Jordan Otis and Ethan McGrath were students at Southern Adventist University together when he heard her sing John Alden Carpenter's song cycle "Gitanjali."
"She sang it so well, and I always thought she should do them again. It occurred to me the song cycle would go well with my 'Jungle Book' settings and I thought it would be cool to pair the two," says McGrath.
That collaboration will happen Saturday night, April 27, when Otis and McGrath present "Gitanjali" in McEwen Chapel of First Baptist Church, 401 Gateway Ave. The artists will give a talk at 7 p.m. prior to the concert at 7:30. Admission is free.
The concert will feature poems from Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book," which McGrath recently set to music, as well as "Gitanjali," which features poems by Rabindranath Tagore. In the more popular vein, Otis and McGrath will also perform music from Disney's 1967 animated version of "The Jungle Book" as well as the musical "Just So."
"We loved the idea of featuring Kipling and Tagore in the same concert," McGrath says, "as they were contemporaries and both lived in India."
He explains that Tagore was a native of Bengali and Kipling, though English, was born in India and spent many years there.
"Though they were markedly different in terms of style and political views," McGrath continues, "there is enough commonality between them to create some interesting interplay between the works on our concert."
McGrath says his songs, which are influenced by classical and popular styles, are a natural fit for Otis.
"She sings in a very uncontrived way," McGrath says, "and she knows how to draw the audience into the story; there's never any sense of the barrier that 'classical' training sometimes places between singers and lay audiences."
Although Otis has appeared in musicals at the Chattanooga Theatre Centre, she says, "I don't have a 'classical voice' or 'musical theater voice' or 'choir voice.' I have my voice. While I use different techniques in different styles, the fundamentals are the same."