With ‘Ethiopia,’ Janelle Gill builds bridges across time and culture
On Friday, Janelle Gill premieres her newest work, a live score for the once-banned, now revived play, “Ethiopia.” Jamie Sandel/CapitalBop
Behind the piano, Janelle Gill has captivated D.C. audiences for over three decades. It is difficult to overstate her presence on the bandstand, which is at once awe-inspiring and unassuming. Attempting to capture her sound in words, one might try to illustrate what postbop sounds like through a kaleidoscope. That description would hardly do her musical voice justice, however, and it is simpler to go and listen to her.
Amidst full days and long nights of teaching and performing, she has recorded with local mainstays like Kris Funn, Reginald Cyntje and LOIDE. In recent years, Gill has expanded her vibrant career to include the stage, collaborating with D.C. theater company INseries on three of their productions as musical director.
Their latest collaboration, Ethiopia, premieres this month with original music by Gill, fusing her sonic palette with the revival of a once-banned play to tell the story of fascist Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia. Gill extensively studied traditional Ethiopian instrumentation and music theory to inform her work on the project, which was further inspired by the music of Emahoy Tsege, an Ethiopian artist known as “the honky tonk nun.”
The show debuts from May 16–18 at Theater Alliance in Southwest D.C. Then, from May 30-June 1, the company heads to Baltimore for a second run at the Baltimore Theatre Project. Ahead of the play’s long-awaited debut, Gill spoke with CapitalBopabout the project and community that informed it.
Janelle Gill. Jamie Sandel/CapitalBop
CapitalBop: Many of us in the D.C. scene know you best as a jazz pianist. INseries describes themselves as “innovative opera theater.” What caused you to gravitate towards working with them on Ethiopia?
Janelle Gill: I should clarify: Ethiopia is not really an opera. With an opera, there would be a libretto, and it would be very different from this, which is a play that is scored.
There’s some portions of it that are sung, there’s some portions of it that are spoken. There are songs that are sung as a part of the story, songs that are underscoring certain scenes or introducing certain scenes, or responding to certain scenes — as opposed to an opera, in which pretty much the entire text is sung. …
I feel like that needs to be clarified, because I don’t want people to come into the space and be expecting Terence Blanchard and Fire Shut Up in My Bones, or Guiseppi Verdi’s Aida. It’s not that. It’s a play that is scored musically.
CB: How did your collaboration with INseries come about?
JG: The director, Timothy Nelson, approached me just before the pandemic, just before the shutdown. He’d heard me play somewhere before, and he really liked my playing; he wanted to know if I would be interested in collaborating with him on scoring and directing Desdemona, a piece by Toni Morrison.
I told him, “I’ve never done anything like this before, and I don’t know if I’m qualified. You might want to call somebody who has more experience.” And he said, “No, I would really like for you to do it. If you’re up to the challenge, I’m happy. I really like your energy and your music.”
So I accepted the challenge. That’s the first time I worked with Timothy and INseries, in 2020 and 2021. I think at the end of ’21, we started the rehearsals, and in the middle of ’22, we actually performed it. And then, in 2023, he wanted to do a reimagination of Chuck Brown and Eva CasIsidy’s only recording together, The Other Side, paying homage to D.C. icons. … He asked me to help him with that project, and I did.
And then he came to me again last year. He said that there was a local playwright called Sybil Roberts Williams who had brought him Ethiopia. It’s a play originally written in 1937 about Mussolini and the Italians invading Ethiopia, and how African Americans offered their support and showed up to assist Ethiopia in this really terrible fight. At some point it became a massacre. The Italians were dropping these terrible mustard bombs over civilians; it was one of many atrocities that led to the Second World War.
So Sybil brought this to Timothy and asked if he would be interested in reworking the script, which was originally slated to be performed back in 1937. It was canceled because the U.S. government said they didn’t want any likeness of any government officials portrayed. The original playwright, Arthur Arent, had wanted to include an actual speech from FDR. The government said, sorry, we’re pulling the funding.
Gill performs a tribute to Billy Strayhorn at the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage in 2015.
CB: That sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
JG: You know, what’s really interesting is that we have found ourselves in the same exact place, quite literally. A grant that INseries received was pulled by the National Endowment of the Arts. We just got word that it was rescinded because they’re no longer in alignment with [NEA’s] values.
CB: There’s a lot of that going around in town right now.
JG: A lot of that.
CB: It’s so on-the-nose. And while I’m glad you clarified the fact that this production is not an opera outright, there is something similarly on-the-nose about what you’re doing: using the aesthetics of such a quintessentially Italian art form to tell the story of a brutal moment in Italian history. In that sense, it is subversive in its directness.
I understand that the original script of Ethiopia is expanded in this production, with the inclusion of characters like Mayme Richardson. Would you say more about that?
JG: All of the new characters, and all of the new storytelling, is done by Sybil Roberts Williams. She’s the playwright who reimagined the original play, which was written by Arthur Arent, a Jewish playwright working in New York in the early 20th century.
This play was a living newspaper. It had headlines of what was happening in Africa, and the actors were to present this in a theater format. But it didn’t happen, and so we’re presenting it for the first time. And Sybil has written an entirely new script that frames the older script through the eyes of African Americans who supported Ethiopia, one of them being Mayme Richardson.
CB: You mentioned that you wrote a new score for the original play; you scored this new portion, as well? You’ve been busy.
JG: Yeah, I’ve been very busy. It’s been a challenge, you know? Scoring a work like this, in and of itself, is not something I do regularly. I’m not Terence Blanchard. It’s not something that I’ve done so much that I can just get into it, and be creative from the beginning. There’s all these other hurdles, technical things like literally scoring it in the notation software, making the decisions, doing the historical research to make sure that I’m representing things correctly and using the right instruments.
I did a lot of research on some of the traditional Ethiopian instruments, like the krar, the begena and the masenqo. We will actually have a masenqo player in this production as well. But I also did a lot of research on these things called qenet, which are the tunings of some of these instruments, and they’re kind of like tonal centers; in the western sense, they’re sort of like variations of pentatonic scales.
A lot of the composition that I’ve done has been rooted in some of the different qenets. And then there are some scenes in which it’s very improvisational, and it’s again rooted in specific qenets.
“Just being on the inside of the community was really important. And that informed my decisions throughout this whole process.”
CB: There is improvisation in the score?
JG: Yes, in parts.
CB: That’s fantastic. Being here in D.C., where there is such a strong Pan-African community that overlaps so significantly with our jazz scene, I’m wondering who else may have influenced you in doing all that groundwork — not just from a musical standpoint, but perhaps an academic or even spiritual standpoint.
JG: I have been in touch with Haile Gerima. I just felt like I needed to talk with him about what I’m doing here. I met him years and years ago, probably when I was in high school, but he’s a pillar in the community.
When I started to do this research, it just so happened that my daughter was doing a filmmaking workshop with him. I asked her if she could tell him about what I was doing, and if it would be okay for me to come talk to him about it. He was more than welcoming, more than accepting. He was happy to sit and talk with me, to offer his insight and guidance.
He helped connect me with my masenqo player. I was trying to find a krar player for some of these scenes, and he corrected me and said, “No, the krar is not the right instrument for what you’re trying to do. You need masenqo, and I know just the person for you.” He made this connection with a wonderful musician that I would not have been able to connect with otherwise.
So there was a lot of that. … Just being on the inside of the community was really important. And that informed my decisions throughout this whole process.
CB: With so much work and intention that you’ve put into this, it almost feels disrespectful to ask if you’re working on anything else. But apart from Ethiopia, is there anything else you’d like folks to know about?
JG: Well, yes, this work itself. … Like I mentioned, Haile Gerima has lived through a lot of this history. He’s been working on this film Black Lions, Roman Wolves: The Children of Adwa. … He sacrificed a lot so that he could tell these stories, and he can frame them in a way that is true to the people whose story it is, as opposed to telling it through the eyes of somebody else.
I’m not involved in that, but I do definitely want to raise awareness that he’s doing it. Maybe go to the Sankofa Video and Books store or website; there’s so many different talks, and there may be ways that people can donate to the film.
Other things that I’m doing musically, of note: … I’m teaching, that’s important. I still have my piano students, and I’ve been doing some things with Rochelle Rice, too. That’s in Massachusetts in a couple of weeks.
The last few months, I should say, have been really intense with the Ethiopiarehearsals. I played with Ben Williams for his CD release performance of Between Church And State last week. And I’ve been doing a lot with Rochelle, and a lot of other local artists here. I played Takoma Station, and, you know, I have my church gig.
After the last performances of Ethiopia, which will be in Baltimore on May 30-31 and June 1, then I’ll have a little bit of a break before things start ramping up again.
