WWGR: ‘Jubilee’ has world premiere at Seattle Opera

McCaw Hall will soon be filled with the sounds of gospel music. The General Director of Seattle Opera is staging it here for the first time anywhere.

“Jubilee” tells the story of the renowned Jubilee Fisk University Singers, a historically black college in Nashville, through song.

KIRO 7 introduces the man who turned his nearly lifelong obsession with the Jubilee singers into an opera.

They were called slave songs then Negro spirituals now gospel music that sprang from the capture, bondage, and forced labor of Africans in America.

But it was music that was wholly foreign to Tazewell Thompson. He was a child when his parents were declared unfit and he was removed from his New York City home.

“I ended up in the convent at Saint Dominic’s In Upstate New York,” said Thompson.

The convent acted as an orphanage run by the Catholic Sisters of Saint Dominic, his mothers, he likes to tell his friends.

“They said, ‘Well, how come you have so many mothers?’” he said, smiling. “Because I was lucky. Those women saved my life.”

They also taught him to sing the music of their mostly European roots.

“You name an Irish song, I can sing it for you,” he said.

What he could not sing, indeed had never heard, were spirituals. That is, until his beloved Sister Benvenuto introduced them.

“And she said, ‘You will find,’ and I remember this phrase, ‘Negro spirituals are the blueprint and the scaffold and the spine and also the heart and soul of gospel and blues and jazz,’” Thompson said. “This, coming from a nun.”

By then he was a teenager.

But that began his determination to tell the story of the Jubilee Fisk University singers. The acappella group was formed in 1871 to raise money to save the historically black college and to spread, well, the gospel of African-American excellence.

In 2019, Thompson’s acappella musical premiered on stage in the other Washington.

Then Thompson shopped it around again. This time Seattle Opera’s general director signed on but only as an opera.

“I never even thought of it as an opera,” Thompson said. “I thought of it first as a book. And then because I received a commission and it was always going to be ‘Jubilee, the acappella musical.’ But now it’s ‘Jubilee, the opera.’ And it’s because of Christina Sheppelmann.”

This opera does have some dialogue. So, Thompson tapped an original cast member.

“Professionally, I am an actor; I am a teacher of theatre; I am an acting coach,” says Lisa Arrindell.

She never says an ‘opera singer.’ “Never,” she declares. “That isn’t what I am.”

The veteran actor’s job then, to bring the words to vivid life.

“He opens with director’s notes,” says Arrindell. “And Tazewell says 12 of these singers must be extraordinary at singing. And one of them must be able to carry a tune and be an extraordinary storyteller. Because she must become several characters in order to tell the story of the Jubilee singers, the Fisk Jubilee Singers.”

Thompson was asked what the audience will see with ‘Jubilee,’ the opera?

“They will see the the struggles, the hardship, the celebration, the joy, the grief, the courageousness, the determination of the Fisk Jubilee Singers.,” he said. “And it started from this wonderful nun.

Perhaps, then, a gift, from on high.

Jubilee, the Opera, opens at McCaw Hall on October 12th and runs for eight shows.

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