Donal Fox is a national treasure, and we’re lucky to be able to call him a local. The composer and pianist has written and performed symphonic and chamber music around the world. He was the first African-American composer in residence with the St. Louis Symphony, he’s premiered his works at venues from Tanglewood to Carnegie Hall, and like the best American musicians and composers, you cannot confine him to a single genre.
In addition to what might be called his classical work, his group Inventions Trio plays some of the most awesome jazz you can hear, while also taking on the works of great composers going back to the Baroque period — maybe even earlier.
Fox is playing a solo concert at GBH on Friday, December 3. He spoke with GBH All Things Considered host Arun Rath in advance of the performance. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Arun Rath: Tell us a little bit about your local background. Were you born in the Greater Boston area?
Donal Fox: Yes, I was born here, and then we went out when I was probably five or six to California, so I think I lost most of my Boston accent being out there. Then we came back and I went through the Brookline school system.
Rath: How old were you, at what age or what stage, did you realize you wanted to perform and compose music?
Fox: You start with early, at least in my house, early piano lessons. There was a lot of music in the house. My mother and father both loved the arts. My father actually had studied some music composition before he went into physics, acoustic physics. I remember as a kid having vinyl of Rite of Spring by Stravinsky, then I'd hear some Bach cantatas, then he'd have some Monk, and then there's some Miles Davis, Birth of the Cool. So all that stuff was mixing in my head at a really early age.
Rath: That's the stuff that we hear in your music. That's awesome to hear. I mentioned how you're not confined by genre. The music that you listened to as a young person also was all types of genres. But I'm wondering — as you were developing as a young person, there's not so much diversity in the classical music ranks in America — was it hard early on not to get pegged just as a jazz pianist?
Fox: Yes. That divide is still here, it crosses cultural lines. The things that we’re struggling with as a society now, it's in the music field as well. But early on, you start with the classical piano. Improvisation I was exploring my own. I started reading about the great composers. You know, Beethoven was a great improviser, Bach and Mozart [too]. So I said, why can't I improvise? Even before I was really focusing on jazz as a jazz improviser. Of course, piano teachers would just go berserk. I was probably a teenager then, doing some Beethoven sonatas, and I came and I warmed up playing a boogie-woogie on a sonata, and she yelled, “You can't do that on my Steinway!” So I just played it louder.
Rath: Some Beethoven does sound like boogie-woogie.
Fox: That's true. Some of the late Beethoven. He was a swinging cat, that Beethoven. So the idea of improvisation, it’s not just one genre. I mean, look at world music, in African music, Indian music — it's everywhere. It's the way we speak normally as human beings. When we’re born, we’re learning words and sights and sounds, and we're not forced to read right away. We learn to communicate through our language, and music is very similar that way. You know, the idea that you should be able to express your thoughts with the sound. You don't necessarily in the beginning have to have a lot of music theory, or how you should hold your hands on the keys and be spanked if your finger is sticking out a little too far. That's not music, that takes away your creative process. So fortunately, early on, I realized that being creative and improvising, and that there was a history to it, was part of spontaneous composition, which got me to be a composer as well.
Rath: Do you have a sense of — I don't know, there's almost maybe the burden of history, but also, where you are in things? Because as an African-American composer, in addition to your work being profound, it’s kind of important. You're in the line with people like William Grant Still — there's this excitement about being able to enjoy your genre-breaking music, if that makes sense.
Fox: Yeah, sure. There’s the social-political aspect to making music that I don't avoid. I have a piece called “Star Spangled Banner Fractured,” which is sort of taking Jimi Hendrix and Charles Ives and myself and mixing it up, and it scares people sometimes. Sometimes I put the “Funeral March” by Chopin in the middle. You can express a lot of different things. The expectations of being a Black composer, that you only should play one genre of music — for a long time, actually, maybe until one of my major commissions at Tanglewood, I really didn't talk about my jazz background, because it was used in a reverse racial sense: “Well, you’re a jazz musician, so I was glad that you're dabbling here with this classical composition.” And so by leaving that out, they were forced to — reviewers, that is, and others — to look at the music just for the music, and not try to paint simple stereotypes on it.
Rath: Some of your classical compositions I'm thinking of, like the"Duetto for Clarinet and Piano," there aren't things in that which are screaming African-American composer. It seems very much part of the tradition. It doesn't call attention to itself in that kind of way, if that makes sense.
Fox: Right, right. I mean, you want to embrace the sounds that you hear that are part of your culture, part of your experiences. A lot of the younger musicians are feeling freer to do that.
Rath: Tell us a little bit about what we're going to hear in the concert. A lot of your music that I've heard on record, it's mostly you with a trio or in larger contexts, but you're going to be playing solo. So what are we going to get to hear?
Fox: So I'm trying to create this theme, this fabric of music that speaks to each other, of the intrinsic quality of the music and how it's constructed. So I'm looking to open up at this point — they're asking for a set list, and I usually keep tinkering with things — but at this point it's opening up with Gibbons, Orlando Gibbons. We're talking about 1400s, 1500s. It’s amazing how much improvisational freedom is in the Gibbons. Some of the pieces I'm not going to improvise in a “jazz” style. That is, I'm not going to add any swing to it or jazz up the harmonies. But I'm improvising in the context of the Gibbons. That leads to a Bach prelude that I'll create a sort of new piece out of. You’ll definitely hear jazzier, bluesy elements in that. Then I’m going to do a Duke Ellington piece called “Reflection in D.” Duke Ellington loved French music and he had a wide, large palette, so I'm going to bring out sides of the Ellington that could be French Impressionism. So I'm sort of showing different angles of music that you think there’s one way of listening to them, but by bringing some things in the forefront and putting some things in the background and shifting the rhythm a little bit, it's like a prism or a mobile. You see these different angles.
