Near the end of the last century, the US Post Office issued a commemorative stamp of the pianist and composer James P Johnson (1894-1955). But this long-overdue Naxos release underscores how incomplete our understanding of his legacy has remained. Recorded in 2006 after the rediscovery of manuscript sources made performance possible, Johnson’s two short operas from the late 1930s are significant examples of the still under-recognised role of Black creativity in forging a new American style and voice.

Johnson is usually cited as a trailblazer in the field of jazz piano. Through his virtuosity, he revamped ragtime into the thrilling syncopations of stride, inspiring a who’s who of jazz legends (his protégé Fats Waller and Duke Ellington among them). He also had notable success in musical theatre, writing a hit song, ‘The Charleston’, that defined the 1920s.

With Yamekraw, his response to Gershwin’s 1924 breakthrough Rhapsody in Blue, Johnson embarked on a series of classical-jazz hybrids and large-scale formats. He eventually took up the challenge of writing for the opera stage, with his colleague Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935) offering an example of how a contemporary opera might bridge cultural divides.

Johnson began in 1937 with a setting of a one-act play from 1918 by Eugene O’Neill, The Dreamy Kid. He adapted the pre-existing text, an intimate drama of the connection between an old woman as she lies dying and her grandson, who has fled the law after being driven to kill a man. He pays a visit at her request, well aware that he’ll likely now be trapped by the police.

Johnson then collaborated with the Harlem Renaissance poet and luminary Langston Hughes to create the one-act ‘blues opera’ De Organizer, which is known to have had a single performance, at Carnegie Hall (in 1940 or ’41). Hughes wrote a libretto specifically intended to be sung (unlike Dreamy). The drama revolves around a group of Black sharecroppers in the Jim Crow South of the 1930s who gather to meet with a union organiser. Together they confront the union-busting Overseer sent to spy and prevail.

Both scores faded into oblivion, apparently lost, until the late pianist, bandleader and scholar James Dapogny chanced upon materials that enabled him to reconstruct orchestrated versions of the half-hour De Organizer and of the extant scenes from The Dreamy Kid. The University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra, Opera Theatre and soloists led by Kenneth Kiesler fulfilled Johnson’s desire for both one-acts (the one uplifting, the other ambiguously tragic) to be performed as a double bill in 2006 and recorded the music soon after, though the latter effort has only now been released to the public.

Johnson’s music appealingly blends vernacular Black styles, both secular and sacred, with operatic conventions – to particularly memorable effect in the numerous choruses that orient the development of De Organizer. Making a persuasive case for the value of these scores for contemporary audiences, this recording, it is hoped, will spur similar efforts.