FourOneOne is thrilled to present Windward Passages, a concert featuring scenes from pianist Dave Burrell’s groundbreaking jazz opera. Written in collaboration with Swedish poet and librettist Monika Larsson, Windward Passages is a deeply personal, major work that presents a socio-political coming-of-age-story following an African-American family’s migration from Harlem to Honolulu just as Hawaii transitions into the fiftieth American state. Musically, the opera is a heady, vibrant and seamless tapestry of Ellingtonian melodies, blues, ragtime, bebop, free jazz and formal operatic arias that has been a hallmark of Burrell's approach to the tradition. 

Remarkably, despite its position as Burrell’s life-defining composition and several stagings in Europe, Windward Passages has never been performed in its full, orchestrated capacity in the United States. Instead, American audiences have primarily known the piece through intimate solo piano or duo reductions—leaving the full, multi-vocal, and choreographed brilliance of this monumental American tale largely unheard on its home soil.

This concert will be the first ensemble performance of this material in the United States since 1982. Monika Larsson will introduce and set the narrative context for each piece in the performance. Dave Burrell will lead the ensemble at the piano.

Windward Passages has been a life-defining work not only for Burrell but also for his wife, collaborator, and partner in everything, Monika Larsson. They met in Honolulu in 1978 and quickly fell into, in Burrell’s words, “a love we couldn’t escape.” Larsson turned Burrell’s memories and music into a sensitive and expressive libretto, tracing his parents’ struggles, his own youth and the relationship between the indigenous Hawaiians and their land. As Burrell describes it: “the work is semi-biographical and takes place when Hawaii reached statehood in 1959. I performed the night of the actual statehood celebration with my regular band. In the story line we have a band of youngsters performing in front of a huge, American flag backdrop. My parents have fictional parts, along with a land developer, Mr. Henry J. Kaiser, a South African man who I actually worked for…Some of the villagers in our story line demonstrated against the development. There is one murder, there is also a love interest, blues and several beautiful arias. There are three acts.”

The performance is one night only and presents a rare opportunity to experience the richness of Windward Passages in the company of its creators.

Pianist, composer, and improvisor Dave Burrell’s life's work spans all facets of jazz and its history, from blues, ragtime, stride, and bebop to the “fire music” he helped sculpt in the 1960s. The richness of his sixty-year career reflects his singular ability to connect voices and histories across musical genres and generations. For Burrell, tradition is a living, embodied dialogue between past and future, a study in dissolving musical binaries of “inside” and “out.”

Monika Larsson is a Swedish poet, writer, and author of the forthcoming book, A Jazz Life, about her relationship and partnership with Dave Burrell. 

Joining Burrell and Larsson for this performance is an intergenerational group whose creative lives connect them to a range of performance traditions reflective of New York City. The rhythm section consists of two long-time friends, collaborators, and integral components of New York City’s creative music community: bassist Ken Filiano, who has performed with the likes of Bill Dixon and Warne Marsh; and Michael TA Thompson, the Virgin Islands-raised drummer and collaborator of reggae legend Owen Gray and saxophonist Charles Gayle. Born in London and raised in both the States and Saudi Arabia, Edward Washington II is the evening’s tenor vocalist, who had his solo debut at Carnegie Hall this year and has premiered numerous works for American composers. The evening's soprano is Afi Bijou, the Bronx native who began performing as a child actor on and off-Broadway; her career has taken her to Essence Fest stages and led to concerts with Angélique Kidjo and Nas. Aakash Mittal, whose work “points toward new possibilities in improvised music," (Denver Post) likely due in part to his study of Hindustani Classical Music and relationship with drum revolutionary Milford Graves, will put his multi-instrumental talents to use through tenor saxophone and flute.