“Songs of My Fathers” at the Berkeley City Club
Music review by Adam Broner
 
Last Tuesday, January 18, Berkeley Chamber Performances sponsored an unusual concert that included string quartet, clarinet,spoken word, image and dance—all through the lens of an African-American experience.

Clarinetist Deborah Pittman arranged this program around a tribute that she wrote for her father, Earl Pittman, in which she alternated vignettes with clarinet passages, posed against a montage of old family photos.

In “The World According to Earl: a Father-Daughter Biography” Pittman drew on a history that was poignant and hilarious, the story of a young girl from a poor family who loved the clarinet, and a father who did what he had to do to nurture that. Her absorbing narrative carried us through poverty and personal triumph, a portrait sketched in pithy sayings and clarinet phrases.

“I don’t know how old I was when I noticed that there weren’t many Dads around,” Pittman introduced her early childhood and the social realities of a Brooklyn project. She went on to describe her tall and quirky father. “He left school in the third grade to help his family,” she said, describing a life-long work ethic, “and he’s still working.” About local culture,  “he disapproved of the Three Stooges and Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts… which inspired my serious interest in classical music.”

Despite his lack of education he had a knack for math, which he put to good use as a numbers runner to make ends meet. “When the cops arrested him they had to manufacture evidence, because he kept the books in his head.”

Faced with his expectations, Pittman took up music. “Someone handed me a clarinet in school. The clarinet gave me permission to be alone… Later, I needed a good clarinet for auditions, a Buffet. I asked my father and the money appeared on the table the next day—he borrowed it from the Mafia.”

Deborah ended with one last moment. “When I was born, my father was expecting a boy. He even had a name picked out for me—Don. And my nickname? Boy. When he came home he would say, ‘Where’s my Boy?’ And I would go running into his arms.”

She started the evening with the elegant Air and Simple Gifts that premiered at Barak Obama’s inauguration, a quartet for piano, cello, violin and clarinet. That piece, which composer John Williams derived from a Quaker hymn, as did Aaron Copland in Appalachian Spring, commemorates a benchmark for this country, the first African-American to hold the office of President.

For Simple Gifts, Pittman was joined by violinist Anna Presler, cellist Andrew Luchansky, and pianist Joanne de Phillips, who founded this series of concerts in 1993 and has overseen it since. No slouch as a pianist, she created the backbone for sweet violin slides and cello gravel.

After intermission, the Sun Quartet accompanied Pittman with Quintet for Clarinet and Strings by Anglo-African composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, hugely popular during his brief lifetime. In residence at CSU Sacramento, the Sun Quartet is comprised of Presler, Luchansky, violist Anna Kruger and Piedmont local treasure Ian Swensen as first violin. Their sound drowned us in riches in the intimate concert hall of the Julia Morgan-designed Berkeley City Club.

That Quintet is impressive and distinctive. Pizzicato entrances left enough air for a lush yet breathable fabric, against which off-beats and curious weighting created a sense of question and tension. Coleridge-Taylor was most expressive in the Larghetto affettuoso, with Swensen showing extraordinary sweetness in his high range, balanced by woodsy clarinet and an earthy loam of cello subsonics from Luchansky. Written in 1895 at the age of 20, its elegant crafting and unusual rhythms evoked Dvořák, but without the folk language of Bohemia.

The performance was nicely rounded with a dance by Sheila Coleman with Pittman’s accompaniment. Her circular gestures gave an interiority matched by low clarinet trickles. Coleman described the work as her experience of loss and connection to her own father.