Lara Downes (& friends): Holes in the Sky
Portrait

On earlier releases, Lara Downes celebrated Billie Holiday, Leonard Bernstein, and even America itself. On Holes in the Sky, the pianist shifts the focus to female artists and does so in a most expansive and encompassing manner. Works by contemporary composers, among them Elena Ruehr, Georgia Stitt, and Mary Kouyoumdjian, are presented alongside ones by earlier figures such as Florence Price, Hazel Scott, Lil Hardin Armstrong, and Billie Holiday; songs by iconic singer-songwriters Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell appear, and Downes also augments solo piano performances with ones featuring singers and instrumentalists. The result is a recording of exceptional quality; though Downes conceived Holes in the Sky as a project designed to celebrate women, it ultimately acts as a celebration of the artistic spirit in general and the benefits that accrue from a vision rooted in values of community and positivity.

It would a mistake to misread Downes's intentions, by the way, as in any way anti-male; on America Again, she included material by Gershwin, Ellington, Copland, and Joplin, among others, and For Lenny, of course, wholly dedicated its set-list to Bernstein material and pieces others composed with him in mind. For Holes in the Sky, Downes wanted to shine the brightest possible light on female artists and accentuate how incredibly vital their contributions have been and continue to be, in musical culture and beyond. Both For Lenny and Holes in the Sky are credited to Downes and friends, the former augmenting the leader's playing with contributions from four guests, the even more community-minded latter featuring a larger array of artists, including pianist Simone Dinnerstein, cellist Ifetayo Ali-Landing, violinist Rachel Barton Pine, and singers Rhiannon Giddens, Hila Plitmann, and Alicia Hall Moran.

On this superbly curated collection, Downes shows herself to be many things, an extraordinary pianist, of course, but also a musicologist and historian. In celebrating the artistry of women composers and performers from multiple eras, she exemplifies an incredible generosity of spirit that goes far beyond what we typically encounter in an artist. Adding to the recording's appeal, eight of the twenty-two pieces are world premieres. Though that number might suggest an overlong recording, it never feels so when most pieces are in the two- to three-minute range, the longest, a hefty six, 2017's panoramic meditation Notes of Gratitude by 2010 Pulitzer Prize recipient and multiple Grammy Award winner Jennifer Higdon.

Downes shares with another of my favourite pianists, Bruce Levingston, many qualities: each is an exquisite and poised player possessing immaculate technique who brings a sensitive handling of touch, tempo, and dynamics to every performance. Words such as unerring and captivating come to mind as they play, the feeling as a listener being that you're witnessing a musical work being presented as close to definitively as possible. Ample evidence of her solo piano artistry appears on the release, from the gorgeous Memory Mist, a plaintive reverie written in 1949 by Florence Price, the first African-American woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer, to the blues-drenched “Willow Weep for Me,” composed by Ann Ronell in 1932. One of the more interesting things about such performances is how time effectively collapses: Downes's sensitive, attentive renderings make them feel as fresh as something created yesterday rather than a half-century ago.

Amazingly, Judy Collins composed “Albatross” in 1967 (one of the first songs she ever wrote) and recorded it for her album Wildflowers. Inspired by a visit with Joan Baez at her house in Carmel, the song, outfitted in a beautiful vocals-and-piano arrangement, finds Collins in incredibly fine form, her voice sounding decades younger than one would expect from someone born in 1939. With Collins recounting the scene in evocative detail (“The lady comes to the gate dressed in lavender and leather / Looking North to the sea she finds the weather fine”), the song's yearning melodies, supported so magnificently by Downes's piano, stir the soul as powerfully as they did so many years ago. How fitting that the sisterhood Collins celebrated in 1967 should be celebrated again in this moving performance with Downes.

On the solo piano front, pieces by Clarice Assad (A Tide of Living Water, 2010), Paula Kimper (Venus Projection, 1990), Paola Prestini (Morning on the Limpopo; Matlou Women, 2005), and Marika Takeuchi (Bloom, 2018) are so ideally suited to Downes's style, one could be excused for thinking they were written expressly for her, and reflecting the breadth of her musicological awareness, Downes chose Joni Mitchell's 1965 song “Favorite Color” for the collection. Dinnerstein and Downes team up for an entrancing treatment of Meredith Monk's propulsive Ellis Island (1981), Dinnerstein also a recent collaborator with A Far Cry on last year's pairing of Glass and Bach piano concertos, Circles.

Predictably, the highlights are plentiful, so a brief overview of the other selections will have to suffice. “Dream Variation” (1959), composed by Margaret Bonds and set to text by Langston Hughes, is elevated by a beautifully nuanced vocal from Giddens, while Hila Plitmann's tremulous delivery heightens the emotional impact of “Farther from The Heart,” composed by Eve Beglarian in 2016 with words by Jane Bowles. “Arrorro Mi Niña” sees a hushed Magos Herrera joining Downes on a stirring traditional arranged by the pianist, the Mexican singer also a recent collaborator with Brooklyn Rider on its wonderful 2018 release Dreamers. Recalling Downes's 2015 A Billie Holiday Songbook release, “Don't Explain” distances itself from the earlier release's piano-only format when Leyla McCalla sings and adds subtle dashes of cello to the 1944 classic. The album's also distinguished by the pairing of violinist Pine with Downes on Libby Larsen's Blue Piece (2010), while the pianist, cellist Ali-Landing, and The Girls of Musicality cap the release with a fine rendering of the traditional “All the Pretty Little Horses.”

The booklet accompanying the release is noteworthy for including a reflective essay by Downes that, among other things, clarifies the origin of the album title (taken from words Georgia O'Keeffe wrote as a twenty-nine-year-old), and an interview the pianist conducted with Judy Collins. In a perfect world, mini-bios for the composers and performers featured on the release would have been included, though internet searches make obtaining background info for a project such as this one an easy enough task.

April 2019