Chris Parker – Memphis Flyer

As 2020 settled into its longest nights last month, one bright spot was an online video concert by a septet stacked with Memphis-affiliated players. As virtual concerts go, it was notable both for its technical clarity and for mixing compositional craft, spontaneity, joy, and gravitas in equal measure. That made it a fitting capstone presentation of a work that has been evolving in various iterations over years: No Tears Suite, composed by onetime Memphian Christopher Parker and Memphis native Kelley Hurt, now married and residing in Little Rock.

Though the couple met in Memphis, living in Arkansas had everything to do with the creation of No Tears Suite, a musical meditation on the Little Rock Nine, the Black students who courageously defied the state’s segregationists and walked into Little Rock Central High School after a monthlong standoff in 1957. Speaking in 2019 to the Oxford American, which commissioned the piece, Parker said, “It was a hometown kind of thing. I grew up here, and all my life, whenever you bring up Central High and 1957, either the conversation is going to be negative or people don’t want to have that conversation. And yet we were one of the first states to force integration. … We should be celebrating what happened then, but that also means you have to acknowledge that huge parts of our community were racists who wanted to tear nine kids limb from limb.”

Hurt saw the historical moment through a more regional lens. “I grew up in Memphis,” she told the magazine, “and that city holds a lot of weight. The assassination of Dr. King is something that changed the city forever, the way people interacted with each other, and especially the music. Coming from there to Little Rock, you start to wonder, do all cities have this kind of weight?”

Whatever its provenance, that weight is felt in the lyrics she brought to the composition, based largely on Melba Pattillo Beals’ memoir Warriors Don’t Cry. Hurt’s recital of the students’ and others’ names and biographies in “Roll Call” carries both heaviness and beauty, especially when accompanied by the very heavy band, which includes, in the latest version, percussionist Brian Blade, bassist Roland Guerin, tenor saxophonist Bobby LaVell, trumpeter Marc Franklin, and alto saxophonist Chad Fowler, along with Parker on piano and Hurt on vocals.

The sensitivity of the players makes the piece a worthy inheritor of a vital, often overlooked tradition of jazz that addresses the civil rights movement, such as Sonny Rollins’ “Freedom Suite” (1958) and the album We Insist! and Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite (1960). In walking a fine line between a composed piece and the audacity of free improvisation, No Tears Suite dredges up the turbulent passions of America’s racism and as such serves as a kind of exorcism. But, as Hurt noted in 2019, it also embodies more positive emotions. “We treat it more as a celebration than as something terrible that happened. It’s a celebration of those young people that had the courage to bring attention to themselves. That’s a hard decision to make when you’re a kid.”

That may best be expressed in the nearly euphoric “Don’t Cry (Warrior’s Song),” with its hard-swinging, slamming chords and intricate unison horn lines, as Hurt sings, “Don’t cry, sister, don’t cry, don’t let them see you shed a tear. Beaten and bruised, yeah, you refused. There are no cowards here.” It’s cathartic, and some of that lies in the composition itself. It can be heard in other versions of the suite, such as its premiere on the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site in 2017, the studio recording from the same year (released on Mahakala Music last September), or the 2019 expanded arrangement with members of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra.

But an additional layer of celebration arose from the particular day on which the online concert was recorded: November 7, 2020. “We started recording this directly after the networks called the presidential race for Biden,” says saxophonist Chad Fowler. “Nobody mentioned politics, but I felt like there was a calm that came over us all and was reflected in the music.”

No Tears Suite can be viewed at youtube.com/user/oxfordamerican.

Dopolarians, while not exactly a household name, are quietly becoming a widely celebrated group in jazz circles. The record they released last fall has been lauded in the pages of Pitchfork, Offbeat, and Rolling Stone. But what’s rarely mentioned in all of this press is that the group has its roots in Memphis’ free-jazz scene of 20 years ago — and a friendship that has endured since those days. Which is not to say that Garden Party, the group’s debut on Mahakala Music, is a Memphis record — the group’s members are too far-flung for that claim. But it is certainly a Southern record, and that’s a unique claim in the free-jazz universe. That it is indeed free jazz should come as no surprise, as the group brings together several luminaries from that world, most notably drummer Alvin Fielder, who played with the likes of Sun Ra and others, when free jazz was a markedly revolutionary musical statement.

Other players include tenor saxophonist Kidd Jordan and bassist William Parker and relative spring chickens Chad Fowler (alto saxophone), Chris Parker (piano), and singer Kelley Hurt. It’s those last three who make the group’s show at Crosstown Arts’ Green Room this Friday a return.

Marc Pegan

Dopolarians

“Chris and I used to live in a house together on Meda in Cooper-Young,” Fowler tells me. “We had a bunch of free sessions — including a couple sessions with [late free-jazz pioneer] Frank Lowe when he would come to town. It wasn’t too long before Chris was touring with him. That connection actually led to Chris meeting William Parker, Alvin, and Kidd and all those people.”

This was some two decades ago, when there was a surprising amount of free-jazz improvisation going on here. “I actually studied with [saxophonist] George Cartwright a bit,” Fowler recalls. “He did a piece for big band, and I was part of that. [Guitarist] Jim Duckworth was also a big influence. We played Sonny Sharrock and that kinda stuff in a group called The Jim Spake Action Figures. And the drummer Samurai Celestial, who was once with the Sun Ra Arkestra, was around Memphis quite a bit back then.”

Ultimately, Fowler introduced Chris Parker to Hurt. The two eventually married and settled in Little Rock. When Fowler moved to Lake Desoto, Arkansas, in recent years, after many peregrinations, the three reconnected. “Initially it was Chris who had the brainchild of the Dopolarians,” says Fowler. “It started with a project we did in Arkansas to commemorate the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School. Chris and his wife, Kelley Hurt, who’s from Memphis, wrote the No Tears Suite for that. Chris called me and [trumpeter] Marc Franklin. We also ended up getting Brian Blade, who is one of the best drummers of his generation. And that made us realize, ‘We can play with great players.’

“So we figured, let’s work with the people who we’d love to work with. And also make it still be really Southern. There’s this frustrating thing, where it’s assumed you have to be in New York or Chicago or San Francisco to do avant-garde jazz music. But if you look at the history of the music, it almost all started in the South, whether it’s Ornette Coleman or Pharoah Sanders or Sun Ra. All these people [in Dopolarians] were born and grew up in the South, other than William Parker. And we recorded it in New Orleans. A lot of it was fully improvised music, but it feels like the blues in a way that a lot of avant-garde music doesn’t. It feels soulful. Some of these people are really into the Hi Rhythm Section and Stax music.”

While Friday’s show will be something of a homecoming, Fowler says it will also serve as a memorial to Fielder, the de facto leader of the group, who passed away just over a year ago. “The new drummer is Chad Anderson — a protégé and a great friend of Alvin’s for many years. And Kidd Jordan’s doctor just told him he can’t travel. So we have the great Douglas Ewart coming down. Everyone in this group is somehow connected through these weird threads.”