Weekly Music Roundup: Bruce Hornsby + yMusic, Julia Holter, and Amaro Freitas
Week of March 4: This week, seafaring music from Bruce Hornsby & yMusic; Julia Holter in an evening mood; and the inventive Brazilian pianist Amaro Freitas. Plus, Brittany Davis' mix of positivity and struggle; Leeds-based sitarist and composer Jasdeep Singh Degun; and Ani DiFranco’s urgent, rocking “Baby Doe.”
Bruce Hornsby + yMusic = BrhyM
Singer/songwriter/pianist Bruce Hornsby has been exploring the sounds and textures of modern classical music in his most recent albums, and his new one, Deep Sea Vents, is credited to Brhym, his collaboration with the contemporary chamber music ensemble yMusic. Hornsby still has the melodic sensibility that made his song “The Way It Is” an inescapable hit in the late 80s; and yMusic has plenty of experience in the pop world, having played with Paul Simon, Emily King, and many others. Together, as Brhym, they have created a loose concept record about water and the creatures that live in it, and the ways in which we treat (or mostly mistreat) it. The songs largely forgo a regular band sound in favor of the chattering flutes, swirling strings, and mellow horns of chamber music; but Hornsby often layers and occasionally processes his vocals, as he does in the opening of “The Wake of St. Brendan.” The song, inspired by the legendary 6th century Irish monk’s voyages – and by the late Tim Severin, whose re-creation that voyage became an international bestseller in the 70s – has an abstract quality until Hornsby’s piano enters, ushering in the album’s most memorable chorus.
Brittany Davis Releases Highly Charged Image Issues
We premiered a song from Brittany Davis back in 2022; “I Choose To Live” was a stirring introduction to a blind, Black, non-binary singer who has wrestled with a lifetime of adversity. Their new LP is called Image Issues, and it continues their musical mix of rock, rap, and soul, as well as their lyrical mix of positivity and struggle. The album is shot through with spoken excerpts and recordings from Davis’s life, documentary-style; but the songs, when they come, hit hard. “Never” is a good example: a rough set of rapped verses interspersed with a transformative, sung chorus with a soulful, almost gospel flavor.
Julia Holter’s Aptly-Named “Evening Mood”
Julia Holter’s songs have long occupied a gray area between pop and art music. As likely to work with adventurous rockers as with contemporary classical musicians, she has shown herself to have a composer’s ear for unusual textures. And there’s plenty of that in her new single, “Evening Mood.” Hazy layers of vocals swirl over a rhythm section that seems more about the feeling of movement than the actual sound of it – and it turns out the basis of the song is a heavily processed heartbeat. Meanwhile, the combination of electronic keys and acoustic clarinet create something that’s almost orchestral, but not quite. The whole thing has a beautiful, twilit quality. Holter’s new album, Something In The Room She Moves, comes out on March 22.
Ani DiFranco Can’t Wait To Release “Baby Roe”
Ani DiFranco is busy. The pioneering figure in the DIY movement still runs the Righteous Babe record label she founded more than 30 years ago. She’s written a best-selling memoir and a recent children’s book in addition to hundreds of songs. And she is current starring as Persephone in Broadway’s Hadestown; so yeah, Ani DiFranco is busy. She’s not scheduled to release her next album, her 23rd, until later this year. But with women’s access to reproductive health care once again becoming a huge issue, she couldn’t hold off on the release of her single, “Baby Roe.” “I think we might be wrong about all of it,” she begins, darkly, while playing some of the choppiest, most percussive guitar of her career. The song gives off a distinct sense of barely suppressed fury – until finally it isn’t suppressed anymore.
A Timeless Melody Played Anew By Jasdeep Singh Degun
Leeds, England-based sitarist and composer Jasdeep Singh Degun earned universal acclaim for his opera Orpheus, a 2022 remake of the 1607 opera of the same name by Claudio Monteverdi. Now, he’s released the “Lament” from that project in a beautiful arrangement for sitar, tabla, violin, cello, and piano. Monteverdi’s original melody was written before the standardization of the Western equal-tempered scale, and Degun found it translated well into the raga scale Sindhi Bhairavi. The performance is all the more haunting for its restraint, and the niceties of tuning are decidedly secondary to the impact of Monteverdi’s timeless song of loss.
A Musical Journey Through The Amazon, From Amaro Freitas
Brazilian pianist Amaro Freitas has released an album called Y’Y (an Indigenous Amazonian word for water or river) which is full of sonic surprises and gifted guests. Shabaka Hutchings plays flute on the title track, and harpist Brandee Younger and guitarist Jeff Parker are among the other musicians making appearances. But at the center of it all is Freitas, who creates a new kind of piano music, incorporating African rhythms, Indigenous imagery, and inventive ways of treating the instrument. This track, for example, called “Uiara (Encantada da Agua),” evokes the sound of the Amazon’s extraordinary pink river dolphins (called “uiara” by some Amazonians) by using e-bows, the electromagnetic devices used by electric guitarists to produce a sustained sound, on a few strings inside the piano. Other strings have adhesive tape on them to roughen and distort the sound. The piece gains speed as it goes along, like a river rushing through its channel, but Freitas’s right hand is continually spraying notes in the upper register that suggest the threatened dolphins swimming.
