Benjamin Koppel | White Buses: Passage to Freedom
(Cowbell Records)
Any artist who takes on the Holocaust as the subject of their work is either a brave soul or a fool. The enormity of the industrial destruction of six million Jews by the Nazis presents a near-impossible challenge, most famously summarized in Theodor Adorno’s statement, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” One approach that composers have favored is to focus on very specific elements of the horror, in pieces like Mikos Theodorakis’s Ballad of Mauthausen, John Zorn’s Kristallnacht, and Gary Lucas’s Verklarte Kristallnacht. Add to this list Danish composer and saxophonist Benjamin Koppel’s awesome White Buses, inspired by the liberation of some 425 Danish Jews who were rescued from the Theresienstadt concentration camp by Danish volunteers and the Swedish Red Cross driving white buses.
Koppel’s song cycle successfully interpolates brief, 20-second snippets of testimony by some of those survivors (in Danish with English translations) within Koppel’s expressionist jazz-classical fusion. Eschewing didacticism, Koppel found a way to make it cohere brilliantly over 47 minutes, building to a dramatic, U2-like climax powered by his triumphant saxophone and the collective power of his world-class ensemble, featuring Hudson Valley bassist Scott Colley, pianist Uri Caine, and drummer Antonio Sanchez. The group is rounded out by vocalist Thana Alexa, cellist Henrik Dam Thomsen, and keyboardist Soren Moller. The piece ends with a poignant denouement inspired by the testimony, “To us, it wasn’t a filthy bus; to us, it was a golden carriage.”
This article appears in April 2024.
