Upper Manahatta Musical Suite: A Literary Tour of Washington Heights
I am honored to be the winner of the Second Annual Jazz WaHi Composition Competition. As a result, I was commissioned to write a new work to be presented at the Washington Heights Jazz Festival. Below are program notes on each movement of this five-part work, which draws inspiration from books set in or around Washington Heights, a vibrant neighborhood just north of Harlem in New York City. Many thanks to Mark Kross and Louise Rogers for this opportunity!
I. Fuku
Inspired by a magical curse called a fuku that lies at the heart of Junot Diaz’s modern masterpiece, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, this uptempo minor blues includes a score indication of “sinister reggaeton.” The music contains battles between good and evil, angular rhythms, and plenty of humor—hallmarks of Diaz’s writing. While set primarily in nearby Paterson, New Jersey, the narrator reports living in Washington Heights, and the protagonist, Oscar, is the son of Dominican immigrants and spends some time in our great neighborhood.
II. Hymn for the Lenape
The Lenape tribe that called Manhattan and the surrounding area home for thousands of years named the island—of which Washington Heights is the highest natural point—Manahatta, from which this suite takes its name. As I learned from Rob Snyder’s masterful public history of Washington Heights, Crossing Broadway, the Lenape in Manhattan were known as the Munsee. Manahatta can be translated approximately to “a place to gather wood for making bows,” as in bows and arrows. The Lenape are still among us, though most have been forced far west of New York and New Jersey. This piece solemnly honors their homeland, civilization, and humanity. I invite you to imagine traveling south on the Hudson River (formerly the Muh-he-kun-ne-tuk ("river that flows two ways" or "waters that are never still") or Mahicannittuk) and observing the high embankments of the Palisades to your right, and the tall forests of Washington Heights on your left. Pre-1600: no city sounds or industry, just the music of the water and the wind and life.
III. Little Red Lighthouse
On this piece we welcome my sister-in-law, the brilliant and talented Allison Benko, a theater-maker, director, and writer. Allison will narrate portions of the children’s book The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Grey Bridge by Hildegarde H. Swift (and illustrated by Lynd Ward), accompanied by my music. The book contains lessons for children of all ages, and I’ve portrayed the emotional journey of our hero—the red lighthouse, which still stands at the base of the George Washington Bridge (GWB) in Washington Heights—through a range of grooves, melodies, and orchestrations. If you look out the window from Le Cheile, where we premiere this work, you might catch a glimpse of Red’s big brother, the GWB.
IV. Soledad
Angie Cruz’s beautiful debut novel, Soledad (which means “loneliness” in Spanish), tells the story of the titular character, a young woman from Washington Heights who has returned home after going far, far away to college—all the way to the Cooper Union in lower Manhattan. She’s back home to care for her mother, who has gone silent and catatonic, for reasons not entirely clear. Soledad is Dominican-American, raised in Washington Heights. In a poignant scene towards the end of the book (semi-spoiler alert!), she travels with her aunt and mother back to a remote part of the DR in order to perform a ritual that will hopefully rid her mother of the curse that has come to haunt the whole family. The book is a poignant meditation on family, tradition, and home, with shifting narrative perspectives and a healthy dose of magical realism.
V. Highbridge Pool
This piece was inspired by segments of Robert W. Snyder’s brilliant Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York City. It was also inspired by my own visit and walk around Highbridge Pool earlier this year. Dr. Snyder, an Emeritus Professor of Journalism and American Studies at Rutgers, is my neighbor, though I didn’t meet him until after reading his book and composing this piece. He writes that in Washington Heights, while geography is critical, it is not destiny. Throughout the 20th century in particular, dozens of ethnic groups, races, and classes have called our neighborhood home, with abundant creativity, community, and conflict. The Highbridge Pool—a New Deal Public Works project during the LaGuardia mayoralty—has been a meeting place for Washington Heights residents of all colors and creeds, but not without violence and struggle. Indeed, public pools across the country were centers of urban conflict around racial segregation during the mid-20th century. During the 1950s, in an early example of the gang violence that would plague Washington Heights from the 1970s through the 1990s, a young white gang member is killed by members of a rival gang—one that is largely (but not exclusively) Black and Hispanic. The subsequent refusal of the city, courts, and media ecosystem to acknowledge this tragedy’s roots in racial inequity and resentment leads to possible miscarriages of justice, and certainly to missed opportunities for genuine healing.
Jason Yeager Septet:
Jason Yeager - piano, compositions, arrangements
Riley Mulherkar - trumpet, flugelhorn
Patrick Laslie - tenor saxophone, flute, bass clarinet
Mike Fahie - trombone
Yuhan Su - vibraphone
Danny Weller - bass
Jay Sawyer - drums
Allison Benko - narrator on Little Red Lighthouse