“If Mahalia Jackson were singing right now, I would have figured out a way that we would be able to perform with her,” says David Harrington, co-founder and violinist of Kronos Quartet, an ensemble that in its more than 50 years has consistently set new standards for what a string quartet can be.
He laughs as he leans into the camera on a Zoom from his San Francisco home, his white hair sticking straight up.
“You can count on that.”
Of course, that’s impossible. Mahalia Jackson, the New Orleans-born gospel singer, voice of the Civil Rights Movement, mentor to Aretha Franklin, confidant of and advisor to Martin Luther King Jr., died in 1972 at age 60. But Harrington got close. A little while back he commissioned composer Stacy Garrop to craft musical settings for excerpts from a 1963 interview conversation Jackson did with Chicago radio host Studs Terkel, a longtime friend of hers, and from performances broadcast in 1957.
The result is Glorious Mahalia, a five-part suite and the title piece of a new Kronos Quartet album featuring the ensemble’s recent lineup of Harrington, John Sherba (violin), Hank Dutt (viola) and Sunny Yang (cellos). It’s insightful and bold, the music echoing and enhancing the conversations, at times cordial, but also at times testy between these two friends as Jackson tells Terkel that he can never understand the experience of Black people in America.
And in one segment, Harrington gets right up next to his wish, as Kronos performs to a recording of Jackson singing “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” It is, indeed, glorious.
This is complemented by another suite, “Peace Be Till,” commissioned by Kronos from composer Zachary Watkins, incorporating reminiscences by King lawyer and speechwriter Clarence Jones as recorded by Harrington about the friendship between King and Jackson. At its core is the moment in a 1963 rally as he watched Jackson interrupt the written speech King was giving, shouting to him, “Tell them about the dream, Martin,” spurring one of the most impactful orations of modern times, the extemporaneous “I Have a Dream.”
An instrumental arrangement by composer Jacob Garchik of Antonio Haskell’s hymn “God Shall Wipe All Tears Away,” based on a 1937 Jackson recording, serves as a perfect interlude between the suites. Kronos has performed the song for years, including a stunning version with Mali’s Trio Da Kali on the 2017 album Ladilikan.
Kronos has long used spoken oral histories in its vast, wildly eclectic career. There is 1988’s landmark Different Trains, composed for the quartet by Steve Reich, juxtaposing audio accounts from a former Pullman porter and survivors of Holocaust transports, and last year’s Witness, by composer Mary Kouyoumdjian, with audio from survivors of the Lebanese civil war and the Armenian genocide. Glorious Mahalia’s themes of social justice also connect to, among many others, 2020’s Long Time Passing, a celebration of Pete Seeger, and 2022’s My Lai, the Jonathan Berger/Scott Chessman opera about the 1968 U.S. Army massacre of a Vietnam village. The new album follows those latter two as the third Kronos release from Smithsonian Folkways.
Harrington discusses all of this in a generous, wide-ranging chat for BGS, edited for length and clarity.
What were your first experiences with Mahalia Jackson’s music?
David Harrington: I think I heard her on television as a kid. But it was Hank Dutt, our longtime violist, who gave me an LP of hers in the late ‘70s. It just blew me away. Have you seen Summer of Soul, that film [Questlove’s 2021 documentary about the 1969 Harlem Music Festival]? Then you’ve seen Mahalia on that. Our family watched it, my daughter, son-in-law, grandkids, wife, and I watched together. And wow, when Mahalia got on, I said to everyone, “I have never seen a singer with a full-body vibrato before!” [Laughs] That was one of the most amazing performances I’ve seen in my life.
Glorious Mahalia springs from the conversations between Mahalia and Studs Terkel, and then it feels like Stacy Garrop joins the conversations with her music, and then Kronos join in too, all of you in a four-way exchange.
That’s a beautiful expression of it. I’ve never thought of it that way. What I wanted to do was hear all the interviews [Terkel] ever did with Mahalia. And that’s where my conversation started with Stacy Garrop. I think she knew a lot about his work, so it started there, really. We wanted a piece that celebrates their friendship and relationship, and what they brought to our society and our country.
It’s not always an easy conversation between Terkel and Jackson. She pushes back on him, even snaps at him that he can never know what it’s like to be her, to be Black in America. Was that part of your process with this, to consider, culturally and experientially what your place is in terms of presenting her views and experiences?
It gets back to wanting to perform with Mahalia Jackson. [Laughs] It’s like, every once in a while I hear a musician – I’m lucky as an explorer of music – I’ll hear something that is just so amazingly powerful. I want to find a way of bringing it into my own experience and that of the other members of Kronos and of our audience. And so I think I’ve been really consistent about that through the years.
The question is, what gives me the right to do that? I guess I’ve never really asked that question too often, because this is what musicians do. I’m absolutely convinced that if Beethoven would have heard some of the amazing musicians in India or various places around the world in his time, he would have wanted to bring elements of that music into his work in some way or another. Beethoven did a lot of transcriptions of Scottish music!
The first thing we hear on the album is Jackson’s voice, alone, singing the words “hold on.” It’s gripping and powerful, and must be even more so in a darkened theater for both you and the audience, hearing that before you even start playing.
Yeah, it’s about as good as it gets!
And then, from there, your task is to enhance and echo and illustrate the tone of her voice.
We’re also commenting, and our role takes on different kinds of complexities, being there as a platform for [Jackson’s and Jones’s] thoughts and voices to exist.
You have a history of projects that let others tell their cultural stories and experiences, from the oral histories of Different Trains and Witness to working with composers and musicians from many different places and traditions around the globe. This one is more centered on one person, though.
It goes back a long way, and thinking how to present this on a Kronos album – not only the voice, but the personality, the force, just the being of Mahalia Jackson. [That] was what I felt would be a good thing to do. That really came into focus when right around the 50th anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech, Clarence Jones was on television and he recounted how the speech became the speech as we know it.
When he described that moment of hearing Mahalia Jackson, someone King relied on in moments of need, Clarence spoke of when she would sing to him on the phone. I mean, when you think of anybody in the universe, a leader like Martin Luther King Jr., a civil rights leader, a spiritual leader, and he’s getting sustenance from a musician!
So then the speech is happening and, from what I can gather, she wasn’t quite hearing what she needed to hear from her friend. And so she called out to him: “Tell them about the dream.” When I heard that story I thought, “Okay, I get it. Mahalia Jackson has defined to me the role of musicians, the musical community in our world.” It was so clear. And what we get to do as musicians is listen. We listen to our inner selves, we listen to our families and our friends and our society.
In this case, Mahalia Jackson used her musical ability and listened to Martin Luther King and then gave him feedback. “Come on. I’ve heard you do better.” Now, am I imagining this? I don’t know if I am. I don’t even care, because it kind of defined something for me about my own role and the role of Kronos and musicians. So at that moment I thought, “I need to get in touch with Clarence Jones.”
This project started a few years back, but it’s coming out as the U.S. celebrates its 250th birthday. How does that timing feel, especially with the current political and cultural climate?
We’re doing a triptych, “Three Bones,” that’s premiering at Carnegie Hall [on April 25]. Part one will [draw on] Indigenous cultures. Part two will be African American, particularly Gullah Geechee [of the Southeastern U.S.]. Part three will be Chinese and Chinese American.
I’d like to make an experience that brings these three essential elements of American society to the stage at Carnegie Hall as our contribution to the 250 years. It’s about listening. It is just growing from listening. That kind of gets back to Mahalia.
Back to the idea of a conversation, it seems like it’s not just with Jackson and Terkel, but with the nation, with the cultures and the experiences, and not a static situation from 60 years ago. Does it feel like your relationship with Mahalia, her music, and her mission is something living and evolving?
I am very happy when Kronos gets to play this music on a college campus and for audiences that maybe never heard Mahalia Jackson, never heard about her, [or heard] that an artist can have very powerful ideas about life and our society. [About] what’s good and what’s right, and can express them as beautifully as Mahalia Jackson and Studs Terkel and Clarence Jones. You put these leaders together and it’s very impressive. And I don’t think there’s an expiration date there.
Photo Credit: Lead image of Kronos Quartet by Lenny Gonzalez. Inset image of Mahalia Jackson by Lacey Crawford courtesy of the National Museum of African American History & Culture.
