Courtney Bryan on Piano: Songs of Laughing, Smiling, and Crying

Hermine Pinson and Courtney Bryan

Photograph by A. H. Jerriod Avant © 2014

The occasion is a tribute to the legendary artist, educator, critic, and historian Samella Lewis, and we have come to the last item on the formal program. In the Performing Arts Studio of Emory University, Courtney Bryan, pianist, composer, Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University, and happily, a New Orleanian like Dr. Lewis, has come to play in honor of Lewis’s life and work. Bryan sits at the Steinway grand piano, hands poised over the keys, then begins Songs of Laughing, Smiling, and Crying. Within her easy reach is a computer programmed to play pre-recorded music, which, in a sense, she ultimately recreates through her practice of orchestration, improvisation, and synthesis. A word before the performance begins. As befitting her New Orleans roots, Bryan surprises, confounds, and conjures. For example, she sets the revered spiritual “Wade in the Water” to a salsa tempo, or explores the jazz undertones of “Steal Away” (both are on her This Little Light of Mine CD), or through her own powers of composition, arrangement, and improvisation synthesizes a selection of songs, sounds, and voices unrelated by temporality, style, in search of “a diverse body of music united on the theme of human emotions.”

First, you hear the fluty introduction to “Put on a Happy Face,” the appealing song composed by Lee Adams and Charles Strouse and originally appearing in Bye Bye Birdie. The song harks back to 1960 when segregation in the United States was an insidious American institution forced to acknowledge if not yet completely yield to the vigorous Civil Rights campaign led by black people on all fronts, from the SNCC, SCLC, NAACP, CORE, and an allied American populace no longer willing to “put on a happy face” in the face of racism. Elvis Presley was popular, because the Beatles and Stones were still in the UK listening to Chuck Berry and rockabilly, but I digress.

Defined by Courtney’s smooth accompaniment, the mood shifts to a less jaunty pace, and the song becomes more thoughtful. A male voice sings the lyrics of the song, reminiscent of its earlier rendition, and Bryan’s piano here sounds like stride piano. Before everyone filed in for the tribute to Samella Lewis, Bryan rehearsed the composition, and Charles Rowell, master of ceremonies, strolled into the performance space right on beat, affecting the pose of a seasoned New Orleanian second-liner. Just then a horn sounding a lot like Louis Armstrong’s takes to the air, and I do a little jig siting right in my seat, nearly forgetting that Courtney and I will perform after her unveiling of her masterpiece, but that’s another story.

The music cuts to “I’ll Never Smile Again” which features a young, skinny Frank Sinatra fronting Tommy Dorsey’s Orchestra circa 1940. You’re listening right along, but then there’s a kind of a temporal snag; the music repeats, shifting to a circus tune. The shift is amplified by canned laughter that creeps in, and you hear character actor Ed Wynn’s chuckly tenor laughing, laughing; the music becomes more insistent, the tempo speeds up, the voices sound more deranged. The piano amplifies the repeated voice distortions, evoking a surreal atmosphere, now juxtaposed to the scatological claims of a rapper, now to the repetition of a short phrase and there’s Ed Wynn again, the “perfect fool” whose outlandish costumes adorned the Zeigfield follies and later Disney productions. He’s saying, “Oh my God!” By this time the piano is thundering in the lower registers, rolling sounds like the visitation of chaos in a God-like aural scripture.

All the while Courtney Bryan is master of this musical drama, guiding you through this sonic terrain and inviting you to look beneath the surface of things to the rumbling thunder of what? Chaos? Judgment? Bryan has said it’s an exercise in the gamut of human emotion, ne plus ultra! In an interview...