Spirituals and Freedom Songs from Lara Downes

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

At the beginning of this month Flipside Music released Some of These Days, the latest album of pianist Lara Downes. Consistent with prevailing Amazon.com practices, this recording is currently available only for streaming or MP3 download. In many ways the new album serves as a complement to Downes’ America Again album, which was released on October of 2016. However, while the earlier release consisted entirely of solo performances, the cover of Some of These Days credits “Lara Downes & Friends.” Those friends enable a diverse approach to arrangements of the selections, some composed and a few traditional. This makes for an innovative mix of spirituals and freedom songs, all of which can be taken as a reflection on the source for the America Again title, Langston Hughes. Indeed, the very title of the new album has its roots in the text of the African-American spiritual “Welcome Table.”

That title also finds its way to the final track of the album. This is Downes’ solo arrangement of “Some ’o These Days,” based, itself, on a spiritual arrangement originally composed by Florence Price for voice and piano. Price is the only composer on Some of These Days that had previously appeared on America Again. On that earlier release, Downes had played the first in a series of compositions entitled Fantasie nègre in E minor. Based on the spiritual “Sinner, please don’t let this harvest pass,” this composition for solo piano was completed in 1929 and revised in 1931. The new release follows up with a performance of the second piece in the series in the key of G minor, completed in 1932. (According to Price’s Wikipedia page, Downes gave the premiere performance of the last of the four pieces in this series this past November.)

Taken as a whole, all of the arrangements on Some of These Days are true to their respective sources, frequently bringing a new character perspective to familiar tunes. My favorite would have to be “Steal Away,” in which Downes partners with guitarist Toshi Reagon, who also sings the text. However, this is very much a “meeting of minds” partnership, since Downes weaves into the spiritual tune a few of the key motifs encountered in the third movement of Charles Ives’ second piano sonata. That sonata was given the title “Concord, Mass., 1840–60;” and each movement is named for individuals from Concord associated with transcendentalist philosophy. The third movement is devoted to Bronson Alcott and Louisa May Alcott (with a clear nod to Ludwig van Beethoven and possibly Richard Wagner).

The album concludes with an “appendix” in the form of a conversation between Downes and Jacqueline Woodson, which addresses many of the cultural factors associated with the music presented in the preceding tracks. About half a decade ago, Downes curated a series of programs under the rubric The Artist Sessions. Each of these amounted to a conversation with another musician interleaved with performances. This was an engaging series, due in no small part to Downes’ skills as an interviewer in making sure that the discussion was based on the guest, rather than the interviewer! Given the cultural context of the selections for Some of These Days, that conversation makes for an engaging and informative development of contextual background.