By Mary Batten

Contributing writer

 

It makes you dance. It makes you sing. It lifts the spirit and soothes the soul when life’s stresses seem too much to bear. It transports listeners beyond ethnic, linguistic, and national boundaries.

“Music kept me sane in an insane world,” my late husband, composer Ed Bland said about growing up in Chicago in the 1930s. As a young black boy, he had to know the streets: which streets he could walk down safely, which ones not, always alert for gangs and the police who often stopped him just for “walking while black” when he walked in the white neighborhood for clarinet lessons with his Italian teacher. It was okay to walk in the Italian neighborhood but not the Polish one. Ed knew he also had to avoid territory controlled by the Four Corners gang, so named because they controlled all four corners of a particular neighborhood. He was constantly afraid gang members might attack him and take his clarinet, which his teacher had given him. Many years later, in 2002, Ed would name one of his compositions for clarinet and piano “The Four Corners.”

A clarinet protégé, Ed was performing professionally while in his teens and later in the Navy Band. It looked as if he were headed for success as a jazz clarinetist. But all that changed during a jam session with tfhe legendary jazz pianist Art Tatum when he chanced to hear Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” Suddenly he was hearing the kinds of sounds he had been hearing in his head. “My world was changed when I heard a recording of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” Ed wrote. “Not only was the music alive, it swung! I decided to become a composer because I could then have a freer formal expanse than was offered by jazz and a much more plentiful, colorful and powerful instrumental palette at my disposal. I felt that if I could uncover the secret of why Stravinsky’s music swung, and combine that knowledge with what I knew about swinging from my jazz background, I might be on a fruitful mission.”

His musician friends thought he was crazy to turn away from performing and what promised to be a lucrative future. Years later when he talked about the profound impact hearing the “Rite” had on his life, he said, “I asked myself why should I play one instrument when as a composer I can play the whole orchestra?”

Over his long career as composer, arranger, and record producer, he wrote more than 150 pieces using every instrument in the orchestra. He composed works for jazz artists such as Lionel Hampton, Dizzy Gillespie, and Clark Terry, but most of his compositions were contemporary classical pieces for chamber orchestras, trios, quartets, and bands, and many pieces for solo instruments, such as clarinet, sax, flute, and piano.

The composing challenge he set for himself was to go beyond what he considered the arbitrary, predictable forms of traditional Western European music. “As I trudged off to the University of Chicago at age 20, I knew that I had three values going for me that I wouldn’t violate. They came from jazz: (1) the sense of adventure, (2) the extended now, and (3) the vitality generated by the rhythmic conflict called ‘swing.’ My problem, as I saw it, was how to fashion the techniques, materials, analytical conceptions and philosophies of Western art music to my own ends so that my compositions would maximize the 3 values from jazz and Black life plus whatever other values that proved of use to me.”

An uncompromising artist, he created a new form in which he synthesized three musical canons: European, West African drumming, and African American (Jazz, Ragtime, Blues, Soul/Gospel, Funk, Hip Hop, R&B). Describing his form, Ed wrote: “Aesthetically, emphasis is continually focused on the present moment, the eternal present, or as I like to call it, the eternal Now. … The curse of pop music and jazz is that they are too predictable. Jazz is the narrative of improvisation on details within strictly set limits. Ideally, Art music should demand unpredictability.” The form he developed is so singular that some have called him “one of the most original composers of the 20th/21st centuries.”

It isn’t often that people have a chance to hear his music played live but folks in Smithfield and Hampton Roads have such an opportunity on February 23rd, when the Sundays at Four Concert Series presents four of his works performed by world class musicians at 4pm, Christ Episcopal Church, 111 S. Church Street, Smithfield, VA. Tickets can be purchased online at humanitix.com  (Adults $20; Students $10,) or purchased at the door.

Ed Bland’s sheet music is published by Osmund Music (www.osmundmusic@gmail.com). His handwritten scores, papers, and other materials are housed in Yale University’s Beinecke Library.