Performing for a rapt audience at the OK Theatre on Friday night, the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble evoked the spirits of two multiracial towns in “From Maxville to Vanport,” a program of songs and short films.

The project, a collaboration between a team of artists, musicians and historians –– including Gwendolyn Trice of the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center in Joseph –– is a community-guided effort to unearth the stories of Black Oregonians, whose histories have been routinely erased from dominant narratives.

The ensemble’s vision for inclusive and personal storytelling led them from Portland to Wallowa County and back again, where they spoke to former residents and descendants of Vanport and Maxville, as well as current community members. According to the artistic team, “it was essential for their narratives to be portrayed authentically and respectfully in this project.”

Maxville, a former logging town nestled in the woods of northern Wallowa County, was founded by the Bowman-Hicks Lumber Co. in 1923. Bowman-Hicks was based in Missouri and imposed the same regulations of segregation on residents of Maxville that were mandated by Jim Crow laws in the American south.

Black and white residents worked and recreated together, despite the company’s rules. In the program’s song, “Stacked-Deck Hand,” poet S. Renee Mitchell writes, “in a company town where racism boiled quiet, simmered slow/interracial interactions formed friendly attractions where blacks and whites tested the boundaries of Jim Crow.”

Trice has devoted more than a decade to collecting artifacts and oral histories from former residents of Maxville. Her father, Lucky Trice, was a logger at Maxville in its early days. Trice’s research was integral to the ensemble’s project and provided a rural perspective on the Black experience in Oregon.

Vanport was built on the banks of the Columbia River in 1942 on land that is now occupied by north Portland’s Delta Park and the Portland International Raceway. Like Maxville, Vanport was home to a multicultural community of migrant workers who navigated race and class at a time when the Ku Klux Klan in Oregon held one of the largest memberships in the west. The town, which housed around 40,000 people, was destroyed by a catastrophic flood in 1948.

Vocalist Marilyn Keller, an alum of several performance ensembles and a fixture in the Pacific Northwest jazz scene, sang lyrics written by poet S. Renee Mitchell and arranged by Ezra Weiss. Filmmaker Kalimah Abioto’s short films, “Marjorie” and “Water” allowed the audience to visualize the intimate histories of Maxville and Vanport from the perspective of individual residents.

“From Maxville to Vanport” will premiere in Portland on May 26 at the Alberta Rose Theater.

The Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center’s traveling exhibit, “Timber Culture,” opens at Trillium School in Portland this month and will head to Baker City in May.