The devil, they say, has the best tunes, but if that’s the case, we’re all devil-worshippers. There are many tales of musicians who made a pact with the devil in order to acquire their preternatural talents: Paganini and Robert Johnson come to mind. Then there are the musical yarns of players, often fiddlers, who, with varying degrees of success, enter into diabolical competition with the Devil: Charlie Daniels’ The Devil Went Down to Georgia and Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale are contrasting examples.
Wynton Marsalis’s A Fiddler’s Tale (dating from 1988) takes several leaves out of Stravinsky’s book. In obvious homage, he uses the same instrumentation and much of the plot structure of The Soldier’s Tale, and like Stravinsky, he uses a spoken narrative to keep the story moving. Traces of Stravinsky continually bubble to the surface – how could they not, with such a characteristically Stravinskyan line-up of violin, trumpet, trombone, clarinet, bassoon, double bass and percussion?
Yet, as demonstrated in this performance by a chamber group drawn from Chineke! Orchestra, Marsalis’s score has its own integrity. As a virtuoso trumpeter himself, Marsalis knows jazz better than Stravinsky did in 1918, and he handles rhythm and texture with a jazzer’s confidence.
In Stanley Crouch’s top-to-bottom refashioning of the original narration, the Devil becomes a record producer, BZB (pronounced “bee-zee-bee”) intent on turning the talented but timid violinist Beatrice Connors into a money-making machine. He succeeds but doesn’t quite get away with stealing her soul.
Crouch’s text is witty if sometimes too wordy for its own good. Here, in a virtuoso performance, it was delivered by Josie d’Arby, utterly credible as the not entirely reliable narrator, while also breathing life into all the characters who drift in and out of the story. It wasn’t d’Arby’s fault if the narration occasionally ran out of steam; she certainly didn’t.
Musically, Marsalis is canny in his use of pastiche. His score looks sideways at Stravinsky, while also sweeping across decades of jazz styles. If that gave the music a retro air, in this reading under conductor Matthew Lynch, everything cohered to sweep doubts aside, the seven players bridging classical and jazz with real panache.
The combination of instruments isn’t meant to blend smoothly: its spikiness is the point, as it was for Stravinsky. Violinist Zahra Benyounes and trumpeter Aaron Akugbo (playing a part that Marsalis must have written for himself) stood out, but so, more surprisingly perhaps, did the bassoon of Daria Phillips. Yet every instrument earned its place in the solo spotlight: as an ensemble, this was as tight as any jazz outfit.
