Da Camera sets the stage for new season
Two shows remain in its current season, but Da Camera — the Houston-based chamber music and jazz organization — has announced its 2022/23 season. Performances taking place during the season will represent music with a global and hyper-local perspective. Among those with close ties will be “Unearthed,” a world premiere of a new work by Kendrick Scott. A Houston native and graduate of the High School for the Performing and Visual
Arts, Scott became a first-call jazz drummer, appearing on numerous sessions while also cultivating his own career as a bandleader.
Scott’s new work is informed by the “Sugar Land 95,” whose remains were unearthed in 2018 when groundbreaking began for Fort Bend ISD’s James Reese Career and Technical Center. Those found were inmates at the Bullhead Convict Labor Camp and part of a Texas program that leased prisoners to a local plantation for cheap labor in the years following the Civil War.
Da Camera artistic director Sarah Rothenberg typically sets a theme for a season. The upcoming season touches on a theme of memory, into which Scott’s work fits.
“There’s nothing that you could consider more forgotten than people found in unmarked graves,” Rothenberg says. “We still don’t have names for these people.”
Scott came to Rothenberg with the idea when news of the discovery broke. “There’s something about a terrible story like this, you can do a documentary or read about it in the newspaper,” Rothenberg says. “But having someone like Kendrick create an artistic work brings a very direct emotional power to an audience, some of which may not know anything about the convict leasing system that went on in places like Sugar Land.”
Scott’s premiere will be an expansive piece that includes the Harlem String Quartet, his jazz quartet (that includes another Houstonian in saxophonist Walter Smith III), as well as two other locals: poet Deborah Mouton and artist Robert Hodge.
Other jazz performers included in the upcoming season include Branford Marsalis, Miguel Zenón, Cécile McLorin Salvant and Christian McBride. The two-day Summerjazz event will return in August with performances by Jazzmeia Horn, Pedrito Martínez and Joshua Redman.
On the chamber music side, music and poetry will nestle together thanks to a collaboration between Da Camera and Inprint, the Houston-based literary arts organization. “True Life: A Celebration of Poet Adam Zagajewski” honors an internationally renowned Polish poet who died last year. Zagajewski for years taught in the poetry in the creative writing program at the University of Houston.
Rothenberg will play piano along with cellist Sonia WiederAtherton
at the event. She says the show will be “mostly short musical works interweaved with Adam’s poetry, which includes a wonderful new book — so it’s not just remembering but also discovering.”
Two takes on Bach illustrate the breadth of Da Camera’s programming. Pianist Jeremy Denk will finally bring a pandemic-delayed performance of “The Well-Tempered Clavier” here, while Bach’s work will receive a bracing new set of arrangements by the baroque ensemble Ruckus who will be joined by flutist Emi Ferguson for “Fly the Coop: Music of J.S. Bach.” Rothenberg calls the ensemble “innovative and dynamic,” and says they help show connections between baroque music and jazz.
Other chamber music series performers include Emanuel Ax, the Juilliard String Quartet, the Ensemble Intercontemporain (making its Texas debut) and the Tetzlaff-Tetzlaff-Vogt Trio.
Rothenberg is particularly excited about a performance by the Silk Road Ensemble of a work it commissioned: Osvaldo Golijov’s “Falling Out of Time,” which she calls “a fantastic work that draws from music from so many geographical areas and heritages.”
Season ticket packages are on sale. For tickets and venues visit dacamera.com.
Houston Summerjazz (all three shows at the Wortham Theater Center):
Jazzmeia Horn, Aug. 19; Pedrito Martínez Group, Aug. 20; Joshua Redman, Aug. 20
Da Camera 2022/23 season:
Gil Shaham with Akira Eguchi, Oct. 14; Jeremy Denk, Oct. 17-18; Branford Marsalis Quartet, Nov. 4; Michael Harrison’s “Revelation Music for Just Intonation,” Nov. 5; Meta4, Nov. 14-15; Sullivan Fortner, Dec. 5-6; Juilliard String Quartet, Jan. 13, 2023; Miguel Zenón Quartet, Jan. 21; Cécile McLorin Salvant, Feb. 10; Ruckus with Emi Ferguson, Feb. 18; “True Life: A Celebration of Poet Adam Zagajewski,” Feb. 27; Sonia WiederAtherton and Sarah Rothenberg, Feb. 28; Christian
McBride and New Jawn, March 3; Ensemble Intercontemporain with Matthias Pintscher, March 23; Tetzlaff-Tetzlaff-Vogt Trio, March 30; Osvaldo Golijov, “Falling Out of Time,” April 15-16; Emanuel Ax, April 22, Kendrick Scott, “Unearthed,” May 12