Theo Bleckmann & The Westerlies: This Land
Westerlies Records

Collaborations either reduce each participant to a less-than-satisfying mishmash or convert the strengths of each into something mutually enhancing. Clearly falling into the latter category is This Land, which works to the advantage of both Theo Bleckmann and The Westerlies (trumpeters Riley Mulherkar and Chloe Rowlands, trombonists Andy Clausen and Willem de Koch). In Bleckmann's case, his singing benefits from its pairing with the group's exemplary horn playing; the brass quartet likewise benefits when a fresh new dimension's added to its heretofore purely instrumental presentation.

The seeds for This Land were planted when the parties convened during June 2018 at Yellow Barn in Putney, Vermont to work on songs of resistance and refuge, with the material formally laid down at New York's Lethe Lounge in August 2020. It's hardly coincidental that a release emphasizing protest movement-related songs would crystallize during a particularly tumultuous period in American history. Never has it seemed more imperative to confront issues of race, gun violence, and political malfeasance than now.

Considerable thought went into the choice of material. In addition to originals by group members and Bleckmann, songs by Joni Mitchell, Woody Guthrie, Bertolt Brecht, and others appear. However much they're separated temporally, geographically, and stylistically, their voices unite in calling out injustice in its many forms. Shooting incidents at the Pulse nightclub and the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the Underground Railroad, plaintive hymns, and a union jingle add to the release's eclectic makeup.

Establishing an anti-violence and anti-war tone at the outset is “The Fiddle and the Drum,” the original a cappella presentation by Mitchell on 1969's Clouds re-cast as a vocals-and-horns lament. Here, as in the songs that follow, Bleckmann's delivery is smooth and direct, his enunciation clear and free of needless embellishment. The horns augment his voice with carefully calibrated expressions that complement the singer rather than compete with or overpower. Brecht's “Das Bitten der Kinder” (“Plead of the Children”) appears in two parts, the first a recitation of the 1951 poem translated into English by Bleckmann and the second the original text spoken-sung in German accompanied by Paul Dessau's music.

Written shortly after the Pulse shooting in Orlando, Bleckmann's mournful “Another Holiday” applies a domestic lens to convey the devastation wrought by such incidents. As haunting albeit in a different way is his arrangement of the traditional “Wade in the Water,” a spiritual work song from the Underground Railroad, in which the hushed vocal intones amidst an atmospheric, horns-generated rumble. Though Clausen wrote his heartfelt “Grandmar” to memorialize his late grandmother, its meaning is complicated by his admission that it also meditates “on the challenges of loving someone with whom you have vehement political disagreements.” Paired with Mulherkar's elegiac music for “Looking Out” is spoken text derived from FDR's Executive Order 9066, which had to do with the prescribing of specific areas as military zones and facilitated the incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry (the order's contemporary resonance is obvious).

This Land ends with a sincere reading of Phil Kline's “Thoughts and Prayers,” which the composer wrote for the five during their Yellow Barn residency and which drew for inspiration from the words of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School survivor Emma Gonzalez (it also includes the Ghandi-esque lines “We will have to be the change we've all been waiting for / It is time for us to be the change we need to see”). Interspersed throughout are spirited renditions by The Westerlies alone of Guthrie's “Two Good Men,” “The Jolly Banker,” “I Ain't Got No Home in This World Anymore,” and “Tear the Fascists Down,” the treatments offering rousing reminders of what makes the group special.

February 2021