Renée Baker’s ‘Through His Spirit’ salutes legacy of composer Perkinson

When the renowned composer and conductor Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson died in Chicago on March 9, 2004, he left behind a huge artistic legacy — one that’s being celebrated in music and dance April 10-13 at Symphony Center. In these concerts, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra teams with the Joffrey Ballet to perform the world premiere of acclaimed choreographer Amy Hall Garner’s Second Nature, set to Perkinson’s Sinfonietta No. 1.

The April 11 performance will be preceded by Renée Baker’s homage to Perkinson, a chamber work titled Through His Spirit. As part of a pre-concert event presented by the CSO’s African American Network at 6 p.m. in Grainger Ballroom, Baker’s Through His Spirit will be performed by musicians from the Civic Orchestra of Chicago and Baker’s own Chicago Modern Orchestra Project, which she will conduct. The work’s three movements reflect Perkinson’s cultural depth and stylistic omnivorousness. Rather than being a pastiche of his work, Baker says, her piece is an homage to his work.

Before the New York-born Perkinson died, he spent six years as artistic director of the performance program at Columbia College’s Center for Black Music Research. That’s when he and Baker became friends, developing a sort of mentor-mentee dynamic that made a lasting imprint on Baker’s life and career. At the time, she was a principal violist for Paul Freeman’s Chicago Sinfonietta, as well as the group’s personnel manager. She was also honing her skills as a composer. To date, Baker has written more than 2,000 works for various ensembles and films.

Although Perkinson was “a stylist in the classical realm, bar none,” Baker says, his work was influenced by a wide range of musical styles, as well as triumphs and tragedies of a life that began in the deeply segregated 1930s. As a result, like the umbrella genre under which it exists, it’s not easily categorized. “I cannot define Black music,” he once said. “I could say that it is a music that has its genesis in the Black psyche or the Black social life, but it is very difficult to say what Black music really is.”

Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson was “a chameleon. But he was a chameleon of authenticity. So you can’t listen to his classical work and say, ‘Oh, my god, he didn’t know what he was doing. Of course he did. He was trained in some of the best schools.” — Renée Baker

A fan and a deft channeler of everything from classical and jazz to pop —Perkinson played piano and drums in Max Roach’s quartet, penned arrangements for Marvin Gaye and Harry Belafonte, and composed numerous film soundtracks — he was, as Baker describes him, “a chameleon. But he was a chameleon of authenticity. So you can’t listen to his classical work and say, ‘Oh, my god, he didn’t know what he was doing. Of course he did. He was trained in some of the best schools.” The Manhattan School of Music and Princeton University were among them.

Perkinson’s musical mind, Baker recalls, was always racing. Sometimes, when he needed a sounding board, her phone would ring — no matter the hour. “Perk was the only person that my husband would allow to call [our home] at 3 a.m. with a bright idea. He was always on the piano or chatting about things. I knew he was up, and he knew I was up.”

As for her Symphony Center tribute, Baker says it could have been a lot of things. “There are 100 other chamber [pieces] I could have written. But when I saw that the CSO was doing Sinfonietta No. 1, I thought, let me give him a little more honor, since we’re inside Symphony Center. It’s the pinnacle worldwide, the top of anyone’s pyramid, I don’t care where you come from. I wanted to give audience members a peek into this man. He was fun. He was brilliant. He was comical.” Perkinson, she adds, also endured depression that accompanied self-doubt and self-pity. “I know it made him sad sometimes, but it never stopped him.”

Baker took that lesson to heart. “Just do something,” Perkinson told her. And this: “Don’t wait for other people to validate you.” So she kept composing and began conducting. She started her own orchestra. And she recently became interim chair of the esteemed Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.

Perk would surely beam at her accomplishments so far, but what would he think of Through His Spirit? “He’d howl” with joy, Baker says. “And then, when it’s all over and nobody’s around, he’d say, ‘OK, now let me talk to you about this passage. Let’s talk about how many rules you broke.’”

Said proudly, no doubt.