Behind the Blues

A glamorous dinner party; Maurice Ravel and George Gershwin both seated at a grand piano with arabesque filigree. Such an event took place during Ravel’s US tour in 1927 with lasting musical echoes. Ravel had already discovered American vernacular music in Paris—in the form of W.C. Handy’s sheet music and touring jazz orchestras—and had already absorbed elements into his own musical language. But the blues Ravel heard were already transformed from the music’s origins in thumping, “over and over strains” from the Mississippi Delta. These were scrubbed up, syncopated blues for ballrooms and dancing feet, many bearing a habanera-like “Spanish tinge” as Jelly Roll Morton called it.

In search of historical recordings similar to what might have inspired Ravel’s Sonata for violin and piano with its famous “Blues”, violinist & New Orleans native Jenna Sherry discovered a web of connections including Ravel’s brief stay in New Orleans during the same tour. But tantalizing as these traces are, the historical record is full of gaps. In collaboration with pianist and composer Prach Boondiskulchok, this project fills the gaps with fantasy and imagination, riffing on the what-ifs. The result is a three-way conversation between Ravel’s Violin Sonata, early jazz, and French Baroque, bringing out surprising parallels between French inégal style and swung jazz rhythms and tracing threads of musical interface and influence that continue to resonate today.

Programme includes:

Ravel: Violin & Piano Sonata No. 2 (1923-27) & Vocalise-étude en forme de Habanera

Rameau: Concert no. 4 in B-flat major RCT10 & Selections from Les Indes Galantes

WC Handy: St. Louis Blues & other selections

Interludes & improvisations