No Musical Boxes for Him

The days when singers and their music were parsed into fine categories are well and truly over, at least in this country. And the very model of the modern American vocal omnivore could well be baritone Jubilant Sykes.

“I just sing,” he summarizes repeatedly. “Sing, just sing.”

Indeed. Something of what that means can be understood from his fall schedule. This Saturday he opens the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s “Made in California” season with Bach, Mozart, Copland and the spiritual “City Called Heaven.” From here Sykes heads east for his New York Philharmonic debut, singing the world premiere of Michael Torke’s “Four Seasons,” one of Disney’s Millennium Symphonies commissions. He then goes into the studio for his next CD, an American song collection, and joins guitarist Christopher Parkening on a Brazilian recital project.

The stylistic fluency and quick study reflected here, Sykes suggests, can be a blessing and a curse.

“In my mind, I think it takes forever for me to learn new music, but it really doesn’t. The benefits are that you get to work a lot. The downside is you are always getting things at the last minute.”

This all seems very natural, however, to a man whose voice is the unforced center of his personal expression.

“Let’s put it this way,” he says. “I can’t remember ever not singing. There was always music in the house when I was growing up. I took piano lessons, of course, and singing was sort of in the background.”

It began to move into the foreground when Sykes was in middle school in Los Angeles. A music teacher included two recordings in class listening assignments that made a big impression on the young musician.

“One was Leontyne Price--there was just something about the sound of her voice,” Sykes recalls. “The other was Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing ‘Winterreise,’ which seemed very intriguing and mysterious.”

Sykes was hooked, and he made music his major at Cal State Fullerton in the ‘80s.

“I just threw myself into it, totally clueless. I had never even seen an opera before, and I just sang everything they put before me.”

What is before him on his LACO program this week is virtually a microcosm of his current career and interests. The Bach aria “Mache dich mein Herze” comes from just-completed sessions for what will be Sykes’ third Sony Classical recording, a straight-ahead classical, mostly sacred collection. The spiritual “City Called Heaven” was on his first CD, the self-titled “Jubilant,” but in a different arrangement.

Released in 1998, “Jubilant” was a project instigated by Sony president Peter Gelb, putting a jazz spin on spirituals as arranged by trumpeter-composer Terence Blanchard, another recent addition to Sony’s prolific crossover-fusion shop. Blanchard’s setting of “City Called Heaven” was actually an adaptation of an earlier arrangement, suggested by Sykes, for harp and strings, which is the version on the LACO concert.

“This arrangement keeps it still folky but brings it to the classical stage. The harp is like a guitar or banjo,” Sykes says. On the recording and in live performances with Blanchard, Sykes improvises, which he will do here, but “within the framework of the orchestra. I never do it the same way twice. There are places I want to end up at, but how I get there depends on what my heart feels at the moment.”

The Copland settings of three “Old American Songs” on the LACO agenda reflect Sykes’ love of American music, many styles of which will be featured on the disc he is recording next (but which will be released before the already taped classical program). The two Mozart arias came up as he and LACO music director Jeffrey Kahane “just pingponged ideas back and forth.”

Sykes and Kahane have worked together before, and later the baritone will join the conductor at his other orchestra, opening the Santa Rosa Symphony season with a program that includes some Mahler songs. The “Made in California” season they initiate Saturday is really the beginning of a two- and maybe even three-season project.

“I felt an impulse to celebrate the enormous wealth of talent, both in terms of composers and performers, that is either native to or transplanted to California,” Kahane says. “Jubilant seemed like an ideal person to launch this, being, as I am, a native Los Angeleno.” He notes other Californians among the soloists for this season, as well as important music composed in the state.

“I can’t give away too much about 2000-01 at this point other than to say that I’m doing a lot of research into works created here by the amazing list of major figures who have lived and worked in the state in the last 75 years: Schoenberg and Stravinsky, of course--we will do a performance of Schoenberg’s magnificent and rarely performed 2nd Chamber Symphony. But I’m also studying piles of music of Krenek, Mel Powell, Milhaud, Sessions, Korngold, Dahl, Kirchner, to name only a very few.”

Sykes--”let’s just say I’m no longer in my 20s”--now lives in an art-filled Venice bungalow with his wife and three young sons. Just a step inside the front door is an old Steinway baby grand, over which looms a striking portrait of Louis Armstrong in full voice.

When he talks, Sykes seems both relaxed and restless, and a similar dichotomy is apparent in his strenuous but seemingly spontaneous career.

“I just take it as it comes and try to enjoy every step,” Sykes says. “I’ve been richly blessed. I have gone beyond anything I could have imagined in my career, but I cannot sacrifice my family to it. Without sounding glib, I want to honor God. Whatever that may mean, it may not call me to do the standard things.”

One of the standard things that might be expected of him is not much present in his current activities: opera. Ten years ago Sykes won first place in the regional Metropolitan Opera auditions here, and the next season he made his Met debut as Jake in “Porgy and Bess.” He has also sung at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin and with Houston Grand Opera, among other companies, but deference to family needs and a certain artistic indifference have led him away from the form, at least temporarily.

It is not that Sykes has any problem with the acting part of it. He did spoken theater in his student days and is mulling over a recent film proposal. Nor, of course, is it a matter of dealing with words.

“Text is really important to me,” he says. “Words are like a railroad, and you just drive the train of notes down them. In opera, I love the acting and the glory of the raw singing.

“But what I love most--this is very selfish, to be honest--is my moment to give from myself to the audience, without having to defer to colleagues and the staging. Just me and a conductor is a lot more intimate, and I long for intimacy. Since I was aware of myself, that’s me.”

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JUBILANT SYKES sings with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Royce Hall, UCLA. Date: Saturday, 7 p.m. Prices: $13-$50 (LACO season opening gala tickets $300-$500). Phone: (213) 622-7001, Ext. 215.