Week of Jan. 18: This week, songs for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day by Moira Smiley, Michael Leonhart and JSWISS, and a Billie Holiday cover.
PREMIERE: Black Loves Matter - Moira Smiley’s Gripping New Version Of “Oh Susannah”
Vocalist and composer Moira Smiley leads the vocal ensemble called VOCO, tours with Tune-Yards, and has released solo records as well. Her next album will be called In Our Voices; and it picks up where her 2018 album Unzip The Horizon left off. That LP dealt with bumping up “against my culture's limited ideas of what a female voice should sound like, and sing about”; the songs on this album tackle other big, pressing issues. Today we premiere her totally recast version of the famous Stephen Foster song “Oh Susannah,” one of the most familiar songs in American music history. But the version we’ve grown up with is a sanitized one – the original song, from 1848, has some shockingly racist language. So working with the Canadian “queen of soul” Dawn Pemberton, Smiley reconstructs the song “to celebrate Black love and life.” The video is drawn from a 1949 documentary called Palmour Street : A Study in Family Life, and provides a hopeful counterpart to the new song’s melancholy tale of two Black people who are in love but are not free to be with each other.
The album In Our Voices comes out on February 19.
Black History and Culture Celebrated In Michael Leonhart and JSWISS’s “Blackout”
Rapper JSWISS isn’t waiting for Black History Month to remind everyone of the contributions of African-Americans to our culture. “Blackout” is the opening track on the collaborative EP The Alchemy from Grammy-winning trumpeter/arranger/composer Michael Leonhart and the New York-based rapper, and at one point he seems dismissive of Black History Month as a token effort, when appreciation of Black culture should have been there all along. “No backdoor, I’m trying to get it from the front,” he raps in the song’s chorus; “respect for my people, we shoulda had it from the jump.” Leonhart had tapped JSWISS to appear with his 15-piece big band in his series at the Jazz Standard, and that worked out well enough that the two began writing songs together in the past year. “Blackout” has a skeletal, perhaps trap-inflected beat for much of its duration, but brief stabs of sampled horns and a lyrical string section at the end are reminders of Leonhart’s arranging skills; meanwhile, JSWISS weaves a dizzying web of references and allusions to great African-Americans, in many fields, as a way of demanding equal recognition for Black culture.
New Orleans’ Past and Present Come Together in Cha Wa’s Music
Cha Wa mixes contemporary New Orleans funk with the much older tradition of the Mardi Gras Indians. In case you’re not familiar with them, the Mardi Gras Indians are mostly Black – there are many stories of how this tradition came about, but the one I heard many years ago was that African-Americans were not allowed to march and drum and sing at Mardi Gras, but Native Americans were, so the Black community simply adopted Native American garb and claimed to be Mardi Gras Indians. However it happened, this important NOLA tradition has its own music and dialect: “Cha Wa” basically means “here we come.” And here comes a new album by this band, due on April 2, called My People. On Friday they released the title track, full of verses that point out continuing inequities in America, but also choruses that promise hope for the future - and perhaps a party for right now.
Andra Day Channels Billie Holiday On New Single and Upcoming Film
The United States vs. Billie Holiday is a biopic coming on February 26 that Lee Daniels directed and Suzan-Lori Parks wrote. Together, they tell the story of Billie Holiday’s years-long struggle with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which apparently wanted to imprison her on drug charges because of her insistence on singing racially-charged songs like “Strange Fruit.” In the role of Holiday, the Grammy-nominated R&B singer Andra Day makes her feature-acting debut, and as a teaser for her film performance, she’s just released her recording of “All of Me,” the oft-covered jazz standard that Holiday famously recorded in 1941. The arrangement is bigger and slicker than the original, and lacks the incomparable Lester Young’s sax solo, but Andra Day shows that she’s up for the part with a convincing performance.
Ana Egge and Dick Connette Look For A New Path Forward in “This Time”
New York folk singer Ana Egge has collaborated with veteran producer/arranger Dick Connette on a heartfelt new single called “This Time,” whose lyrics mix familiar phrases from American history with a warning that the familiar path of history is “a dead end.” “Over and over is over,” Egge sings, accompanying herself initially on guitar; Dick Connette, who spent years reframing old American folk and popular songs with the late singer Sonya Cohen in their essential band Last Forever, worked on the song’s bridge. Meanwhile, the redoubtable Rob Moose (of yMusic, Taylor Swift, Paul Simon, etc.) adds strings and Ana is joined by backing vocals from Lucy Wainwright Roche and J. Hoard to suggest an idea gaining strength and momentum.