Anwen on choirography

It all started on a night out. Good ideas do. Our Jack, late beloved friend; and Oli, who conducts us now; and me, at a short-lived cinema-slash-bar beneath the arches of Central station. We went to watch a film about the life of Arthur Russell, a film I’d seen before, and as his song ‘That’s Us / Wild Combination’ played over the credits, I said to Oli, “You should arrange this for the choir”.

Now the thing about Jack (there were so many splendid things) is that he knew how to be decisive. I would watch him in rehearsal, over and over, commit to a musical decision that the choir would then find a way of rising to, for him. No sooner had I spoken the thought than Jack was humming, off and running—as Polyphony’s conductor and musical director he was always plotting shows in advance, and he wrote out the final setlist for this concert, including the arrangers that he wanted for each song, last September, two weeks before his death. I’d suggested some sad songs (I always do), never guessing how they’d resonate now: songs like ‘Sometimes It Snows in April’, one of Prince’s most vulnerable, (un)earthly tunes. Jack countered with, in his words, the love and fizz: Kylie and Charli and Chappell, the pop divas he adored.

Arthur Russell loved pop music, too, and if he hadn’t existed you’d have to make him up: a 1960s escapee from middle America who caught the tail end of the Haight-Ashbury hippie counterculture, then landed (of course) in New York. There he kept one foot in experimental music and the other in a vibrant, and vital, gay club scene—a cellist who made disco records. Russell found in disco’s groove the same discipline and peace that he found in Buddhism, which he practiced, and in the minimalist composition of his friends and peers like Philip Glass and Julius Eastmann. And he wrote things like ‘That’s Us / Wild Combination’, a song (or is it two songs?) spliced together from tape loops. It charms and repeats. It repeats. It still sounds like the future arriving (again). 

World of Echo was the only full-length album that Arthur Russell released within his lifetime. Swandream was the only full-length album that Jack Colwell released within his lifetime. Neither of these seemingly modest tallies tells you much about the real and living generosity, expansiveness, or energy of these musicians. I think of Jack’s word, choirography—an accidental or deliberate coinage? Deliberate, I’d say. Jack was great at combining words into new sounds and meanings. Our beloved conductor wrote the choir with his hands, and no word exists that tells the grief we’ve lived through—are living through—without him. No words, but sound.

I think of Kylie spinning around her disco ball; Solange turning dizzy circles; the week-in, week-out rhythm of the choir. That night underneath the railway arches, of which no photo exists but in my memory: what started then has come back around. Oli tells us in rehearsal, spin the sound, and we do, turning our notes. We love you, Jack, and so long as the choir exists we will sing you, hymning and humming, off and running. We sing your joy into being, again.