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    A Dave Brubeck Cantata Boasts Star Soloists: His Sons

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    “The Gates of Justice,” a large-scale 1969 choral work about relations between Black and Jewish Americans, is being performed in Los Angeles.LOS ANGELES — “Want to give us a blast?” the bassist Chris Brubeck asked the young woman in a music studio at the University of California, Los Angeles, on Wednesday morning.Remy Ohara lifted a long, corkscrewing shofar to her lips and blew a resonant call. Brubeck had brought a few other shofars with him as options, but it was clear from the moment Ohara, a sophomore trumpet student, started playing that this one had what he was looking for.The call of a shofar, the ancient instrument usually made from a ram’s horn and best known for its use in Jewish worship, opens “The Gates of Justice,” a grand 1969 choral cantata by the eminent jazz musician Dave Brubeck, Chris’s father.On Sunday and Tuesday, U.C.L.A. will present the work — with Chris and two of his brothers, Darius and Dan, forming the central jazz trio — as the main offering of a series of events devoted to the intersection of music and social justice, and to finding common cause between Black and Jewish communities in America.“It’s something that Dave really believed in,” said Mark Kligman, a professor of Jewish music at U.C.L.A. and an organizer of the program. “He really believed in this type of communal opportunity for unity and conversation.”Searching for — and galvanizing — that common cause between Black and Jewish Americans was the motivation behind “The Gates of Justice.” Brubeck, famous for numbers like “Take Five” and for his pioneering use of unconventional rhythms in jazz, also wrote concert music that reflected his social conscience, particularly on issues of race.During the days of Jim Crow he refused to play tour dates if they were contingent on replacing Black players. His 1961 musical “The Real Ambassadors,” with lyrics by Iola Brubeck, his wife, starred Louis Armstrong and Carmen McRae in a story about jazz, racism and the music business.As the 1960s progressed, Dave Brubeck — who was raised Protestant but joined the Catholic Church after writing a Mass setting in the late 1970s — was pained to see the unity among racial and religious groups earlier in the civil rights movement give way to tensions and suspicion. The assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 was the direct inspiration for “The Gates of Justice,” which quotes the Bible and liturgical texts alongside King’s writings.The shofar that was chosen to open “The Gates of Justice.”Alex Welsh for The New York TimesThe music is also an amalgam, taking in the influence of Jewish cantillation, traditional choral styles, gospel, mariachi, pop, blues and 12-tone music. (It shares its eclecticism with the 1971 “Mass” by Leonard Bernstein, who had collaborated with Brubeck on jazz-classical experiments.)In 2001, the Milken Archive of Jewish Music, founded by the businessman Lowell Milken, recorded the work for Naxos. And the U.C.L.A. performances — on Sunday at Royce Hall on campus and on Tuesday at Holman United Methodist Church, a Black congregation in the city — will take place under the auspices of the school’s recently opened Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience.Neal Stulberg will conduct a chorus consisting of the ensemble Tonality and members of Los Angeles church and synagogue choirs; a brass and percussion orchestra; and two vocal soloists. The keening tenor part will be sung by Azi Schwartz, a cantor at the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York; and Phillip Bullock will take the baritone part, influenced by traditional Black styles.As the core jazz trio, which has improvising interludes, Chris Brubeck, on bass and trombone, will be joined by his brothers Darius, on piano, and Dan, on drums. (Another of Brubeck’s sons, Matthew, is a cellist; they had a sister, Catherine, who died last year, and a brother, Michael, who died in 2009.) Chris, Darius and Dan have played together often, but this is the first time they will collaborate on “The Gates of Justice” — and the first time they have been united since before the pandemic lockdown.Dave Brubeck’s roots were in swing, but he had classical chops. In an interview, Darius said that his father had a shelf full of music theory books, and kept the scores of Bach and Shostakovich preludes and fugues next to his piano for reference. After World War II, Dave studied at Mills College in California with the jazz-loving French composer Darius Milhaud, who had fled Europe during the war. Brubeck came to admire Milhaud so deeply that he named his first son after him.Dave Brubeck (at the piano in 1965 with, from left, Paul Desmond, Joe Morello and Gene Wright) turned toward classical forms and social themes at the end of the 1960s.Brubeck Collection, Wilton Library/Pictorial Press LtdIn the 1950s, Brubeck became a celebrated figure in jazz, featured on the cover of Time magazine — exposure that led to criticism, which dogged him, that he owed his fame, at least in part, to being a white man who appealed to a broader audience. His era-defining recording “Time Out” (1959) was the first jazz album to sell a million copies. But in the late ’60s, after his classic quartet disbanded, his work shifted, turning more toward classical forms and social issues.Brubeck’s first major choral work, “The Light in the Wilderness” (1968), adapted biblical texts to spread a message of hope amid that decade’s widespread questioning of faith and the lingering horrors of World War II. A few years after “The Gates of Justice,” he wrote another cantata, “Truth Is Fallen” (1972), in response to the killing of student protesters at Kent State University in 1970. He kept composing in this social-religious vein over the next decades, even as he returned to touring with small jazz groups almost until his death, in 2012, at 91.“The essential message of ‘The Gates of Justice’ is the brotherhood of man,” he wrote in the liner notes for Decca’s recording of the work, now out of print. Brubeck wasn’t an expert in Jewish music, but he had open ears and curiosity; the shofars Chris Brubeck brought to U.C.L.A. as alternatives were ones he had found in his father’s house and presumed were research materials for the cantata.“He seemed to have an affinity for the right cantorial, modal stuff to do,” Chris said.Playing through those modal, klezmer-style scales on the piano during the interview, Darius said, “Those traditional scales fit everywhere in the piece, in different movements, in different moods.” Darius then added a missing note to the scale to form, like magic, a classic blues scale. Even on a fundamental musical level, then, Black and Jewish styles blend into each other in the score.Remy Ohara, left, with Jens Lindemann, center, and Chris Brubeck.Alex Welsh for The New York Times“They were both enslaved, uprooted from their homelands and wandered in the diaspora,” Dave Brubeck said in 1997 of the similarities between the Black and Jewish experiences. “When I began exploring the music, I was thrilled to hear the similarities among Hebraic chant and spirituals and blues.”The work has its raucous moments, as in a climactic section, “The Lord Is Good,” in which grandeur melts into a smoothly integrated succession of references to mariachi melodies, pop songs and Chopin. But even when the piece swings, it has a solemn, even melancholy cast — prayerful more than hopeful.The tenor and baritone solos are impassioned and soulful, with a shining duet on King’s word’s “Free at last”; the choruses are sometimes serene and sometimes emphatic, with stentorian demands to “open the gates” and “clear the way.” The sober prayer of “Lord, Lord” is punctuated in the score by shouted racial slurs that will be rendered at U.C.L.A. as a cacophony.Like Dave Brubeck’s other large-scale pieces, “The Gates of Justice” is not unknown, but it’s hardly a standard, either. As with many artists who ranged between pop and classical styles — Bernstein, Gershwin and André Previn among them — Brubeck had trouble maintaining an audience for the full scope of his output.“He could not really, totally break through and have people understand that he did both things,” Chris said. “As far as I’m concerned, the most important thing is this piece not be forgotten, and that it still speak to people in some way.”As part of the effort to show the work’s continuing relevance, it will be performed on the U.C.L.A. programs alongside newer pieces, including premieres by Arturo O’Farrill and Diane White-Clayton. And the brothers spent the rehearsal tinkering with the score and its possibilities, seeking to heighten its rally-like forcefulness and its harmonic contrasts.“It’s a living piece,” Darius said. More

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      ‘Framing Agnes’ Review: Transition, Center Stage

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      The documentarian Chase Joynt stages re-enactments of midcentury medical interviews with transgender people.In the 1960s, a sociologist, Harold Garfinkel, and a surgeon, Robert Stoller, led a clinic for the study of gender at the University of California, Los Angeles. The clinic performed some of the first gender confirmation surgeries that were available to intersex or transgender people in the United States, and as part of the team’s medical research, Garfinkel interviewed the patients. The documentary “Framing Agnes” uses these patient interviews to reflect upon the history of transgender people.The director Chase Joynt reimagines Garfinkel’s interviews as black-and-white talk show segments, recruiting transgender actors to perform scenes from the archived transcripts. The rest of the film consists of colorful talking-head interviews with the actors, as well as researchers who have studied the archives in the present day. Of particular interest to Joynt is the story of Agnes (played in re-enactments by Zackary Drucker), a transgender woman who initially presented herself as intersex to the medical staff at U.C.L.A. to receive gender-confirming medical care. But Joynt also stages re-enactments of interviews with transgender men and teenagers, and even enlists Angelica Ross (“Pose”) to perform as Georgia, a Black transgender woman who described her struggles with racial and gender discrimination to the clinic.Joynt’s scope as a researcher is admirably broad, but what his film lacks is a sense of purpose as a work of cinema. The re-enactments are staged in a perfunctory, static way, despite brief standout performances from Ross and Jen Richards, as a transgender woman who found a community of women like her in the 1950s. More frustrating is that Joynt’s interviews lack insight. The documentary reminds its audience that it’s impossible to truly know people based on their responses to medical interviews. But this approach unfortunately prevents the film from achieving either catharsis or understanding.Framing AgnesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Marina Goldovskaya, 80, Dies; Filmmaker Documented Russian Life

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      In about 30 documentaries she looked at the people and history of her homeland, some of it brutally dark.Marina Goldovskaya, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker who exposed the harsh underbelly of the Soviet Union’s labor camps and later chronicled the heady days that followed the state’s collapse — days that promised democracy but bordered on anarchy — died on March 20 in Jurmala, Latvia. She was 80.Her death was confirmed by her son, Sergei Livnev, who said she died at his home after a long illness.Ms. Goldovskaya, who often operated as a one-woman band, made some 30 documentaries — as writer, director, cinematographer and producer — and was a film professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, for two decades. Her wide-ranging films include a portrait of a Russian circus aerialist (“Raisa Nemchinskaya: Circus Actress,” 1970); a chronicle of six weeks in the life of a television journalist during the Soviet thaw known as perestroika (“A Taste of Freedom,” 1991); and the story of a Russian prince who returns to live in his family’s former estate, now in ruins (“The Prince Is Back,” 2000).In a review of “Solovki Power,” her 1988 film about a Soviet labor camp in northern Russia, Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the work “first-rate film journalism” and “a remarkable documentary about the prison camp said to have been the prototype for all of the gulags that came after.”With a style that calls to mind the films of Ken Burns, “Solovki Power” juxtaposes the cold, white beauty of the gulag’s remote White Sea location with the memories of eight survivors and an official 1928 propaganda film that touted the camp’s clean linens and enlightened teachings. Theologians, historians, poets, mathematicians and economists were among those who were sent to the camp, which operated from 1923 to 1939.In the film, an economist recalls the night she had to wake up her children, ages 4 and 6, to tell them that she was going “away to work.” Her son told her that his papa had already gone away. If they took her, “Who will stay with us?” he asked.And then there was the night, recalled by an academician, when 300 shots were fired in a botched execution — the executioners were too drunk to aim properly — leaving bodies squirming in a dirt pit the next morning.Ms. Goldovskaya began making “Solovki Power” in 1986, when it still could be dangerous to examine the dark side of the Soviet past, since her film would expose the camps as an integral part of the Soviet system, not as an aberration created during the Stalin era.Ms. Goldovskaya in 1990 shooting “Taste of Freedom,” a documentary about six weeks in the life of a television journalist during perestroika.When she told her mother what she was planning to do, “she started crying,” Ms. Goldovskaya recalled in a 1998 interview. “‘You are committing suicide,’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember what happened to your father?’”In 1938, her father, then a deputy minister of film, had been overseeing construction of the Kremlin’s movie theater when a lamp exploded. Stalin believed it was an assassination attempt and sentenced him to five months in prison.Speaking from Latvia, her son, Mr. Livnev, who is also a film director and producer, said: “The film really became very important not just as a film, but as an event in the life of a country. For many, many people it opened up so many unknowns, about how terrible our past was.”Another Goldovskaya film, “A Bitter Taste of Freedom” (2011), was about her friend Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist and fierce critic of Vladimir V. Putin who was shot at point blank range in her Moscow apartment block in 2006. The film included diaristic footage that the filmmaker took in Ms. Politkovskaya’s home over many years.There is “a scene in the kitchen with Anna and her husband, where you can almost smell the food and the coffee, and they’re talking about how they’re afraid,” said Maja Manojlovic, who worked with Ms. Goldovskaya as a teaching assistant and now teaches at U.C.L.A. “Boy, did Marina capture the energy of this fear, the fear of repercussions for her criticism of Putin.”Marina Evseevna Goldovskaya was born on July 15, 1941, in Moscow. Her father, Evsey Michailovich Goldovksy, was a film engineer who helped found, and taught at, VGIK, the All-Union State Institute of Film. Her mother, Nina Veniaminovna Mintz, studied actors’ interpretations of Shakespeare and helped develop and curate theater museums.The family lived in an apartment building built by Stalin in the 1930s to house filmmakers “so that he could keep an eye on them,” Ms. Goldovskaya said in a 2001 interview. She attended VGIK, one of only a few women to study cinematography there. After graduating in 1963, she began working for state television. She became a member of the Communist Party in 1967 and remained one for 20 years.Otherwise, “I would not have gotten ahead in television,” she wrote in her 2006 autobiography, “Woman With a Movie Camera: My Life as a Russian Filmmaker.” “In an ideological organization like television, a camera operator who was not a Party member could never be promoted.”She made close to a dozen films for state television before leaving her job to make “Solovki Power.”“I grew up in a house filled with filmmakers and cinematographers,” she said in the 1998 interview. “Many cameramen died during the war; it was so romantic to die for your country. There were so few women in the profession. My father told me that if I went into it, I would never have a family, that I would be unhappy all my life. But I was young, it was romantic, and I loved to push the button.”In addition to her son, Ms. Goldovskaya is survived by two stepdaughters, Jill Smolin and Beth Herzfeld; two grandsons; and three step-grandchildren. Her first marriage, to David Livnev, a theater director, ended in divorce, as did her second, to Alexander Lipkov, a film critic. Her third husband, Georg Herzfeld, died in 2012.Mr. Livnev recalled his mother “always with a camera.”“She was shooting all the time,” he said. “I can hardly remember her face without the camera in front of her.”In 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed, Ms. Goldovskaya was a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego, when she was introduced to Mr. Herzfeld, an Austrian engineer and businessman. Six days later, he proposed.Ms. Goldovskaya moved to Los Angeles in 1994 and began teaching at U.C.L.A., returning to Moscow in summers to work on her films. Guests to her classes, and then to her sunny, sprawling home nearby, often included noted documentary filmmakers like Albert Maysles, D.A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock. And she was closely engaged with her students.“She opened up her classes to anthropology students and students from other disciplines,” said Gyula Gazdag, a Hungarian-born filmmaker who was on the U.C.L.A. faculty and teamed up with Ms. Goldovskaya to make a documentary about Allen Ginsberg, “A Poet on the Lower East Side” (1997). “She felt they would bring a new perspective to documentaries,” he added, in a phone interview. “She knew all her students by name, what their motivation for making a particular documentary was.”Ms. Goldovskaya in 2011. “She was shooting all the time,” her son said. “I can hardly remember her face without the camera in front of her.” via Getty ImagesMs. Goldovskaya’s film “Raisa Nemchinskaya: Circus Actress” featured an aerialist who “was in a way very similar to my mother,” Mr. Livnev said. The aerialist died of a heart attack as she was taking her bow after a performance.“She never used a rope for protection,” Mr. Livnev said. “My mom loved this woman, she was a role model, and all her life she lived like this. She would work, work, work all the time. Her dream was to die with the camera rolling, and she would never use this security rope in her life.” More