Word: thulani
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...black women, Aretha is the voice that made all the unsaid sayable, powerful and lyrical," the writer Thulani Davis once observed. "She was just more rockin', more earnest, just plain more down front than the divas of jazz...Aretha let her raggedy edges show, which meant she could be trusted with ours...
MUSIC Composer Anthony Davis comes from a talented family: his brother Christopher is a gifted actor and his cousin Thulani an accomplished poet. Davis recalls that at Yale he encountered an essay by Nietzsche extolling opera as a reflection of a people's cultural identity. "I thought that a truly American opera would be based on African-American music," says Davis. That is precisely what he accomplished in his powerful and biting 1984 work X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X (with libretto by cousin Thulani), a fierce, modernist, free-tonal piece that employs elements of jazz, blues...
LIBRETTIST: THULANI DAVIS...
...years. In between came the faux noir of Porgy and Bess, which is really a Russian grand opera in blackface (the choral scenes are closer to Rimsky-Korsakov or Mussorgsky than they are to anything Catfish Row ever heard). With a fierce, angry and brilliant libretto by Thulani Davis, the composer's cousin, X is at once a musical entertainment, a folk epic, a cautionary tale and a cri de coeur...