Hitting all notes
Pioneering Black cartoonist started in Chicago, switched careers and won a National Book Award — the many sides of Charles Johnson
Charles Johnson has one of those careers, you know the kind, the ones where you start out at the Chicago Tribune as a political cartoonist, turn Buddhist and philosopher, make a huge splash as a novelist, win the National Book Award, grow so revered that literary societies are founded in your name, host a national PBS show for a decade, land a MacArthur “genius” grant, receive early tenure, have your face put on a stamp, publish collections of comics, children books and compilations of your wisdom, get inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, donate your papers to a university, become routinely included in literary canons and have your drawings shown by major museums.
That kind of career.
And yet — hmmm, wait, who’s Charles Johnson again?
If the name sounds familiar, the name is common, but only one Charles Johnson is from Evanston and had a PBS series while still in college, and became a Buddhist at 14, then an accomplished martial-arts instructor, then had the 25th anniversary edition of his National Book Award-winning novel “Middle Passage” reissued with an introduction by the preeminent cultural critic Stanley Crouch, then himself wrote the introduction to the 2021 edition of Ralph Ellison’s “Juneteenth” — that Charles Johnsonisunclassifiable.
So much so, 30 years after the Baltimore Sun wrote that Johnson was “hot, hot, hot,” he’s remained both venerated within the literary world and obscure to everyone else.
He’s 73 now and retired from University of Washington in Seattle, where he taught English for more than four decades. He’s also, of course, being that Charles Johnson, not finished: He just donated his archives to Washington University in St. Louis; he guest edited a new Black fiction anthology for Chicago Quarterly Review; Penguin included him in a canonical collection of modern American short stories (alongside Chicagoan
Stuart Dybek); and if you go to the Museum of Contemporary Art’s new “Chicago Comics” exhibit, his comics are among the first things you see. He also wrote the introduction to a companion book for the MCA show, an anthology of Black Chicago cartoonists. Of course, the title, “It’s Life As I See It,” is taken from a Johnson comic.
In fact, despite decades of accomplishments and honors since Johnson got his professional start drawing illustrations for a Chicago magic company, he never quite left comics. He even has a new graphic novel in January, and rather than allow the MCA to simply display a handful of his old works, he redrew most of his pieces shown in the exhibit, tidying up ancient single-panel gag comics that he first made when he was 21.
Johnson slowed down the other day, just long enough to talk on the phone.
of great trial,” Dunn says. “We focus so much on the trauma of what happened to these people in their last moments, so instead we’re celebrating the lives that they lived.”
For the Harris performance, streaming free until Aug. 27, a three-piece band joins a string orchestra culled from the ranks of the Philharmonic; for the live album recorded at Chicago Temple last February, Dunn’s Rize Orchestra — an ensemble uniting Black professional and student musicians and focusing on the music of living Black composers — plays the instrumentals.
“If you’re a Black player in undergrad or graduate studies, you automatically have a spot in this orchestra and get mentored by older Black musicians,” Dunn says. “With both Rize and the Adrian Dunn Singers, the ‘why’ is at the forefront. I think audiences want to see organizations that are connected to something bigger than the hall they’re performing in.”
Dunn knows that “why” is crucial, because it’s something classical music scarcely offered him. A self-described “weird Black gay kid from Cleveland who loved Tchaikovsky more than anything,” Dunn fell hard for classical music after singing the Vivaldi “Gloria” with his middle school choir. But never once over the course of his music education — from grade school all the way through his two performance degrees, plus additional opera study at the Sibelius Academy in Finland — did he have a Black teacher. And gigging as a classically trained tenor was demoralizing in its own right.
“I saw the writing on the wall when I was 19 years old. Like, ‘I cannot walk in spaces like this every day and see nothing but seas of white people.’ I personally didn’t have the social capacity,” he says.
As Dunn saw it, he had to do one of two things: “change the game, or play a different game” altogether. He’s done both ever since. Through his streaming service Black Music Experience,
Dunn has cataloged performances by Black musicians (including a few by local chamber music initiative D-Composed), roundtables, and his many projects with the Singers — like last December’s “Black Messiah,” a genre-melding counter to Handel’s original. Dunn now works at his alma mater, Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of the Performing Arts, as its racial equity adviser; while still a student there, he started the Legacy Black Music Project, which promoted music by Black composers and successfully agitated for the hiring of more faculty members of color. That in turn became an incubator for “Hopera,” his first opera. (Dunn is currently working on his second, “Black Bohème,” and a choral-orchestral work “Emancipation,” which Dunn says is inspired by “Black sacred texts” by the likes of Audre Lorde, James Baldwin and Tupac.)
“Hopera” was a launching pad for “Redemption” in two respects. First of all, it introduced Dunn to Norris, a kindred spirit who also founded his own Black music-focused orchestra (the South Side Symphony in Los Angeles); the two then collaborated on orchestral expansions of Dunn’s prior a cappella arrangements to create “Redemption.” Second, it began Dunn’s career-long fusion of classical idioms with Black musical traditions — in this case hip hop — “on our own terms.” You can draw a direct line from “Hopera” to moments like the orchestral prelude to “Redemption’s” “Wade in the Water,” when the strings cut off completely then enter with driving pizzicatos — a thrilling beat drop that almost always elicits appreciative hoots from the Adrian Dunn Singers in live performance.
“No matter what the genre or style we’re singing at that moment, (I tell the singers) if you feel like raising your hand, raise your hand. If you feel like moving, move,” Dunn says. “I say all the time that classical music does a good job of separating Blackness from Black music. When we present Black work, why does everything have to feel like we’re doing Beethoven?”
Another thing classical music (or, more accurately, classical music institutions) does a good job of separating from the music? Any hint of provocation. The 36-year-old Dunn says his retooling of the spirituals and gospel songs in “Redemption” is rooted in a millennial perspective — one which rejects apoliticization and is more willing to call anti-Black violence what it is inside the concert hall. “Redemption” sometimes even stretches the songs themselves to emphasize that vantage point. For example, Dunn altered the refrain of the spiritual “I Open My Mouth to the Lord,” dedicated here to both Eric Garner and George Floyd, from “... and I won’t turn back” to the more decisive “I’ll never turn back.” He also cut out the lyrics “I will go / I shall go / To see what the end’s going to be” — because, as far as Dunn is concerned, Garner and Floyd never got to see that end.
“I still stand on the shoulders of the original writers — the Moses Hogans and the Thomas Dorseys. But in this generation, this is the part that’s got to be highlighted,” Dunn says. “The way I see that same story might be very different than the way previous generations have seen it, and that’s OK. There’s room for both.”
“I hope that ‘Redemption’ ends up being a part of a new canon, if you will, of Black work that represents another generational perspective, one that says that we’re gonna do what’s right. And even if we don’t get it right, we’re gonna try. This is the hill to die on as far as I’m concerned.”
“Redemption” streams until Aug. 27. Marcus Norris’s “Glory,” featuring violinist Njioma Grevious, is also featured. Watch at virtualstage.harristheaterchicago.org.