Lara Downes’ Full Album of Black Composers

courtesy of Shuman Associates

Readers may recall that, this past April, I reported on pianist Lara Downes’ latest project organized around a series of EP releases. The title of the project was Rising Sun Music; and the objective was, as I put it in my April report, to “shed a bright light on the music and stories of Black composers over the past 200 years.” About a month ago Downes released a full CD entitled New Day Begun. Seven of the fifteen tracks were taken from those EP releases; and, as described on the Amazon.com Web page for the recording, the entire album “resounds as a celebration of heritage, a cry for freedom, a call to action, and a promise to the next generation.”

Six of the album’s fifteen tracks are world premiere recordings. Ironically, one of them is by a composer that died in 1972. Margaret Bonds was represented on two of the Rising Sun Music EPs, Remember Me To Harlem and Phenomenal Women; and her setting of Langston Hughes’ poem “When the dove enters in” is sung by bass-baritone Davóne Tines with Downes accompanying. This is definitely a high point of the album, due in no small part to the clarity that Tines brings to Hughes’ contribution to the overall theme of a “new day.” The other world premiere tracks represent an impressive diversity of contemporary composers: Carlos Simon, Leslie Adams, Lettie Alston, Nkeiru Okoye, and Daniel Bernard Roumain.

Three of the tracks have been arranged by Jeremy Siskind. These include popular songs from two different generations, “Love Will Find A Way” by Eubie Blake and “A Change Is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke. Siskind also arranged Abbey Lincoln’s “Caged Bird” for violin and piano; and Regina Carter joined Downes to perform this arrangement. Other familiar names among the composers include Duke Ellington (“Come Sunday” from his Black, Brown and Beige suite), Florence Price (“Adoration,” first published in The Organ Portfolio but performed on this album with Downes accompanying oboist Titus Underwood), and Hazel Scott (“Peace of Mind”).

The description on the Amazon Web page also observes, “As we emerge from the darkness of pandemic and unrest to face a new day, Lara Downes curates a hopeful, joyful program of works by Black American composers ….” Anyone that tries to follow the news on a global scale has probably wondered, even if only briefly, whether that “darkness of pandemic” was the result of an even greater darkness that may be a matter of a breakdown of governance on a global scale, possibly as the result of an Internet culture that seems to prioritize marketing over any other value. The rhetoric of New Day Begun reminds us gently that there are other priorities in life, even if they are currently buried in the darkness of precedes the dawn of that new day.