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Judge LaDoris Cordell: A secret musical life

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LaDoris Cordell, 66, rehearses at the home of her piano teacher Jodi Gandolfi, left, in Menlo Park, Calif., on Saturday, Jan.16, 2016. Cordell and Gandolfi founded the African-American Composer Initiative. (John Green/Bay Area News Group)

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By Richard Scheinin | rscheinin@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group

PUBLISHED: January 27, 2016 at 7:28 am | UPDATED: August 11, 2016 at 10:53 pm

MENLO PARK — In the distance, church bells rang as pianist LaDoris Cordell pressed her fingers into the keys. She was accompanying a soprano named Yolanda Rhodes in a song about new love, titled “Summer.” The music rose to a rhapsody — almost trembling with feeling, and the bells underlined the mood, as if proclaiming, “Listen to this! This is special.”

“Summer” was composed by Valerie Capers, one of dozens of African-American classical composers whose music has been championed over the past seven years by Cordell and her teacher, Jodi Gandolfi.
And yes, this is the same LaDoris Cordell who spent decades as a litigator, judge and, most recently, the independent police auditor for the city of San Jose. Always the activist, if not an outright crusader, Cordell — who has led a parallel life as pianist and singer — is once again out righting wrongs, this time advocating on behalf of the many black American composers who have been ignored by the classical musical establishment since the 19th century.

“I’m on a mission to bring this music to the world,” she said.
The rehearsal at Gandolfi’s home was in preparation for two benefit concerts to be held this weekend in East Palo Alto, where these and other top Bay Area musicians will perform more than a dozen pieces composed and arranged by Capers — a rare program devoted to a composer whose works too often get overlooked.
“It’s going to blow people’s minds,” Cordell said. “People are going to get inside the head of this phe-nom-e-nal composer.”
Then she spun out the names of a few of her other favorite composers: Margaret Bonds, Florence Price and William Grant Still. The latter, often called the dean of black American composers, was a largely uncredited influence on George Gershwin — whose “I Got Rhythm” sounds suspiciously like a theme from Still’s Symphony No. 1, “Afro-American.”
“These composers had to write this music — it is so strong in their very souls,” Cordell went on. “And I got angry when I first started to read about their lives, when I saw how despondent some of them became at going unrecognized. So, yes, we’ve got an injustice to fix here, and the way to do it is to keep it positive, to learn the music and play it. We’re trying to bring this music to light — and people respond, we find.”
Saturday and Sunday at the Eastside College Preparatory School, Cordell and Gandolfi will lead their annual benefit program for the school. The prep school’s own choir will participate along with musicians from renowned ensembles, including the San Francisco Opera Orchestra.

Now 66, Cordell graduated from Stanford Law School in 1974 and opened her first law practice in East Palo Alto, a community that remains important to her. One senses that the annual concerts, which began in 2009 and play to packed houses, are a sort of social experiment for the retired judge. They attract an integrated audience that comes together to celebrate black composers — men and women who embrace the European musical tradition, while infusing it with their own African-American roots via spirituals, jazz and the blues.
The audience that comes to hear this music “isn’t your polite little classical audience, going clap, clap, clap,” Cordell said. “If they want to move and have a shout-out, they do. It’s almost like church.”
The concerts are just the tip of the iceberg. Cordell and Gandolfi have founded the African American Composer Initiative (http://aacinitiative.org), a nonprofit whose website lists scores of compositions along with YouTube links and information on where musicians can buy sheet music. The idea is to stir interest, inciting a ripple effect so that the resistance encountered by black composers will give way to a renaissance.
“LaDoris is a go-getter,” said Judith Anne Still, who owns and manages William Grant Still Music, her late father’s publishing house. “What she’s doing for the public’s enlightenment is so important — just hearing the music raises people’s sights because they had no clue that we have any great black classical composers. It’s simply not known.”
“Oh, LaDoris, where do I begin?” said Capers, whose eclectic composing career includes art songs commissioned by the Smithsonian Institution and hit tunes for Latin jazz great Mongo Santamaria. “People who know her for one thing don’t know the other things that she does. Did you know this lady can sing? She’s a wonderful pianist, and have you seen her drawings, her artwork? I would call her a Renaissance woman.”

Raised on Motown

LaDoris Hazzard Cordell grew up in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, where her parents ran a dry-cleaning business. Her mother, Clara, headed the local chapter of the NAACP — here were the seeds of her daughter’s activism — and music filled the house. Her father, Lewis, was an accomplished woodwind player. Motown 45s were on the turntable.

LaDoris began piano studies at 6, violin at 7. She always scrambled on Saturday mornings to prepare for lessons.
And she always sang.
She and sisters Denise and Roxanna — the latter became a music teacher in the Philadelphia public schools — grew up in the Mount Calvary Baptist Church. They sang in the children’s, junior and adult choirs. They sang while driving in the car with their parents, and they sang while washing and drying the dishes after dinner: “We’d break out into three-part harmony, a cappella. We would sing anything: Broadway shows, West Side story, Marvin Gaye, Mary Wells, the Marvelettes.”
In high school, LaDoris sang in talent shows, played violin in the school orchestra — second stand, first chair — and continued her piano studies. But as a member of the student council and as class president, she became “too busy for music,” she said. “I had to fit the piano in and I never found time to practice.”
Still, she performed.
She majored in theater arts in college. While a young litigator in East Palo Alto, she founded and led a children’s choir at the True Light Baptist Church. Later as a state Superior Court judge, she never lost sight of the unfolding courtroom drama: “Because the judge, when you think about it, is producer and director.”
That said, she didn’t take a piano lesson for 36 years. During that time, she married and had two daughters. She divorced. She settled down with her partner, Florence Keller, a psychologist and trial consultant. They have lived in Palo Alto for 29 years.
In 2004, when Cordell was vice provost of Stanford University, she was invited to a banquet to honor the women’s basketball program. Coach Tara VanDerveer, a friend who was studying piano with Gandolfi, decided that Cordell needed to kick-start her own piano studies. Mischievously, VanDerveer seated the provost next to Gandolfi. The two hit it off and Cordell — eventually, after mulling it over for two entire years — phoned her up for lessons.
They worked on Brahms and Beethoven, Chopin and Mozart. And one day, Cordell said, “Wait. Mozart is great. But is there anything here for me? Are there any black composers?”
Gandolfi, who had studied at major conservatories and taught at Stanford, “drew a blank,” she admitted. “I didn’t have an answer. LaDoris’s question set me off in a whole new direction in terms of my musical interests.”
The two became obsessed: stunned at first by the volume of music they discovered, music that was exquisite, powerful, brilliantly crafted — and roundly ignored. Gandolfi has traveled the country, researching scores by African-American composers in archives. She and Cordell have brought dozens of other musicians into their quest, not to mention a growing audience.
The ripple effect is happening.
“It’s a journey for us, and it’s a journey for our audiences,” Cordell said. “And it’s a way of showing our gratitude to the people who gave us this music.
“This has just opened a world for me. It’s the music that now stirs my soul. It moves me. It teaches me. I want more of it and I can’t get enough of it. And the best part of it is sharing it.”

Contact Richard Scheinin at 408-920-5069, read his stories at www.mercurynews.com/richard-scheinin and follow him at www.Twitter.com/RealEstateRag.

African American Composer Initiative:

A Musical Celebration of Valerie Capers featuring LaDoris Cordell and other musicians
When: 3 p.m., Saturday and Sunday
Where: Eastside College Preparatory School Performing Arts Center, 1041 Myrtle Street
Tickets: $20 ($5 students and seniors); http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2467635 (or at the door; advance purchase recommended)

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