Linking two contrasting musical giants

What connects Baroque German composer Johann Sebastian Bach and 20th-century American jazz composer John Coltrane—across centuries, continents and musical categories?

That's the question explored by Passion for Bach and Coltrane, a collaboration by Imani Winds and the  Harlem Quartet, on Tuesday, March 31, 7:30 pm at the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth. In addition, Imani's french horn player Jeff Scott and poet A.B. Spellman set the stage for the concert with a discussion of Bach, Coltrane and contemporary poetry with Hop Director Mary Lou Aleskie, at 6:30 pm in the Top of the Hop, free admission.

Created by Scott, a noted composer, Passion is a seven-movement, evening-length work that quotes two sublime works—Bach's Goldberg Variations and Coltrane's A Love Supreme—to which Scott adds his own movements. The work also weaves in readings by Spellman from his 2008 poetry collection Things I Must Have Known, which speaks to the musical mastery of Bach and Coltrane, and the transcendent spirituality and humanity the two shared. Imani and Harlem realizes this wide-open sound with the help of a jazz trio of Alex Brown, piano, Edward Pérez, bass, and Neal Smith, drums.

In tune with Imani's mission of broadening the picture of who plays classical music and what they play, Passion lets the listener appreciate the contrasts and overlaps between two innovative geniuses. Classical Voice North America praised the work's "chaste Baroque music-making and explosive jazz riffs," commenting that, "The blizzards of notes ... came hot from the heart."

Imani is a Grammy-nominated wind quintet known through its 20 years of music-making for dynamic playing, adventurous programming, imaginative collaborations and outreach endeavors that have inspired audiences of all ages and backgrounds. The ensemble's playlist embraces traditional chamber music repertoire as well as new work, some of it commissioned by the quintet itself. In addition to Scott, its members are Brandon Patrick George, flute; Toyin Spellman-Diaz, oboe; Mark Dover, clarinet; and Monica Ellis, bassoon.

Harlem Quartet's mission to broaden the audience for string quartet music has taken them around the world; from a 2009 performance at The White House for President and Mrs. Obama, to a 2012 tour of South Africa to a current three-year residency at London's Royal College of Music. The musically versatile ensemble has performed with such distinguished artists as Itzhak Perlman, Misha Dichter, Jeremy Denk and Paquito D'Rivera, and also collaborated with jazz masters Chick Corea and Gary Burton on the album Hot House, a 2013 multi-Grammy Award winning release. Its members—violinists Ilmar Gavilan and Melissa White, violist Jaime Amador and cellist Felix Umansky—are from Cuba, Puerto Rico and the US.

Passion began with the poetry of Spellman, a writer, educator and activist who also happens to be the father of Imani's Spellman-Diaz. In a conversation published by the DePauw School of Music, Scott said Spellmen "gave [everyone in Imani Winds] a copy of his poetry. I have to admit, it sat on my shelf for a couple of years before I opened it up. I needed some inspiration. 'Let me read some poetry,' I thought. 'Let me open this book that this man gave me.' And then, boom. Mind blown. The music is in the poetry. You hear the rhythm, you hear the pulse, you hear the history. The music flowed after that. It wasn't even an issue of writing the music, it was just how much of it I was going to get away with putting together. I ended up with about an hour and a half that I had to actually trim, but I could have written an opera out of what A.B. gave us."

When Scott began hearing that a string quartet needed to be part of the work, he contacted the Harlem Quartet, recalls violinist Melissa White. "You know, when Jeff called to talk about it, I had the 'mind blown' moment. I thought, 'Wow, it's the worlds that my quartet merges.' We do classical and jazz. Our mission is to diversify classical music, so we work to expand the listening of our audiences. To think this project was going to do [that for the] entire night, and finally our groups were going to be on stage together working with a jazz combo.. … It's been a lot of fun, it's been a great journey, it's been a stretch for us as players."