MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Songwriter Maurice White is best known as the founder and lead songwriter for Earth, Wind & Fire.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SEPTEMBER")
EARTH, WIND AND FIRE: (Singing) Do you remember the 21st night of September?
MARTIN: He also wrote orchestral music that is only now reaching the public 23 years after White composed it.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
That's the Symphonic Jazz Orchestra rehearsing "Passages," a piece commissioned in 2002. The ensemble blends jazz and classical genres. They premiered "Passages" at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center in Long Beach, California, over the weekend. Here's SJO music director Mitch Glickman.
MITCH GLICKMAN: Sadly, we thought it was lost over the years.
MARTIN: Glickman had hired a video crew to record White's work in progress. But then funding for the project fell through and it was shelved.
GLICKMAN: When Maurice passed away, 2016, we did a search, couldn't find any of the tracks. The software was so old at this point. Lots of moves had gone on. So we thought, all right, that's the end of that.
MARTÍNEZ: A new Earth, Wind & Fire documentary is scheduled to air on HBO later this year, so there was new interest in the old footage. Glickman went digging.
GLICKMAN: Lo and behold, in a hot garage in an unmarked box were the tapes. So as we were going through that, we realized the fly on the wall b-roll had Bill and Maurice listening back to the piece.
(SOUNDBITE SYMPHONIC JAZZ ORCHESTRA'S PERFORMANCE OF WHITE'S "PASSAGES")
GLICKMAN: So while the score is gone, the tracks are gone, everything is physically gone, the music was right there. It was all spelled out. It just needed to be extracted.
(SOUNDBITE SYMPHONIC JAZZ ORCHESTRA'S PERFORMANCE OF WHITE'S "PASSAGES")
MARTIN: With painstaking effort, White's cowriter, Bill Meyers, used the old tapes to rebuild the 11-minute piece over the course of three or four months.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: On the tapes, Maurice White talks about his approach.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MAURICE WHITE: I was amazed in a sense of, what direction should I go? I've had many Top 40 hits, but my essence is really jazz. This is not just a Earth, Wind & Fire project. It's like a Maurice White presentation I'm making to the world. So that's the way I looked at it, you know? So it's like, it's something that you have to, like, take your time and explore it. It's all about discovery.
MARTIN: An exploration, more than two decades in the making.
(SOUNDBITE SYMPHONIC JAZZ ORCHESTRA'S PERFORMANCE OF WHITE'S "PASSAGES") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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