By Larry Katz
JON BUTCHER has covered a lot of ground in his long career. A guitarist, singer, songwriter and producer best known as the leader of the hard-rocking Jon Butcher Axis, he’s spent much of the past 30 years creating music for television, movies and computer games while continuing to perform and record solo and band projects. His current endeavor may be his most unexpected: a collection of songs inspired by Mary Caldwell Dawson, an African American educator and opera singer. Butcher says this new music—which ranges from ballads to rap, jazz to gospel, rock to classical—is not a departure for him, but the next step in a lifelong musical journey.
“This is really the culmination of many such projects that I’ve done for film and television”, Butcher said, “things that gave me the skills to bring to ‘Songs for Mary.’ I did a score around 1989 that ended up airing on The Simpsons. That led to Star Trek and creating music for the HBO series Deadwood and a bunch of other things.”
“When I look at Songs for Mary, it’s like the end product of all of that other stuff that goes across genres, from R&B to jazz to symphonic orchestrations. For me, it’s all the same. It’s all music—and I love having a big palette.”
Butcher first heard about Mary Caldwell Dawson from Dawn Carroll, his collaborator on “Songs for Mary.” A designer as well as a songwriter, Carroll went from raising awareness and funds to preserve the dilapidated home of Dawson’s National Negro Opera Company in Pittsburgh to writing a musical theater piece to celebrate the accomplishments of Dawson and her famous acquaintances, among them Count Basie, Lena Horne, Cab Calloway and boxer Joe Lewis.
“Dawn introduced me to Mary Dawson, who I wasn’t aware of,” Butcher said. “The more I read about her life, the more intrigued I became to know her and to understand her. It’s one of those situations where the more you dig the more you find out you didn’t know. For instance. I had no idea that luminaries like Louis Armstrong and all these others passed through the doors of this house in one capacity or another. I was astonished. I didn’t know how important her work was at the time.”
As an aspiring opera singer, Dawson was frustrated by the lack of opportunities for African American classical artists. She decided to do something about it. From the 1940s until her death in 1962, her National Negro Opera Company offered training and presented concerts and operas
in different cities. Her headquarters also offered something special to African American artists and athletes: a safe haven and stimulating gathering place.
“As you read about Mary’s life and her struggle to become a classical musician,” Butcher said, “you start to realize what she was up against, which was quite a lot. As importantly, I came to understand how hard it was for musicians of that era to find a place to stay when they were coming into a town to work or play and that as much as anything made me appreciate the kind of sacrifice and the dedication of her life’s work. I’m very impressed by Mary Dawson. I’m very impressed by her willingness to sacrifice her energy, her time, her resources. It’s unusual. I have appreciation for her as an artist and as an activist. Any time you are breaking down barriers, any time that happens, that’s a kind of activism.”
Butcher and Carroll plan to release “Songs for Mary” later this year. They see it as the calling card for a projected musical theater production titled “If the Walls Could Talk”. More than a visit to the past, it will relate Dawson’s work, her opera company home and tales of the famous visitors who spent time there to the present day fight for racial justice and freedom around the world.
“I think that this body of music is powerful”, Butcher said. “I’m really proud of these compositions for ‘Songs for Mary.’ I think they’re strong melodically. Everybody who looks at themselves as a composer of music wants to write things that stand the test of time. You want to write a melody like “Yesterday” by Paul McCartney. That’s a melody that’s forever. That’s someone at the top of his game and I think that’s what we all aspire to—writing and composing music that is meaningful and stands the test of time. I’m hoping that some of the stuff that I wrote for ‘Songs from Mary’ does that.” Longtime fans who remember when the Bostonbased Jon Butcher Axis was featured on MTV in the early ‘80s will find some familiar touchstones on ‘Songs from Mary’, for example, Butcher’s wah-wah guitar on “Dearly Departed” and the funk-rocker “Crack the Bat”. But he expects listeners to be surprised too.
“I think surprise is the element that makes a musician relevant. That’s the one thing that has kept me Interested in someone like Paul Simon from the beginning to now. That’s the brilliance of that man. So that’s what I aspire to when I grow up,” the 60-something Butcher said with a laugh.
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