The first time I met Deborah Wai Kapohe (Te Ātihaunui-a-Pāpārangi, Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki, Ngāti Rua/Te Whakatōhea, Ngāti Kahungunu) she was effortlessly wiping the floor with a stage full of aspiring musicians. The occasion was a masterclass held by leading classical guitarist John Mills, and although it took place in 1988, I have an acute memory of it because I was among those swept aside. A career as a professional guitarist clearly beckoned. Gallingly for those of us with lesser gifts, she became an opera singer instead.
Kapohe still plays guitar to accompany herself – “No pianist needed!” – but her next assignment is a semi-staged Porgy and Bess with Orchestra Wellington. It’s a work she’s previously performed with OW music director Marc Taddei and they’ll again use Russell Garcia’s swinging arrangement, famously employed in a 1959 recording by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.
This most American of works has a Kiwi connection. Garcia was a major figure in Hollywood, arranging and composing music for numerous films and TV shows. But in the mid-60s, he literally sailed away from it all, eventually washing up in Kerikeri, where he lived for the last 40-some years of his long life, dying in 2011 aged 95.
Kapohe says Garcia’s arrangement, generally pitched lower than Gershwin’s, leaves her plenty of scope to riff, jazz-style, on the famous melodies. For example, Porgy and Bess’s most-performed song, Summertime, was written as a soaring soprano aria. Dropping it down a few steps makes it a different proposition.
“[In the original], there’s only so much further up I can go,” Kapohe says. “With this I have more room to move.”
Playing Louis to Kapohe’s Ella is the experienced Eddie ‘Muliaumaseali’i, another veteran of that earlier production.
“We did a lot of extemporising,” Kapohe recalls. “That’s the exciting thing about Garcia’s arrangement – we can approach it classically but still make room for an improvisational approach.”
Although classically trained and by her own admission best suited to that style, Kapohe has always been an adept genre-hopper, writing contemporary songs since she was a kid. More recently, she has experimented with taonga puoro, and treasures a set made by master carver Brian Flintoff. Working with traditional Māori instruments has challenged how Kapohe approaches music.
“There’s a different way of viewing instruments,” she says. “With my Western training I’d go, ‘Let’s see if I’m good enough to play them.’ Brian would say, ‘Let’s see when the instruments are ready to speak.’ A lot of the time, I felt the instruments were telling me I was a bit of a prat. I just have to go very slowly and listen to what they’re saying.”
Orchestra Wellington, The Jazz Age, November 9, Michael Fowler Centre.
