By Michael Anthony Star Tribune Staff Writer

One of the brighter news items in the music world last month was a set of performances in Detroit and Ann Arbor, Mich., of “De Organizer," a one-act opera by jazz pianist and composer James P. Johnson, the score of which had been lost for nearly 60 years.

A quintet billed as Butch Thompson and Friends played a number from the opera in a concert Sunday afternoon at the St. Anthony Park United Church of Christ in St. Paul as part of the popular Music in the Park Series, a chamber-music series that sometimes devotes itself to jazz. The title of the tune, “Hungry Blues," suggests the story of the opera, which concerns a group of sharecroppers who form a union.

The concert, given twice Sunday, was devoted to the music of Johnson and his pupil, Thomas (Fats) Waller, both of whom were accomplished pianists and prolific songwriters. Johnson, who died in 1955 at age 61, tried his hand at concert music, too. Thompson and cellist Laura Sewell played the second movement of Johnson's “Jassamine" Concerto, a work for piano and orchestra from 1934 that offers as contrasting elements a rich nostalgic tune and an up-tempo section, both of which are combined at the end.

Waller, on the other hand, seems to have had fewer aspirations toward concert music and the mantle of respectability that many jazz composers of that era thought — for better or for worse — went along with it. Waller's relatively early death at 39, in 1943, leaves us in the dark as to the full extent of his compositional skills. However, his “London Suite," six piano pieces he recorded in England in 1939, skillfully arranged by Thompson for cello and piano, displays a new tone, a wistful quality, that suggests a new direction in Waller's writing in his last years.

The rest of this high-spirited, deftly played program consisted of more familiar pieces by Johnson and Waller, both up-tempo numbers and ballads, for which Thompson, acting as host and pianist, collaborated with three longtime colleagues: drummer Hal Smith from San Diego, bassist Bill Evans of St. Paul and the much-respected young New Orleans trumpeter Duke Heitger. Heitger's spare, vigorous style and rich, resonant top notes recall Louis Armstrong, who practically invented the jazz trumpet vocabulary. But Heitger has his own sound, and his use of mutes, in an especially lovely “Old Fashioned Love," brought out a vocal quality in his soloing.

Thompson has assimilated the Johnson and Waller styles so thoroughly and plays with such nimble grace that the music seems current, rather than nostalgic. He has come up with something that might be new in the world of early jazz: the use of cello as a source of countermelody and harmonic support. (He writes out the parts for Sewell.) Surely Waller and Johnson would have liked that extra voice.
—Mike Anthony is at: manthony@startribune.com.