Music: Up From The Underground

It's the slurs that are bothering Anthony Davis. Not racial cracks or snooty disparagement -- not those slurs at all. No, the slurs that have drawn his ire are the little hemispheres that composers write over groups of notes to indicate a phrase. Musical slurs. Value-free slurs. And, insists Davis, they are all wrong.

"No!" Davis exclaims, sitting in an empty Midwestern concert hall listening to the first rehearsal of his new Violin Concerto by the Kansas City Symphony. "I know I wrote slurs over those eighth notes, but they're all jumbled together. They sound like mush." Davis jumps up and heads toward the conductor, score in hand. "We need to hear each one separately," he says. "Dig-a-da-dum!" he scats, his right hand punching the air in emphasis. All at once, something that had been mumbled turns articulate as the strings bite into their parts.

"Sometimes I forget when I'm notating that not everybody hears the music the way I do," says Davis, 37. But hearing it they are these days, and cheering it as well. The Manhattan-based composer is enjoying acclaim for the recent premieres of his two latest works: the concerto, subtitled Maps, performed in Kansas City, and Notes from the Underground, an orchestral piece, in New York City. Two seasons ago, his powerful first opera, X (The Life and Times of Malcolm X), caused a sensation at the New York City Opera, and Davis is now at work on a science-fiction opera called Under the Double Moon (with a libretto by his wife Deborah Atherton), scheduled for production in St. Louis next year. A brilliant pianist, Davis tours regularly with Episteme, his crack avant-garde jazz ensemble.

He would, in other words, seem to embody the notion of a crossover artist. With his jazz background, he calls up visions of the Third Stream, that brief confluence of jazz and classical music long thought dried up. In works like Black, Brown and Beige, Duke Ellington bravely but cautiously ventured across the border that separates the big band from the orchestra; playing with the Modern Jazz Quartet, Pianist John Lewis pushed out the frontiers of his art while still remaining within its bounds. Now Davis, the New Jersey-born, Yale- educated son of a college professor, has gone a step further. Bright, articulate and accomplished, he is an important young American composer who happens to be -- a jazzman.

As such, he represents one of the salient trends in modern American music, the fusion of the pop vernacular with the mainstream classical tradition. He is not alone: Rock Musician Glenn Branca writes raucous symphonies for electric guitars, and the Chinese-American Lucia Hwong brings a cross-cultural sensibility to bear on her wistful New Age musings. But although Davis' orchestral music may contain improvisatory sections reminiscent of jazz, it is carefully controlled and expertly planned. Imagine Ellington's lush, massed sonorities propelled by Bartok's vigorous whiplash rhythms and overlaid with the seductive percussive haze of the Balinese gamelan orchestra, and you will have an idea of what both the Concerto and Notes from the Underground sound like.