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D’Zama: The Musical Vagabond
The following description was submitted by the event organizer.
D’Zama: The Musical Vagabond probes the life of the unsung Oregonian remarkably ahead of her time. In 2022, Portland writer Sarah Smith and her husband, conductor Raul Gomez Rojas, were offered a dozen boxes of what they assumed were a collection of musical scores. What they discovered instead was an estate’s worth of manuscripts and collectibles, including the self-published autobiography of D’Zama Murielle (1901 – 1985), an Oregon woman who lived an extraordinary life.
Murielle studied conducting under Toscanini. She led the Portland Women’s Symphony Orchestra at a time when women were hardly afforded the opportunity to play in professional orchestras, let alone conduct them. She hopped trains to apply for distant conducting jobs and once biked to Chicago. She toured across the states and throughout Europe with a collection of musical instruments from around the world, teaching students music history and how to play.
She was wildly prolific and clearly ahead of her time. Smith wondered, “ Why wasn’t D’Zama Murielle a heralded figure? Why hadn’t she made a lasting mark or become a notable figure in Oregon history?” Smith and a team of collaborators from Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble and Third Rail Repertory Theatre — composer Owen Broder, lyricist Ben Tissell, music director Ryan Meagher, and director Isaac Lamb — set out to create a new jazz musical that would probe these questions and consider the legacies we leave, and those we lose.
Inspired by the life of the free-spirited and pioneering spirit of the little-known Oregon musician D’Zama Murielle, the concert production will feature the TRRT cast alongside PJCE’s 12-member ensemble.