(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST: (Singing) Lift every voice and sing till Earth and heaven ring.
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Lift every voice and sing - James Weldon Johnson penned the poem around 1900, years before joining and leading the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
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UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST: (Singing) Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
RASCOE: In between those two things, drafting the words for what would become the Black National Anthem and his long run at the NAACP, Johnson anonymously published a book called "The Autobiography Of An Ex-Colored Man," about a biracial, post-Reconstruction man who discovers he can pass as white.
In the book, which is fictional, Johnson teases, (reading) I know that in writing the following pages, I am divulging the great secret of my life - the secret which, for some years, I have guarded far more carefully than any of my earthly possessions.
Here's Mark Turner picking up the thought.
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MARK TURNER: (Reading) I think I find a sort of savage and diabolical desire to gather up all the little tragedies of my life and turn them into a practical joke on society.
RASCOE: Turner's new album is called "Reflections On: The Autobiography Of An Ex-Colored Man."
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RASCOE: It's a 10-movement jazz suite inspired by Johnson's book, and Mark Turner joins us now. Welcome.
TURNER: Hi. How's it going, Ayesha?
RASCOE: It's going good. So how did you find this book? What drew you to it?
TURNER: I found it while I was just sort of doing my own Afro-Am study 'cause I didn't have it in college or anything. So I was just trying to figure out about African-American history on my own. I was drawn to it just because of the title. Like, what does that mean? What's that about?
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TURNER: My mother can pass. My two great-aunts or great-great-aunts could pass, and they actually did what the protagonist in the book does. So I thought, oh, I'd never read a book that actually talks about passing. I just talked about it in my own family. I didn't realize that people wrote about it out in the open. Originally, I wasn't intending to write a suite that had words in it. I was just using it as a catalyst to write music. So that was the beginning.
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RASCOE: Talk to me about your family because you said your mother and your great-aunts were able to pass.
TURNER: Well, my great-aunts - or maybe they're my great-great-aunts - they passed, and they married two men of European descent, went to another town and they left the family.
RASCOE: 'Cause that's what you had to do. If you really were going to pass, you had to leave the family behind. But your great-grandfather didn't do that.
TURNER: No. He didn't do that. He could visit them because he was light enough, so he wouldn't out them - I'll put it that way. And his wife could not. She was too dark.
RASCOE: Let's hear some of the track titled "Europe" that gets into some of this.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "EUROPE")
TURNER: (Reading) My boy, you are by blood, by appearance, by education and by tastes a white man. Now, why do you want to throw your life away amidst the poverty and ignorance and the hopeless struggle of the Black people of the United States?
RASCOE: Who's advising the protagonist here?
TURNER: The person's advising him is - you know, it's the Gilded Age. So it's a friend that he meets who's a millionaire. So he travels with him. They're in Europe, and he's advising him. He's talking to them and saying, why not just continue traveling with me and enjoy the fruits of being someone of European descent? You can do that.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "EUROPE")
TURNER: (Reading) I can imagine no more dissatisfied a human being than an educated, cultured and refined colored man in the United States.
RASCOE: You said at first you weren't planning to include any words. Why did you decide to do that, to include these passages?
TURNER: Basically, I wanted music that's enhanced with words, not the other way around. The difficulty of music, in general, especially music without words - it's probably the most abstract about art forms. Most other art forms are more visceral and tangible. You can see it. You can touch it. When there aren't words, what you're trying to do is bring your feelings, emotions into melody, harmony and rhythm and form.
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TURNER: But what's nice about writing music based on prose is that it gives a organizational direction to what you write. So that's very - I find that very powerful. The whole suite is - they're recurring themes.
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TURNER: That theme right there, if you've noticed - it's a different key, but it's the same theme as the very beginning of the suite. When I first started writing, I was thinking about, if this was a movie, what would the movie theme sound like?
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RASCOE: Going back to your family history, did you ever have conversations about passing with your mom?
TURNER: Yeah, definitely. She used to come back and tell us stories about what white people were saying (laughter).
RASCOE: (Laughter) Oh, really?
TURNER: (Laughter) Oh, totally. She'd be on the bus or coming home from work. Did you hear what these people said, blah, blah, blah? When she was a kid, I remember some girls called her a white [expletive]. I guess that was a thing in the '50s. Just, you know, all kinds of things like that. You know, she beat them up. She's a tough lady. She kicked ass.
(LAUGHTER)
TURNER: Sorry. Maybe I shouldn't say that on the radio.
RASCOE: Did she talk to you about how that made her feel about being Black or what it means to be Black if you can pass?
TURNER: I don't think she said anything about it. I just think it's more about how she decided to live her life. She could've married someone of European descent and just done that, you know? But she married a dark-skinned man from the South. She's totally committed to the struggle, so on and so forth.
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TURNER: (Reading) At other times, I feel that I have been a coward, a deserter, and I am possessed by a strange longing for my mother's people.
RASCOE: The book is over a hundred years old. The music is new. What do you want the audience to take from this album?
TURNER: I never really want to direct what people should take from anything that I produce. I just like people to listen to whatever we're doing and come out transformed. It's kind of like going into a movie theater or a play or going to see a shaman - something that you go into, and you come out changed on the other side.
RASCOE: That's Mark Turner. His new album is called "Reflections On: The Autobiography Of An Ex-Colored Man." Thank you so much for speaking with us.
TURNER: Absolutely. My pleasure.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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