Reviews 2003
Reviews 2003
✭✭✭✩✩
music by D.D. Jackson, libretto by George Elliott Clarke, directed by Colin Jackson
Guelph Jazz Festival, River Run Centre, Guelph
September 5, 2003
To celebrate the Guelph Jazz Festival's 10th anniversary, Artistic Director Ajay Heble took the bold step of commissioning a full-length jazz opera from musician D. D. Jackson and librettist George Elliott Clarke, acclaimed for his libretto for Beatrice Chancy (1998). The result is Québécité, a story about the ups and downs of two interracial couples set in Quebec City. Indo-Canadian lawyer Laxmi (Kiran Ahluwalia) struggles with Haitian-Canadian architect Ovide (Haydain Neale) over his macho attitude. Black Nova Scotian singer Malcolm (Dean Bowman) and a Chinese-Canadian club-owner's daughter Collette (Yoon Sun Choi) fall in love but she won't tell her parents about him. All is resolved when they realize they are all victims of oppression, as Quebecers are in Canada, and celebrate the "Québécité" or "Quebecois-ness" that unites them.
How enlightening audiences will find this political-racial equation is doubtful. Indisputable is the engaging verve and variety of Jackson's music. The work is operatic only in having recitatives and songs. These songs, however, mostly based on a wide range of blues and dance music styles from tango to bebop, traditional to fusion, create rather the effect of a musical, albeit more harmonically adventurous and vocally demanding.
Bowman and Choi made the most effective contributions, establishing their characters quickly and singing with strong, flexible voices, their explosive scat solos being particular highlights. Neale's and Ahluwalia's characters were never clear, though Ahluwalia's Eastern melismas were the most important single component of the score's distinct tonal colour.
Director Colin Jackson placed the accompanying jazz quintet on stage and used projections, dancers and umbrella wielding extras to establish a mood of romantic melancholy.
A caveat to judging this amplified work was the continual malfunctioning of the sound system. About half of Clarke's lyrics, seemingly rich in wordplay, were obscured or unheard due to mikes cutting out, distortions and balance problems.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Opera Canada 2003 Winter.
Photo: Yoon Sun Choi and Dean Bowman. ©2003 Guelph Jazz Festival.
2003-09-06
Québécité