Bernadette Speach and Thulani Davis

The opera The Little Rock Nine, a collaboration with librettist Thulani Davis, tells the story of nine students, ages 14 and 15, who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957-58, forcing President Dwight D. Eisenhower to order U.S. troops of the 101st Airborne to protect them. In what has become her signature melding of musical styles, Speach bares the raw emotion of a pinnacle moment in U.S. history.

The Little Rock Nine reunites Speach with Davis, a Grammy Award winner for liner notes, and librettist, playwright, journalist, novelist, poet and screenwriter. Together, the pair redefined the art of poetry and music fusion. With such efforts as Telepathy Suite (1986-87), Baobab 4 (1994), Woman Without Adornment (1995), Passages and Outtakes (2000) and Meditations: Abandon All Hope of Fruition (2004), among others, Speach’s post-minimalistic jazz punctuates Davis’ considerable literary depth.

Kyle Gann of The Voice said of their collaborations: "Speach and Davis have created a snug fit still loose enough to allow for the spontaneity of Davis's reading. And over the years their collaborations have shown how flexible and fertile their self-made genre can be. And all through the whole series, Speach’s delicate postminimal jazz and Davis’s warmly idiosyncratic inflections infuse the genre with subtle shades of color that could have come from no one else.”

The composer notes: Our collaboration began in 1987 with Telepathy: Poetry/Music Suite which is composed of three poems: “Contessas & Cardsharks,” “Telepathy,” and “Boppin’ is safer than grindin.’” This collaboration is an exploration of the interaction between spoken poetry and its musical expansions. The instrumental make-up of the ensemble – reciter, contrabass, trombone, alto saxophone, piano, and guitar, was chosen based on the timbre of Thulani’s voice. It was premiered on March 8, 1987, Celebrate Brooklyn Festival, Prospect Park Picnic House, Brooklyn, NY, and recorded on Without Borders - Mode Records 16.

"The music, all thoroughly grounded in jazz, is muscular without being obtrusive, flowing and loose in a way that conjures memories of the old beat cafes. Speach allows the special qualities of each instrument to relate directly back to the most marvelous of all instruments - the human voice. The overall effect is intensely magnetic." - Tom Wachunas, The Phoenix

Over the years we collaborated using a wide variety of texts.

Baobab 4, a setting of Thulani’s poetry from her travels to Senegal, is composed of four poems:”Baobab,” “synchrosystem,” “a man’s tailor,” and “Leaving Goree.” This work was written for flute, clarinet, alto saxophone, trombone, acoustic and electric guitar, contrabass, two pianos, balafon, reciter, three women's voices and dancer. It was premiered on April 9, 1994 at P.S. 122, NYC. It was commissioned by MusicVistas, Inc. with funds provided by the New York State Council on the Arts.

Woman without Adornment is the fifth collaboration between Thulani Davis and myself. The text was taken from her novel 1959. These passages deal with the mother of the story. As we proceeded with these settings we realized how much our mothers had in common. At the end of each of seven sections of the suite, Thulani, who is the reciter within the ensemble, adds comments or reflections as well.

Woman without Adornment for chamber ensemble: mezzo soprano, reciter, piano, guitars and contrabass, was premiered on March 29, 1995 at The Kitchen, NYC, and recorded on Reflections – Mode Records 105.
Woman without Adornment for reciter and piano was premiered on December 21, 2004 at Clark Theatre, Lincoln Center, NYC.

In the following years our collaborations were drawn from Thulani’s written journey in Buddhism.

These include: Meditation: Abandon All Hope of Fruition, for Reciter and Piano, April 21, 2004, performed at Pen & Brush, NYC, and Passages and Outtakes for Chamber Ensemble was premiered on , April 29, 2000 at Roulette, NYC, among others.

Complete list of collaborations between Bernadette Speach and Thulani Davis.

Thulani Davis is an interdisciplinary artist and a professor and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of two recent works, a volume of selected poems, Nothin’ but the Music, released by Blank Forms Editions in December 2020 and the historical study: The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom, published by Duke University Press. Davis is the author of eight other books, a dozen theater works, and has had a long career in journalism.

She is well known as the librettist of three produced operas: Anthony Davis’ award-winning X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, (1986), Davis’s Amistad, An Opera, (1997), and Anne LeBaron’s The E. & O. Line (1989). Her fourth opera, The Little Rock Nine (2017) is in progress with Bernadette Speach, along with Greenwood 1921, with Anthony Davis. She has collaborated on ten scored spoken-word works (mostly with Speach), six recordings, and a musical The Sojourner Washing Society (2014), scored by Steven Robinson. She was the first woman to win a Grammy for liner notes (for Aretha Franklin), and the recording of X was a Grammy nominee.

Schanzer/Speach Duo

The Schanzer/Speach Duo consists of Jeffrey Schanzer, composer/guitarist and Bernadette Speach, composer/pianist. Their collaborative works combine the intuition and spontaneity of improvisation with the structure of formal composition. The Duo had its premiere performance in October 1986 at Experimental Intermedia Foundation, New York City. Since that time, they have performed in New York at Roulette, St. Ann's Church, the Knitting Factory, The Stone and Dia Center for the Arts, and in Newark, Hartford, Buffalo, Chicago, Boulder, San Francisco, Seattle, Puerto Rico, Gent and Liege, Belgium, and Cologne and Herne, Germany. Dualities, the Duo's first CD, was released on the Mode/Avant label in January 1992 and was picked as one of the top 10 recordings of 1992 by Robert Hicks in Jazziz magazine. The Duo has had works written for it by Lester Bowie, Kitty Brazelton, Michael Colquhoun, Fred Ho, Joseph Jarman, Oliver Lake, Tania León, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Betsy McClelland, William Ortiz, Wadada Leo Smith and Steven Swartz. Artists who have performed with the Duo include Lester Bowie, Thomas Buckner, Michael Colquhoun, Barbara Held, Joseph Jarman, Oliver Lake, Joelle Leandre, Fred Ho, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Myra Melford, David Pleasant, Bobby Previte, Alva Rogers, Ned Rothenberg, Wadada Leo Smith, Libby Van Cleve and Jack Vees.

In addition to his work with the Duo, Jeffrey Schanzer appears with his group, The Jeffrey Schanzer Ensemble, which has brought together musicians such as Leroy Jenkins, Bobby Previte and Ned Rothenberg. His No More In Thrall, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald where his father was a prisoner, performed by the Sirius String Quartet with percussionist Kevin Norton, was released on the Composers Recording Inc. (CRI) label. Jeffrey also appears as a sideman on Leroy Jenkins’ and Joseph Jarman’s Out of the Mist on Ocean Records. His playing was noted as one of the highlights of the session in Billboard magazine’s review of the CD. Bernadette Speach's activities as a composer have included performances of Within, for piano and orchestra, by Ursula Oppens and the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and Les Ondes pour Quartre, premiered by the Arditti String Quartet in Darmstadt, Germany. In and Out of Love – after Liaisons and Send in the Clowns from A Little Night Music, was premiered by Anthony de Mare, pianist and Artistic Director of “Liaisons: Re-imagining Sondheim from the Piano,” at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, which commissioned the work. It received its New York City premiere on March 9, 2013 at Symphony Space. The complete 3 CD set of the “Liaisons” project was released in September 2015 on the ECM to critical acclaim and received a Grammy award. Most recently Embrace the Universe (2001) for Orchestra, Chorus (SATB) and soloists: Mezzo-Soprano, Viola, Piano, with text: "Hymn to Matter" from The Divine Milieu by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was premiered on May 9, 2016, Teatro Petruzzelli, Bari, Italy. A selection of her works appears on the CDs Without Borders and Reflections on the Mode label.

"They're from different worlds - improvising guitarist Jeffrey Schanzer devours various world traditions, pianist Bernadette Speach notates her quasipostnotreallyminimalist tone poems. But their sensibilities match, their talents are complementary.... they've arrived at one of the most intelligent solutions to the composition-improv interface." - Kyle Gann, The Village Voice

"... composers who draw on a healthy variety of musical influences." - Allan Kozinn, The New York Times

"They tend to sound rather like an updated, freely improvising extension of jazz piano great Lennie Tristano and his guitar partner Billy Bauer, without Tristano's odd intensity -- though much of their work, such as the intriguing 'Blue' is, as one critic noted, to the jazz tradition what Stravinsky's Ragtime is to ragtime.... The post modern oppositions in their music -- consonance in dissonance, the harmonic movement of Debussy or Messiaen, Jim Hall or Derek Baily -- at best sustain tension and movement without nervosity. ... the innate attractiveness of this pair's music is as relevant to the present age as the violent sound of their highly amplified contemporaries." - John Litweiler, The Reader (Chicago)

"Silence is the third partner in this zen-delicate collaboration .... Whether it's the ruminative, suspended tonality of "Two in the Morning" or more frantic, post-serial workouts like "3-½" and "It's Your Turn," the chemistry between them is immediate and forceful." - Bill Millkowski, Jazz Times

"I don't doubt at all that this disc [Dualities] succeeds in seducing the general public to its intimate ambience." - Jazz in Time (Belgium)

Complete list of improvisations for piano and guitar conceived and performed by the Schanzer/Speach Duo.