Talk about Smalltimore.
Ethel Ennis, Baltimore's grande dame of jazz, was in Oslo in 1990 to perform the national anthem at a ceremony commemorating the first American killed in World War II. In the audience was Anne Brown, the American soprano who, literally, put the Bess in Porgy and Bess - George Gershwin became so enraptured with her singing, he expanded both her role and the title of a new opera he was writing, originally called, simply, Porgy.
Ennis and Brown met afterward for the first time, just a couple of world-class artists who happened to have graduated at different times from the same school halfway around the globe - Baltimore's Frederick Douglass High.
They'll be reunited, in a sense, this Saturday, on the stage of Douglass' auditorium where Ennis, 76, will be the featured singer at a concert by students and alums paying tribute to Brown, who died last month at age 96 in her adopted hometown of Oslo.
The audience will be treated to a recording of Brown singing the iconic "Summertime" - part of a tribute that includes snippets of an interview that Ennis' husband, Earl Arnett, taped during that 1990 meeting in Oslo - followed by Ennis' live performance of it.
"Oh, oh, when you hear a voice like hers, well, I don't call myself religious, but when I hear her voice, I think, 'God lives,' " Ennis said of Brown. "It's just a spiritual connection."
Ennis will put her own uniquely Baltimore spin on "Summertime," prefacing it with her rendition of how the a-rabbers would call out what they were selling from their horse-drawn carts that day. (Believe me, you've never heard anyone make "watermelon" or "peaches" sound quite as luscious as Ennis.) "That was summertime to me," she said of her childhood in Baltimore.
But the concert is as much about looking forward as backward. The school's alumni have organized the performance to ensure that Douglass' rich musical tradition continues into the future. Alums say the concert will showcase a side of the school that tends to be overshadowed by grittier depictions, such as HBO's Hard Times at Douglass High, the documentary that aired last summer. School district administrators say the documentary is dated - it was filmed several years earlier - and that the school has since improved its curriculum, and graduation and college acceptance rates.
