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The career of composer/pianist Donal Fox has daringly straddled
two traditions -- Western classical music and African-American jazz and
blues. Fox was born July 17, l952 in Boston, Massachusetts, into an artistic
home where the music of Bach, Stravinsky, Charlie Parker and Miles got
equal hearing. His career is the story of that dialectic.
Fox received early training in the Western classical piano repertoire
at the New England Conservatory of Music, but began rebelling early. He
began composing in mixed idioms of jazz and classical as a teenager, studied
at Boston's famous "jazz college," Berklee and, at 17, received a scholarship
to study at the Tanglewood Music Center, summer home to the Boston Symphony
Orchestra. Fox continued to study composition and theory under an impressive
series of tutors. One of them, Gunther
Schuller, had early on proposed the blending of jazz and European classical
idioms in a concept he called "Third Stream." Another early teacher was
T. J. Anderson, who shared not only Fox's African-American background,
but an equal interest in drawing techniques from varied traditions.
Fox's Refutation and Hypothesis I, A Treatise for Piano Solo
(1981), established him as an accomplished composer -- one who could draw
not only on the standard repertoire of the Western classical tradition,
from Bach and the German romantics to the great modernists Stravinsky,
Bartok, Schoenberg, and Cage, but also on jazz's improvisational discipline
and the shouts and field hollers of the blues. Fox's performances of that
piece also clearly established him as a virtuoso pianist. He executed speedy,
complexly written passages with crystal clear articulation and demonstrative
physical force. He could play with jazz feeling but also had a Chopinesque
sense of the instrument's tonal range and color that was uncommon for a
jazz pianist in the post-bop era. What's more, the score's call for spontaneous
shouts, body-slaps, even cursing, drew on Fox's unique emotional resources
as a performer. It's safe to say that Fox's early performances of Refutation
and Hypothesis I (later revised for piano and chamber orchestra) shook
up some traditional concert hall audiences.
In 1990, Fox began a series of collaborations that originated in Boston
and were soon stunning audiences throughout the world. In August of 1990,
Fox collaborated with the saxophonist/composer Oliver Lake, a founding
member with David Murray of the World Saxophone Quartet. Their performance
of original compositions and spontaneous improvisations at Cambridge's
Regattabar Jazz Club was recorded and later released by Music and Arts
as "Boston Duets." Other collaborations in the series followed. Fox performed
with Murray, with the saxophonists Billy Pierce, John Stubblefield, and
the poet Quincy Troupe. Several of these performances were recorded and
broadcast on PBS television and public radio, including the Branford Marsalis-hosted
"JazzSets."
Concurrently, Fox was composer-in-residence for two seasons of the St.
Louis Symphony Orchestra (1991-1993), where he worked with the St. Louis
Chamber players and was commissioned to write a piano concerto. He participated
in New York's "Bang on a Can" festival of new music, was invited to perform
at the Library of Congress, and composed "Gone City" (New World, 1997)
for Boston Ballet. Meanwhile, he created a stir in his work with the chamber
groups Dinosaur Annex and Boston Musica Viva. Fox prepared traditionally
trained chamber players for those performances with what he called "playing
in the sandbox." Conducting from the piano, Fox prodded his colleagues
to take the leap into improvisation based on his scores and cues. The performances
impressed critics not only with their conceptual daring, but their cohesive
integrity.
The tensions in Fox's career between two traditions has lead to a unique
and original style. When Fox's pieces were released on the omnibus composers'
album Videmus (New World, l992), the Pulitzer Prize winning critic Lloyd
Schwartz wrote, "Fox is one of the most exciting musical personalities
on the current scene. His four pieces are dazzlingly performed (or improvised)
by the composer alone or with the marvelous young clarinetist Eric Thomas
or the great alto-saxophonist Oliver Lake. The entire album achieves a vivid, even uncanny coherence -- really an entire new and powerful work in itself."
--Jon Garelick, Music Editor, The Boston Phoenix
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