Johnson: De Organizer / The Dreamy Kid (excerpts)

Renowned as an influential jazz pianist, James P. Johnson also flourished as a composer of opera and of show tunes in the 1920s and 1930s. His two short operas The Dreamy Kid and De Organizer offer contrasting stories of African American life at that time, revealing both its incredible hopefulness and precariousness in the inter-war years. The Dreamy Kid is a tragedy, marked by police violence in a racially unjust atmosphere, and De Organizer is a hopeful story of solidarity and resistance meant to break the twin oppressions of poverty and racism. Johnson sets these stories to an eclectic and powerful mixture of jazz, swing, blues and ragtime that capture the essence of African American music-making in the early 20th century.

De Organizer was first performed in modern times in 2002. Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times wrote: 'The work proved so powerful in its melodic content and so poetic in its choral writing that it's easy to imagine the piece might have attained broad popularity... Any one of these tunes surely held the potential to become hits... De Organizer is so beautifully crafted by Johnson and so adroitly restored by Dapogny that it may yet earn a place among key dramatic works in the jazz-blues repertory'.