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In 1971, when soul singer Marvin Gaye asked America “What’s Going On?” he echoed the socio-political disillusionment of the times.
Gaye’s timeless album is an eponym for the upcoming 13th annual concert organized by the African American Composer Initiative (AACI), a group that’s on a mission to bring the work of African American composers, living and deceased, back into public consciousness.
This year’s concert will be held on Jan. 27 and 28 at the usual East Palo Alto venue – the Performing Arts Center of Eastside College Preparatory School.
All proceeds from ticket sales will go directly to the school, which is a private, all-scholarship establishment that prepares first-generation students from low-income households for college.
“It’s a gem in the community,” said retired Judge LaDoris Cordell, co-founder of the AACI, about the school. “That place is our anchor.” It’s where the group holds two concerts once a year, always in the last weekend of January.
The concert will feature 18 performers, including Bay Area jazz and classical musicians as well as two jazz artists from New York – pianist Valerie Capers and bassist John Robinson.
The AACI is a fiscally sponsored affiliate of InterMusic SF, which is a nonprofit.
Some of the musicians choose to donate their services, but through its fundraising efforts the AACI pays its tech staff and gives honoraria to the performers.
The AACI became a group in 2010.
The seeds, however, were sown a few years before that: It all started when Cordell, met her old friend, the piano, while leading a children’s choir in one of the churches in East Palo Alto, where she practiced law after graduating from Stanford. She credits celebrated basketball coach Tara VanDerveer, with whom she shares a Stanford connection, for putting her in touch with AACI co-founder Josephine “Jodi” Gandolfi, at a social event around 2003-04.
It was around the time Cordell was thinking about getting back to playing the piano. Gandolfi, who was already teaching VanDerveer, took Cordell on as a student too. Four years into their lessons, Cordell asked Gandolfi a question that became the foundation of what is now the AACI: “Aren’t there any Black composers?”
Sure there were, but unfortunately their names and music had faded into oblivion. “I heard that question and drew a complete blank,” said Gandolfi. “Other than Scott Joplin, I hadn’t heard of any African American composers of piano music.” And this was despite her long education in music history.
“I said ‘I’ll get back to you on that’ and started to look into it,” she said. And thus began her journey of discovering all the fantastic concert music by African American composers, starting with greats like William Grant Still.
Then in 2009, Gandolfi got a call from the Palo Alto Art Center asking if she’d like to do a concert, filling in for someone who had canceled at the last minute. She agreed, and included a lot of the work of Still that she’d been uncovering at the time, along with music by Debussy, Brahms, and Gershwin.
“The audience was thrilled,” she said, about the concert, that less than five members had managed to string together; it comprised a lot of piano music, vocal music, spirituals and art songs. “That was the beginning.”
“We determined it was time to present more music by these wonderful African American composers that we’d been discovering,” she said. The following year, they held the first concert at Eastside College Prep, current venue of the event, and decided to make it a benefit for the school.
“When Jodi pulled me in on this journey to find out about the music of African American composers, I don’t know why I was shocked. This country has so much of racism built into every institution,” said Cordell. “That part of the music establishment is just excluded, deigned to be unimportant, irrelevant, not good enough.”
Things are changing thanks to the work the group is doing, though.
“Part of the journey is finding this music, because much of it has not been published,” said Gandolfi, who takes a rigorous scholarly approach to combing the archives – for instance, the Center for Black Music Research at Chicago and the Library of Congress at DC – for African American music.
Many of these collections of music are in manuscript form. “A lot of background work has to happen to bring some of this music alive,” she added.
The process of selecting the right music for the annual concert is an education in itself. One of the piano pieces on this year’s program is by John Wesley Work III. “In doing this work we’ve discovered that he came from a family of musicians. His grandfather was a freed slave,” said Gandolfi. The family had deep ties with Fisk University, training ground for the glorious Fisk Jubilee Singers. “It’s a quest to uncover historical figures, facts that have been buried for a very long time.”
After the killing of George Floyd in 2020, a lot of musicians and institutions have been waking up to the problems of racism in music and have been programming, recording and publishing work by Black musicians. “There is change that’s coming about, but there is so much work to be done,” Gandolfi said.
Like a lot of offline events, this one too took a break for two years during the pandemic but, during that time, the organizers produced a CD (“Good News”) of past live performances, which features the work of tenor Othello Jefferson, who has been associated with the AACI since 2017.
For Jefferson, participation is a chance to connect with music that represents the African American experience. “The thing that makes it really cool is to experience and share music that’s connected to your culture,” he said, delighting in the range of styles covered by the AACI over the years – gospel, operatic, art, folk and jazz music, to name a few. “African Americans are not just a monolith – it’s not just one group or just one example of music; all the genres are represented.”
This time, some of the genres the audience will be treated to include jazz, R&B, a piece in Swahili, music related to African roots and, of course, spirituals and hymn-based music – which used to be a staple of African American compositions early on, the kind that masters like Harry T. Burleigh helped document in the 1800s.
“The breadth is massive,” said Jefferson. “There’s more to African American music than the ones that people see the most,” like rap and hip hop.
Clearly, this event is more than just the music. “It’s more than just people coming to a concert and sitting down for two hours. It’s more than just getting up and singing. It’s more than just sending out flyers and getting people to come,” he said.
Through its concerts, the AACI has helped subvert stereotypes that surround both African American music as well as the city of East Palo Alto.
Though the focus of the concert is on bringing songs from the archives to life on stage, calling them “covers” is a touch reductive, not least because that’s a term used more in the context of popular music. “I wouldn’t call them ‘covers’ – for me, that’s more related to pop music or music outside of the classical realm,” Jefferson clarified. “To me this is our rendition of – or our performance of – someone else’s work.”
The African American Composers Initiative Concert takes place Jan. 27-28, 3 p.m. at Eastside College Preparatory School, 1041 Myrtle St., East Palo Alto. $5-$20. aacinitiative.org/concerts.
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