Weekly Music Roundup: Samora Pinderhughes, Lara Downes, and Andrew Bird

Week of April 6: This week, unintentional pandemic songs from M Ward, Andrew Bird, and Samora Pinderhughes; plus, a break from the day’s news.

 The Wonderfully Odd World Of Modern Memphis Soul, Revealed

Memphis, the city of the blues and Stax Records, has always punched above its weight as a source of music and musicians. But a new compilation called Stone Crush: Memphis Modern Soul 1977-1987 shines a light on some of the town’s lesser-known and slightly more recent soul artists. The results might be the perfect album for bopping around the home while you attempt to forget just how sick of your home you’re becoming. The “singing dentist” O.T.Sykes is too good to not mention here, and there’s plenty of funky guitar and gleaming R&B horns throughout. But my favorite track might be this one from Captain Fantastic And Starr Fleet called “Keep It To Yourself” (one of two tracks they have on the album). The playing is assured and the singing has a fun come-hither quality, but the thing I love most about it is the lo-fi sound. It’s as if Prince and Chic got together to make a record – before either of them really knew how. So there’s a goofy charm at play, but the soul quotient remains impressively high.

Pianist Lara Downes Reaches Into Black History For A New Version of “Motherless Child”

Lara Downes’s parents, a black father and Jewish mother, met at a Civil Rights sit-in. Her new album, Some Of These Days, is full of her own reconsidered versions of Civil Rights-era freedom songs and even earlier spirituals. She was supposed to have played some of them in our studio a few weeks ago but we’ll now have to wait for the pandemic to recede before that happens; fortunately, the album’s release went on as scheduled. Her striking opener is this version of “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child,” which begins (and ends) with a field recording of three women singing that beautiful old spiritual – in circumstances that were not so beautiful. As Downes writes, “I want to reach back to these singers and tell them that they are not forgotten. Their voices come to us from out of the past — a rural prison in the Jim Crow South. The sorrow in their song is rooted in the injustice and oppression of that specific place and time; but, that sorrow also belongs to the long arc of history.” When Downes’s piano first enters, it isn’t with a gentle harmonic backing, but with a wayward, angular version of the theme; then, as the singers continue, they seem to calm the piano down until it nestles into the song itself. 

M Ward’s New Album Is About Freedom Of Movement

In a striking example of art imitating life, even when it’s anticipating life, M Ward’s new album Migration Stories describes what the singer calls “a maybe-era where movement is free again.” M (Matt) Ward did not intend this to be a record about self-isolation in a time of global pandemic; the album was about the long-term story of human migration, the story of his own family (his grandfather crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico in the 20s), and the fraught implications of how we treat migrant people. But instead of getting on his soapbox, Ward created an almost impressionist collection of stories and character studies bound together by dream logic rather than headlines. And now those songs have accrued an added layer of meaning at a time when freedom of movement seems like a dream itself. The album’s opener, “Migration of Souls,” has a cosmic, almost floating folk sound, with wistful, whispery vocals and a spacey, reverbed production where stray moments of other instruments are briefly heard, and then move away. 

Andrew Bird’s New Song Is Unintentionally Timely

Singer, violinist, guitarist, whistler Andrew Bird has just released a new single called “Capital Crimes.” The song starts with him singing about giving people a test to see who lives and who dies; while he sings that, the video shows images of a lab processing medical test results. The combination of song and video goes right to our current pandemic predicament – except that isn’t what Bird had in mind. The song was written about capital punishment, and the IQ tests that were given to death row inmates. Those with low IQs were spared the death penalty; anything over 70 meant you’d be killed. “I thought this was a single-issue song,” Bird said in a statement, “until Matthew Siskin put this video together and made me realize that it’s far more universal than I thought.” The key line in the song might be “if I let go of your hand it would be murder,” he suggests. “The things that hold our society together are not really institutions and laws but everyday humanity and compassion. An acceptance that we are all in this together.” As for the song, there’s none of Bird’s trademark whistling, but lots of singing and violin, both bowed and plucked; and you can hear Bird’s love of West African music in the Saharan 6/8 rhythm, and then in the extended instrumental coda, in the plucked violin playing that echoes the West African ngoni (lute) sound. 

A Moody, Soulful Track By Samora Pinderhughes Takes On Added Meaning

Samora Pinderhughes is probably best known for his work as a writer/producer/performer on Common’s last album, although he’s also worked with Herbie Hancock, Robert Glasper and Sara Bareilles, among others. Like Common, his music has a strong current of social justice flowing through it – he is the first-ever Art for Justice/Soros Justice Fellow – and his new single, “Hold That Weight,” is an expression of solidarity with those people living at the margins of our society. And while it was written before the COVID-19 pandemic, he chose to release this track first because it deals with, as he writes on his Bandcamp page, “how this crisis has exposed some of the real inequalities in the American system; and how we’re all trying to figure out what it looks like to help and support one another during this crisis.” The music is built on a scaffold of interlocking electric guitars, with quietly insistent programmed beats and a rotating cast of keyboards. Pinderhughes’ voice never rises above a soft croon, and, especially in the final minute, seems to be unmoored from the rhythm beneath him. 

The song comes from Pinderhughes’ forthcoming EP called Black Spring, out on April 24.

Yael Naim Takes To The Streets Of Paris Hours Before They Close

The French-Israeli singer Yael Naim may not be a household name here in the States, but almost everyone would recognize her song “New Soul” from its use in a ubiquitous Apple television ad a few years back. Now she’s done a live version of her song “My Sweetheart” for the reliably great French video producers La Blogotheque. This video series, impeccably curated and exquisitely filmed, often features artists in live, one-take situations; and in Naim’s case, she performs on the eerily quiet streets of Paris, just hours before the French lockdown was implemented. It’s an I-love-you-but-I-have-to-leave song, which she delivers with a genuine smile as she walks down the street with a brass quintet providing unexpectedly full, rich sound. (The video’s opening shows the players taping the sheet music to each other’s backs so they could read their parts while walking.) And when she is joined by an 8-voice backing choir, which seems to materialize out of nowhere, it is totally charming and somehow also quite moving.