Musician deVon Russell Gray has composed music for Walker Art Center’s ‘Sound for Silents’

Composer deVon Russell Gray thinks of his musical creations on a spectrum of zero to 10.

Zero is fully improvised music, such as his 2023 album with percussionist Davu Seru and saxophonist Nathan Hanson, “We Sick.” Meanwhile, 10 is “a maximalist score. Things that are totally notated and a complete road map of what to play.”

“I’m finding less and less joy in that,” he added.

On Thursday, the St. Paul native and keyboardist for hip-hop group Heiruspecs will offer music that he describes as between the two extremes. For the Walker Art Center’s annual “Sound for Silents” event, Gray and his collaborators will accompany four silent films from the Walker’s Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection in a free outdoor presentation on the hillside next to the museum. Picnic blankets are encouraged.

The Walker approached Gray about “Sound for Silents” after a January Cedar Cultural Center concert that concluded his yearlong McKnight Composer Fellowship.

“deVon is a serious free thinker, a long-respected originator and thoughtful collaborator in the local scene,” said Doug Benidt, the Walker’s associate curator of performing arts. “I was thrilled when he was intrigued by the idea of not only selecting the films from the Walker collection but imagining how they should now be heard.”

However, Gray couldn’t quite find what he was looking for in the collection.

“At my January performance at the Cedar, I was talking about trees and ecology and Black folks in nature,” he said. “And that’s what I wanted. Some Black joy in the trees.”

He found that in limited supply in the Walker’s collection but did choose a pair of short 21st-century films — Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s “Otros Usos” and Diane Kitchen’s “Wot the Ancient Sod” — that Gray said “are the kind of films where you can determine a lot of what it’s about for yourself. Images of leaves and water and metal structures left by man or left by the military.”

But he did find Black joy, although not in the trees, in a pair of 1929 films by Dudley Murphy: “Black and Tan Fantasy,” which features the Duke Ellington Orchestra’s first time on film, and “St. Louis Blues,” with the original “queen of the blues,” Bessie Smith. Gray and his collaborators are tying them all together with a work that he calls “in the year of the parable.”

“Octavia Butler wrote this genius book in the early ‘90s, ‘The Parable of the Sower,’” he said. “And the story starts in July of 2024. She was just such a prescient author, and the things that she forecast have come to pass. The world’s on fire, more so every year. The climate is getting crazier every year.

“And so yes, we need to prepare and be prepared to reap what we sow. So collect seeds, collect lineages, collect our stories, collect ourselves and be prepared for change.”

Rather than a fully notated score, Gray will provide his collaborators — Seru, Hanson, Andrew Broder and Ariadne Greif — with what’s called a “text score” that amounts to written instructions but doesn’t prescribe any specific notes.

“It’s sort of a road map I borrowed from master composer and enduring elder George Lewis,” Gray said. “Here’s our 45- to 60-minute set, and actions can happen these ways and in these places, potentially. But we’ll have monitors and will get to see images in real time with the audience. We are going to react.

“I remember seeing Miles Davis talking about some of the film scores he made in the ‘60s and ‘70s. He did it the way I would love to do it, which is watching the movie and playing in real time.”

“Sound for Silents” offers just such an opportunity.

With: Music by deVon Russell Gray.

When: DJ Sarah White, 7 p.m., “in the year of the parable,” 8:30 p.m. Thu.

Where: Wurtele Upper Garden, Walker Art Center, 725 Vineland Place, Mpls.

Tickets: Free, information at walkerart.org.

Because of the possibility of rain Thursday evening, the “Sound for Silents” event has been moved to the Walker Art Center’s McGuire Theater. Music by DJ Sarah White will be offered in Cityview Bar at 7 p.m., doors to the theater will open at 7:30 p.m., and the performance will begin at 8 p.m. Tickets will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis at the box office by the Walker’s Hennepin Avenue entrance, beginning at 7 p.m.

Rob Hubbard is a Twin Cities classical music writer. Reach him at wordhub@yahoo.com.