Castle of our Skins & Samantha Ege: Homage
Lorelt

Close your eyes while listening to Homage and you might imagine yourself attending a thoughtfully programmed chamber concert of solo piano, string quartet, piano trio, and piano quintet performances. The debut album by Boston-based Castle of our Skins (COOS) pairs the COOS quartet (violinists Gabriela Diaz and Matthew Vera, violist Ashleigh Gordon, and cellist Francesca McNeeley) with British pianist Samantha Ege in an inspired hour-long set featuring works by five Black composers from Africa and the Diaspora. A concerted effort has been made in recent days to shine a greater light on Black composers, but it's something COOS has been doing since violist Ashleigh Gordon and composer Anthony R. Green established the organization a decade ago. Ege is a fitting partner for Homage as she too has been championing the music of composers of African descent and women composers. Before Homage, for example, Ege issued the albums Fantasi Negre; The Piano Music of Florence Price and Black Renaissance Woman: Piano Music by Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, Nora Holt, Betty Jackson King, and Helen Hagan.

Designed to honour Harlem Renaissance composer William L. Dawson on his ninetieth birthday, the new album's titular work was written in 1990 by his female student Zenobia Powell Perry. The release's other single-movement piece, Moorish Dance, op. 55, was composed eighty-six years earlier by English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912), while Spiritual Fantasy no. 12 (1988), a blues-tinged, Negro Spiritual-based string quartet by Frederick C. Tillis (1930-2020) is of a more recent vintage. The other multi-part works, Safika: Three Tales of African Migration (2011) and the piano trio Soweto (1987) by, respectively, South African composer Bongani Ndodana-Breen (b. 1975) and Virginia-born Undine Smith Moore (1904-89), consider apartheid from distinct historical vantage points. Whereas Safika addresses the dispossession, migration, and translocation of Black South Africans, Soweto explores both Moore's Southern upbringing and that of her South African brothers and sisters.

We start with Ndodana-Breen's three-movement Safika, the vitality of the piano quintet performance evident from the first note and thematic statement. Rhythmic drive propels the strings and piano as interlocking percussive patterns reveal a pronounced African influence. No one would mistake the writing for Steve Reich's; even so, there's an insistence to Ndodana-Breen's patterns that in places invites the reference. Naturally softer and less dynamically charged, the central movement unfolds with a delicate to-and-fro between the piano and strings, the music hushed, peaceful, and serene until dance gestures emerge to generate momentum. Following a solo cello intro, the rousing third part grows animated as the arrangement expands and dance patterns and singing melodies interlock. Like Safika, Moore's three-part Soweto begins on an insistently energetic note with intense rhythmic flourishes and animated interactions. Unlike Safika, the central movement in the piano trio retains the animation of its opening part and if anything ups the ante with aggressive gestures; soon enough, however, the intensity subsides for expressions of pensive lyricism by all three participants. Soweto again departs from the structure of Safika by fashioning its third movement as a lament that exudes the tenderness of a hymn.

Perry's compact Homage draws from one of Dawson's favourite spirituals “I Been ‘Buked and I Been Scorned,” its lamenting character permeating the work's opening and leading into the thickening expression that soon develops. A bluesy quality haunts the piece as it ruminates between declarative and introspective passages and ventures boldly into chromaticism and arresting chordal combinations. In slightly more than four minutes, Perry manages to combine elements of African American and European sound worlds in strikingly seamless manner. At eleven minutes, the album's other solo piano piece, Coleridge-Taylor's Moorish Dance, op. 55, is more wide-ranging. After a suspenseful intro, the piece blossoms into a dramatic statement teeming with rippling flourishes and blues-tinged phrasings. Ege's virtuosic rendering is wholly attentive to the composition's mood swings and its many theatrical twists and turns.

April 2023