end watching BET, VH1 and MTV, and you start to see that there are people being put in boxes by these programmers. I mean Joan Armatrading? She was never on MTV. I could see that there were things that needed to be addressed, or redressed, in terms of who was being acknowledged, whose existences were being acknowledged. There are Black women who’ve made music that changed my life that have never received a review in any magazines. The thoroughest description I got was Vibe, when it showed up. Because I had been waiting for that. I had been waiting for people to acknowledge that there was some merit to this music.I’ve noticed in the last 10 years, say, but it’s probably even older than that, that there is a real reluctance to seriously engage with the work and the craft of the work and what pop music is doing, what it sounds like. I don’t know if that’s a fear of getting it wrong. I don’t know if that’s a fear of what Twitter might do to you if you do get it wrong. This is related to a question of ethics, which is what is falling in that lacuna between greatness and crap that only criticism can both explicate and reify in some way. To me, it feels like a crisis that nobody’s really acknowledging, but I think that’s because there still aren’t enough Black people to pick that work up and do something.DANYEL SMITH Listen, it’s the criticism that’s missing in action without question. I am consistently, constantly in a mild panic about the music that has been created over the last 15 to 20 years that has not been listened to like it’s real music. I am concerned about artists like Cardi B and Drake, who are literally the biggest stars in the entire world, and their music is not talked about with a lot of seriousness. Comparing it to what happened in the past, comparing it to what could happen in the future, the context of when it came out to when it didn’t. Again, as an editor, I say, what about the knowing, deeply reported stories and the profiles that are not being written? The columns?It has to do, I think with there being a generation of Black writers who have not really ever worked with Black editors. And I think, flawed as we were, at Vibe, XXL, The Source, Essence — there were hip-hop magazines all over — there has not been enough of “I’m a Black editor that knows a lot; and I’m a Black writer that wants to know more.” I don’t know where they’re happening. Not nearly enough, anyway.TATE Well, I’ll first say, and this is in response to Wesley: Internet killed the Black music journalist star or the Black music star publication. But that was a different world we existed in just in terms of the power that labels had, right? If you wanted your music, you had to get it in a CD form from a major label. So the work we did as independent writers, and as “Blacketty-Black” as we were in the writing, it was very much tied to the commercial life of those publications: the ads The Voice got, Vibe got, Source got from labels. So on just a base level, what we were doing was glorified consumer reporting. That’s why those voices mattered, but what also happened around 2000 and in the arts was that the published pool of writers on hip-hop shifted more from Black to white. Why? Most of our colleagues by that time had just moved out of doing music journalism at all. People grew up, they had marriages, they had kids, kids needed to be fed and properly clothed and sent to the right school. And hip-hop at that point blew up in the suburbs in a major way. But the thing was that notion of Black writing being essential to one’s understanding of the culture, where the culture was no longer the culture as we’d known it in ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.BROOKS: But let’s be real, right. We know historically that jazz and blues criticism has been the domain of white men.TATE Yeah and certainly, that’s the radical transformation that hip-hop criticism offers. It was the first time in the history of the music that Black writers were writing about it authoritatively as it was being created.THULANI DAVIS But I want to say there, you all are talking out of a wealth of information …. This is the moment to teach young people that they’re in a continuum, because I don’t know that they’re aware of that. The one thing about the ’60s and the ’70s was everybody got some education about what happened before them and what the continuum was like. This is a particularly good time to ask, “What is it that the critic needs to know?” Because any critic of anything needs to know something more than the last 25 years of their lives. They need to know everything you all have been talking about.I think also there’s this idea that everybody has a platform, everybody can be a platform …. I do think people have to think about working together, because one of the things about the culture right now, it’s one star at a time. The collective conversation would be useful. We need to keep asking how do we push awareness, taste, interesting writing styles? How do we push forward? I think it can’t be one at a time. I don’t think that’ll work in the way that information is disseminated now.TATE I just want to paraphrase Baldwin: “Ours is a story that must be told again and again and again, because the erasure goes on as the culture is emerging.” You can’t reboot the institutional access that we had in that particular moment because of how incendiary the culture was in that period. People were coming up with new paradigms for what hip-hop or rap was every week, it changed. There was just an understanding that there needed to be writers who were on the ground, who got it, who lived it, embodied it at a certain level.We haven’t even tracked the kind of self-making, cultural transformation of the landscape that got affected by all this writing, by these gangs of folks being at these institutions at that particular time. The conversation about hip-hop that is still sustained is the one that we created in the ’80s and ’90s. And it extended, of course, to what was happening in Black academia, what was happening in Black film.BROOKS So it means that at the point in which we’re writing about popular music, for instance, we’re asking questions that start with, “What are the conditions that created this music in the first place?” We need to start at that level. We need to start at 1619 before we can actually get to the place of critics being able to dissect and write really beautifully about the richness, the depth, the urgency and complexity of what our music is, why we made it, what it means to us. It’s a 400-year story. More