Glorious Mahalia

“I’m hearing this in the middle of the night, and I’m thinking, ‘OK, I get it,’” David Harrington tells Apple Music Classical. “Now I know what a musician’s responsibility really is: It’s our job to listen, to listen to our friends, to our families, to our society. And then report what we’re hearing. That’s what Mahalia Jackson did.” A spell of insomnia led the Kronos Quartet violinist and founder to tune in to a nocturnal television programme about Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” speech in the summer of 1963, a cris de cœur that raised global awareness of the struggle for civil rights in the US and helped change history. Clarence B. Jones, Dr King’s lawyer, whose notes informed the first half of his friend’s inspired oratory, told how the Baptist minister’s rhetoric soared seconds after Mahalia Jackson, seated nearby on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., shouted, “Tell ’em about the dream. Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.” King dreamed that day of freedom, hope, justice and dignity for countless Black Americans and all those downtrodden by poverty. His message is woven into the musical fabric of Glorious Mahalia, Kronos Quartet’s trilogy of pieces created to honour one of the greatest singers of the 20th century, great for her voice, great for her soul and great for the part she played in the battle for civil rights and social justice. “I thought it would be a good thing if Kronos could make an album that celebrated that moment when a musician, because of her listening and her friendship and her personality, made this enormous contribution to our civic life,” Harrington recalls. “That became the beginning of Glorious Mahalia.” He pitched his ideas for a piece to Chicago-based composer Stacy Garrop, offering her ample freedom to develop them into a fully-formed musical work. “If Kronos had existed in the early 1960s,” Harrington confides, “I know I would have figured out a way for us to have performed with Mahalia Jackson—I know that! I said to Stacy, ‘Kronos has to perform with Mahalia as part of this piece.’ The only other thing I wanted to be sure of was that the friendship between Studs Terkel and Mahalia gets revealed, the complexity of that friendship, even the danger of it. When they became friends in the late 1940s, it was not common in the United States that a white journalist and the most prominent gospel singer in the country would be friends, do interviews and even do TV shows.” Jackson’s voice, recorded in conversation with Terkel in the early 1960s and profoundly affecting performances of the gospel songs “Hold on” and “Sometime I feel like a motherless child”, becomes the irresistible, overwhelming solo turn in Garrop’s Glorious Mahalia. Towards the end of “Stave in the ground”, she delivers a blow to the heart: Jackson knew what it was like to be tethered by the colour of her skin and suffer the hatred that came to those who, like her, dared to break “out of their place”. The old gospel promise, of a new world free from racial prejudice and division, rings true in God Shall Wipe All Tears Away, played in Jacob Garchik’s version for Kronos Quartet. Its rich soundworld grew from Harrington’s discovery of Jackson’s recording of the piece, made with organ accompaniment in 1937. A breakfast meeting with Kronos sound engineer and electro-acoustic musician, Scott Fraser, provided the key to its arrangement for strings. “I played that old recording for him and said, ‘Scott, Kronos has to sound like that organ. Can we do it?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I think we can.’ I loved that organ sound so much.” Kronos, Fraser and Garchik began experimenting, found just the right sound and turned Jackson’s vocal line into a solo for Hank Dutt, the group’s violist at the time. “We played it as a Kronos concert piece for a long time,” says Harrington. “Glorious Mahalia grew from there.” God Shall Wipe All Tears Away prepares the ground for Peace Be Till, Zachary James Watkins’ sometimes harrowing, sometimes sublime, always respectful container for Jones’ memories of Martin Luther King Jr. “After hearing Clarence Jones on television, I discovered that he lived very near to me in Palo Alto, California,” notes Harrington. “One thing I’ve learned in life is that it’s best, if you have an idea and a phone number, to act on it right away. So, the minute I got Clarence’s number, I called him. We began talking, and by the end of our conversation, we’d arranged that he would go into a recording studio to tell his story. And I said, ‘I have an idea for a young composer that I think can bring it into the world of Kronos in a beautiful way.’” Watkins, based a short drive from Palo Alto—in Oakland—says that he was “beside himself” to receive a commission from a group that has, ever since its creation in 1973, redefined what the string quartet can be. “Just a couple weeks after my phone call with Clarence, Zachary Watkins, Clarence and I were in the studio recording. I only found out later that during the session Clarence brought his copy of Martin Luther King Jr’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and read from it. It was Clarence who visited Dr King in the Birmingham jail, put the letter in his pocket and left with it. The reason we have that letter is because of Clarence Jones’ foresight and courage.” Lines from Letter from Birmingham Jail, declaimed by Jones without sentiment, burn beacon-bright in “Symphony of Social Justice”, a timeless reminder of King’s moral authority and conviction that “oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever”. The piece ends with “Tell ’em about the dream”, where Jones’ voice gradually blends with the sounds of Kronos Quartet to form a devastating reminder of history’s eternal relevance to the present.