Alcée Chriss at the Organ Pavilion, Balboa Park, San Diego: Great Eclectic Organ Concert

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s concert at the Organ Pavilion was fantastic, a quite beautiful mixed-bag program whose sheer range made me think of George Bernard Shaw’s snippy remark about Adelina Patti: “Of all miscellaneous concerts, a Patti concert is the most miscellaneous.” The organist was Alcée Chriss (actually Alcée Chriss III, according to the program bio – which I didn’t bother to look at before the concert, and therefore I was expecting “Alcée” to be a Black woman and was startled when he turned out to be a Black man instead), and my husband Charles noted that three of the 10 pieces listed on his program were by African-Americans – though there’s a caveat to that. Only one of the three was actually written by a Black composer – “In Quiet Mood” by Florence Price (incidentally I had just dug out the BBC Music CD of her Symphony No. 3, and like the first and fourth Price symphonies Naxos recorded it was a technically accomplished symphony but didn’t “grab” me as a work of musical genius the way Duke Ellington’s “Black, Brown and Beige” has since I first heard it complete in 1976). The other two were Chriss’s own adaptations for organ of recorded jazz improvisations on piano, Art Tatum’s “Tea for Two” (his first record of it, for Brunswick in 1933 – I looked up “art tatum tea for two” on YouTube this morning and got a video combining this with his later remakes from 1939 and 1955, but it was the 1933 version Chriss worked from) and Oscar Peterson’s “Over the Rainbow,” but those songs were originally written by white composers: Vincent Youmans and Harold Arlen, respectively. Chriss was born in Fort Worth, Texas but currently lives and works in Connecticut (and he was predictably impatient with audience members complaining about how cold the weather was), and he played a wildly eclectic program blending eras and musical styles.

He began with a toccata and fugue in B-flat by Alexandre Pierre François Boely (1789-1858), whom I’ve probably heard on previous organ programs but whose name didn’t ring the proverbial bell to me. Then he played the fourth of a set of “Six Canonic Studies,” Op. 56, by Robert Schumann – and Chriss’s odd comments on the piece before he played it said he heard it as being in the style of a bel canto opera aria. This is odd because Schumann hated opera – he wrote just one, Genoveva, to a text by Robert Reinick, and while they talked about doing others (including Tristan und Isolde – Irving Kolodin got hold of Reinick’s proposed libretto for Schumann and noted that “it took five long acts to tell the story Wagner later told in three”), Schumann really didn’t like opera and praised Brahms for never having composed one. (Just one more aspect in which Brahms was the anti-Wagner: Wagner wrote almost nothing but operas, while Brahms avoided the genre altogether.) The piece didn’t sound especially bel canto to me but I enjoyed it anyway (and I wondered if it was one of those pieces Schumann wrote for the short-lived pedal piano, which had pedals that could be used to play bass notes with the feet like an organ; organists sometimes play Schumann’s pedal-piano pieces on the ground that the instrument is closer to an organ than a normal piano.) Then Chriss played his own transcription of the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances for orchestra – the last piece Rachmaninoff ever finished and the only work he composed entirely in the United States even though he lived here for 25 years (from his flight from Russia in 1918 after the Revolution to his death in 1943). It was a strong enough piece of music to make me wonder if I’ve underrated Rachmaninoff in general and late Rachmaninoff in particular.

His next work was his transcription of Oscar Peterson’s version of “Over the Rainbow,” which was quite nice but I’ve heard other jazz pianists who did more with the song (I wonder what it would sound like if Alcée Chriss transcribed Sun Ra’s version!). Then he did a piece by Leo Sowerby called “Comes Autumn Time,” which was not at all what one might expect from that “autumnal” title (which would have been something more along the lines of Ralph Burns’ “Early Autumn,” played by Woody Herman in 1947 and the star-making record for Stan Getz). This musical version of autumn had a fast-slow-fast structure and the fast parts were quite stormy (in both senses). I’ve probably underrated Sowerby as a composer because until he turned up on the CD The Pulitzer Project (containing three of the first four pieces to win the Pulitzer Prize for music after it was established in 1943 – when the winner was an O.K. cycle of two songs by Walter Schuman based on Walt Whitman poems for baritone, chorus and orchestra – I’ve long thought that if there were any justice in the world back then Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige would have won the first Pulitzer for music, and when I got that CD and played it for the first time I thought, “O.K., Mark, be fair,” but the vast gulf in inspiration, imagination and emotion between the two works was still all too obvious; 22 years later the Pulitzer nominating committee recommended they give Ellington what amounted to a lifetime achievement award, but the Pulitzer board voted it down … and more recently the Pulitzer people, who never gave a music prize to Ellington, disgustingly and inexplicably gave one to rap scumbag Kendrick Lamar) I hadn’t known he’d written anything other than organ music.

When he returned he began his second set with an “Organ Concerto in D minor,” BWV 596, by Johann Sebastian Bach (I didn’t know Bach had written anything called an organ concerto – unlike the 19th century French organ composers who called their solo-organ works “symphonies” because they used the full set of orchestral colors of the symphonic organ), which Chriss said had been inspired by the Italian Baroque in general and Vivaldi in particular. That seemed to make more sense than his comparisons of Schumann’s “Canonic Study” to a bel canto aria, if only because Bach knew Vivaldi’s music and even wrote his own organ transcriptions of two of Vivaldi’s orchestral concerti. But I suspect this particular Bach piece is probably known to most organists as a prelude and fugue, which is what it is. Chriss said it was an early work when Bach was still trying to establish a virtuoso reputation by writing very flashy and technically difficult pieces. This one begins with a scale that has to be played entirely by the feet, and it ends with that same scale becoming the basis for one of Bach’s great fugal structures. Chriss tore into it as if he were enjoying its challenges – which he surmounted with ease – and this was full-spirited, full-throated Bach playing unencumbered by “historically informed performance” concerns. Then came the piece by Florence Price, “In Quiet Mood,” a nice little Victorian-style pastoral, and afterwards he went to the races with a piece he announced as his own transcription of Art Tatum’s record of “Tea for Two.”

As I mentioned above, Tatum made several records of “Tea for Two” but it was the 1933 version, from Tatum’s first solo session, from which Chriss worked. It took a lot of work, he explained, because while the organ has more keyboards than a piano it actually has fewer notes, so he had to do some tweaking of Tatum’s spectacular runs up and down the keyboard to fit them into the compass of the organ. Later, when he was meeting privately with people after the concert, he said he had kept Tatum’s right hand pretty much intact but had done most of his tweaking with the bass, using the style of Fats Waller (appropriate because Tatum always named Waller as his biggest influence), which raised hopes in my mind that Chriss might be the organ player we need to transcribe Waller’s amazing 1927-1929 organ recordings and bring them back to life as live music. I asked him about them after the concert and he was well aware of some of Waller’s organ records even though he hasn’t been able to obtain them all (I told him where I had got them – on the first two boxes of JSP Records’ reissue of the complete Waller), and he agreed with me that the organists who play Waller’s songs using the same thick, heavy theatre organ voicings are just plain wrong: Waller’s own organ records reveal quite a light touch. (Admittedly, Chriss mentioned that Waller didn’t have much of an organ to work with: he got to make organ records when Victor bought the old 30th Street Church in Camden, New Jersey to use as a recording studio, and they got the organ as part of the purchase. It wasn’t that great an organ, but my Lord, what Fats Waller did with it!) What particularly impressed me with Chriss’s performance of “Tea for Two” was how well he was able to reproduce Tatum’s dazzling piano runs on the organ and articulate every note without turning them into glissando smears; those runs are hard enough on the piano and even more so on the more legato organ!

The next piece on Chriss’s program was quite a departure: a fugue on the name “B-A-C-H” (B flat-A-C-B natural in German notation) by Max Reger, a composer who seems to generate many anecdotes. One Reger story I love is the letter he wrote to a critic who’d penned a particularly negative review of one of his performances: “I am sitting in the smallest room of my house with your review in front of me. Soon it will be behind me.” I remember when Robert Plimpton played Reger he would joke that with other composers you looked at the black spots on the paper and those were the notes you needed to play; with Reger you looked at the white spots and those were the notes you wouldn’t play. And Chriss’s reference to Reger as a rock star of his time reminded me of my own comment about him: “If there were such a thing as heavy-metal classical, Reger would be it.” The Reger fugue on B-A-C-H started as quietly and slowly as possible and gradually built up in both volume and speed, and created the sort of heavy-metal classical effect I love him for (it was essentially Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” three-quarters of a century early), and as with Mendelssohn and Brahms in their organ works, I suspect Reger was asking himself the question, “What would Bach be writing if he were alive today?” After that Chriss closed out his printed program with a transcription (uncredited) of the “Ride of the Valkyries” from Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre – and I couldn’t help but note the irony that a program by an African-American musician that had included tributes to the Black musical tradition was ending with a piece by a notorious racist that was used at the end of D. W. Griffith’s racist cinematic masterpiece, The Birth of a Nation, to depict the Ku Klux Klan heroically riding to the defense of Southern white manhood (and womanhood) against bestial Blacks (played by white actors in singularly bad blackface).

Admittedly, Wagner and Griffith were specifically prejudiced against certain groups – Wagner against Jews and Griffith against Blacks – rather than generally racist or white supremacist. Wagner’s letters indicate he wanted to see the North win the U.S. Civil War and abolish slavery, and Griffith actually made anti-racist movies – he took on anti-Native American prejudice in Ramona (1913) and anti-Asian prejudice in Broken Blossoms (1919). Charles and I have heard various transcriptions of “Ride of the Valkyries” for organ and Chriss’s was lighter, more airy and less thick than most (which are good things); incidentally I was wondering why the “Ride of the Valkyries” wasn’t included in the Wagner collection on the series The Britannic Organ (Volume 5 of a series on Oehms Records recording all the surviving player organ rolls for the organ originally built for the RMS Britannic, sister ship of the Titanic which itself sank in 1916) when a number of more obscure Wagner pieces were. Chriss exited to a standing ovation and returned for an encore, an artful version of “Amazing Grace” that began with a bagpipe-style voicing that reminded me of Carol Williams’ version and then went through several choruses, each with a different color in the registrations. The song itself has a confusing history, though its lyrics became a touchstone for the abolition movement because their author, John Newton, was a British navy veteran who owned and operated a slave ship until he converted to Quakerism and became appalled at the immorality of what he’d been doing (hence the lines, “I once was lost but now am found/Was blind but now I see”). The melody apparently came from a British folk tune called “New Britain” that was itself a mashup of two previous songs, “Gallaher” and “St. Mary,” and an American composer named William Walker in 1835 was the first to match Newton’s poem to the piece of music we all know as “Amazing Grace.” It was a lovely ending to one of the best concerts we’ve heard at the Organ Pavilion (the only other one this year that’s been as good was the one from September 13 with Chinese-American organist Weicheng Zhao and his wife, violinist Fang Gao, another multicultural program that mixed Western music with the artist’s own ethnic tradition) and one I was glad not only have gone to myself but to have been able to go with Charles with for what amounted to a date!