Words by Emma Warren

Chicago composer Angel Bat Dawid has had a busy pandemic. So far, she has scored a film about women who dress up as baby dolls for the New Orleans Mardi Gras; she wrote a sonata inspired by live streaming titled ‘Sonata for an Empty Room’, she’s written a suite for Yoko Ono and she’s written a full requiem for jazz which will be released on award-winning label International Anthem. 

“I’m always thinking of the different compositional blueprints historically,” says the clarinetist, improviser and bandleader whose albums The Oracle and LIVE featured heavily at the end of year lists in 2019 and 2020. “Eventually I want to write a ballet. I want to write a symphony.” Opera is not on that list – but only because she wrote and performed a ‘cosmic love opera’ based on the biblical Song of Solomon back in 2018.

On top of her recent output, there are the forthcoming Afro Town Topics which she wrote for her artist residency at New York’s Winter Jazzfest, and which tells a deeply-researched story about Black music in the second decade of the last century. Subtitled ‘A Mythological Afrofuturist Revue’, it features Marshall Allen who began playing with Sun Ra’s Arkestra in the 1950s and who has led the Arkestra since 1993. 

“This was a journey,” she says, before recounting the twists and turns that led to the work, which premieres in January. “This song came into my head: ‘Get your clothes and grab your hat/ Leave your worries on the doorstep/ Just direct your feet / On the sunny side of the street.’ It was bopping in my head. It felt divine. I looked up who composed that and it was two white guys. Then I saw this small caveat that said that it was rumoured that Fats Waller really wrote it.”

The detail, which is typical of the way Black musicians were sidelined in their own compositional practice, led her to the sheet music industry that existed before the recording industry was ushered into existence by the gramophone. “Tin Pan Alley was a place, with all these piano shops, where people could go and sell their songs. You know what they were doing – taking their songs and giving Black people chump change.”

It also led her to dig deeper into Fats Waller’s histories – “he was a dynamic performer but people don’t know he composed symphonies, he could play Chopin” – and that of his mentor, James P. Johnson, who wrote The Charleston. She found James P. Johnson’s historic address in Harlem, discovered an Airbnb in the same building, and began planning a trip to New York to Rutgers University where James P Johnson’s scores are archived, aiming to write new music holed up in an Airbnb in the same building where he lived and worked a century before.

The university refused her request because of Covid restrictions. Her appeals didn’t bear fruit, but then New York Winter Jazzfest invited her to be their artist-in-residence for the 2021 edition. Unable to access the scores, she focused instead on Connie’s Hot Chocolates, the hit 1920s musical review that Fats Waller wrote with Madagascan prince and emigré Andy Razaf. “Twenty years into that millennium, the same things were happening as are happening now. There was a pandemic, there was racial upheaval, there was world global depression,” she says, “then this wonderful music birthed out of it called jazz.”

Her journey into music more generally began with a trip to the cinema, aged four, to see Miloš Forman’s 1984-released ‘Amadeus’ – and particularly the deathbed scene where Salieri is scribing the remaining music that Mozart can communicate outwards. “I remember looking at it and thinking ‘I want to be able to do that one day’,” she says. “My approach to composition is much like Mozart. It’s all here in my head. The score is already done, I just need to get it out on paper. I do a lot of research and I have to have a story. Once I have that, I just write music to the storyline. That’s why I never run out of compositional ideas because they’re all stories.” 

Composition is storytelling, she adds, recounting a story of a ten-year-old pianist she’s teaching. “I realised he had a big passion for Batman and so I got him to write the Batman Suite. Once I gave him a story he was able to compose. He could learn a piece for a recital but this is more fun for him.” Whilst she uses classical notation for her work, she believes the method can act as a glass ceiling simply because it’s considered difficult, or mysterious. “Reading music is easier than being a spontaneous musician. It’s also easier to read Western notation than to read a book,” she says. “You’ve 26 letters in the alphabet, that’s a lot. You’ve only got seven notes. It’s not that difficult.”

She’s also turning her hand to mixing and mastering, partly because of the deflating feeling of seeing the word ‘master’ on the back of records – a word that is loaded for a Black American woman in a country with histories of enslavement. “I’m tired of seeing credits on the back of records where it says mixed and mastered by a white man. That part bothers me. That word. I have to give my stuff to a white male to master?” Her relationship with her record label International Anthem means that it was possible to air her concerns and find a resolution. “The word ‘master’ has different connotations to me,” she says. “We’re gonna have to change some of these words.”

Next up is the Requiem. It is based on the 1959 film ‘The Cry of Jazz’ which was filmed in her adopted home town of Chicago. “The thesis of the film is that jazz is dead, but if jazz is dead, why wasn’t there a funeral? I decided to write a requiem for jazz. The body is dead but the spirit always lives.” The film soundtrack was written by a young Sonny Ray, who renamed himself Sun Ra, and who remains a strong and present inspiration for Bat Dawid and many of her musical collaborators. Sonny Ray’s film soundtrack appears in the final part of her Requiem. “I transcribed the theme song, like I was Salieri, writing Mozart,” she says. “I used this free software and something happened – it just disappeared. I realised that when things disappear and you have to write them over again, it’s going to be better.” She pauses and smiles. “I felt like Sun Ra made me do it.”