Lara Downes & Friends: Some of These Days
Lara Downes

Lara Downes's versatility is routinely captured on her releases, with the pianist as comfortable performing the music of the Schumanns as Bernstein. That being said, she's never sounded more at home than on Some of These Days. Even without knowing anything about her personal connection to these spirituals and freedom songs, one would still imagine them pieces she grew up hearing long before her professional career began. Her ties to the material do, it turns out, run deep, with the release featuring songs her Jewish mother and African-American father (true to the spirit of the times, they met at a San Francisco sit-in in the late ‘60s) sang during the Civil Rights Movement and others that originated at the plantation fields and along the Underground Railroad.

As is typically the case with a Downes release, multiple bases are covered, in this case gospel, R&B, and folk but classical also in the inclusion of material by African-American composers Florence Price and Margaret Bonds. Downes's generosity of spirit is well known, from the organizations she supports to the guest musicians she regularly partners with, and in featuring collaborations with Toshi Reagon, Alphonso Horne, PUBLIQuartet, The Chapin Sisters, and others Some of These Days is no exception; enhancing the presentation, solo piano settings appear alongside those with guests.

Downes has long championed the power and resilience of the human spirit. In that regard, many of the songs here were sung by souls longing for social justice, equality, and liberation, yet they also express hope for change and the enduring belief in its possibility. She herself states in notes included with the album, “These freedom songs give me something to hold on to. … They express the full range of human feelings and conditions: the protest against oppression, the cry for freedom, the hope for salvation.”

Setting the tone for the recording is a stirring treatment of “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child,” where a crackle-drenched field recording from June 4, 1939 of Clifford Reed, Julia Griffin, and Johnny Mae Medlock singing at a rural Florida penitentiary blends with Downes's heartfelt rumination. Though the song's connection to slavery is clear, it resonates today too in the anguish experienced by migrant parents and children upon separation. A mashup of a rather different kind follows in a rendering of “Steal Away” that sees Reagon's soulful singing and tremolo guitar shadings merge with Charles Ives' Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840–60, the dignified result a genuinely Ivesian creation.

Though a mere two minutes long, H. T. Burleigh's “Deep River” movingly couples piano with PUBLIQuartet's strings. The lilt of the traditional “We Shall Overcome” proves affecting when performed sweetly and sincerely by The Chapin Sisters (Abigail and Lily) and Downes, and she also duets with trumpeter Alphonso Horne on a pretty rendition of “My Lord, What A Mornin'” and with violinist Adam Abeshouse on a stirring version of Clarence Cameron White's “Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen.”

Price, the first black female composer ever performed by a major American orchestra (the Chicago Symphony premiered her Symphony in E Minor at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933), is well-represented by two pieces, including “Fantasie Negre No. 2,” a wide-ranging, seven-minute mini-concerto that offers a compelling account of her gifts. Bonds, the first black soloist to perform with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, is represented by three settings, the first, the brooding meditation “Troubled Water,” given a dynamic solo performance that evokes at times the image of Duke Ellington playing an early piece in the spirit of "Black and Tan Fantasy." The second, the haunting spiritual “Hold On,” brings the voices of the nine-member ensemble Musicality and the strings of PUBLIQuartet into the fold for a song promoting endurance in its “Keep your hand on the plow, hold on” refrain. Aside from being a lovely piece of music, “The Bells,” a movement from Bonds' Spiritual Suite based on “Peter, Go Ring dem Bells,” is noteworthy for being recorded here for the first time.

As striking as such collaborations are, the solo performances prove as powerful when Downes's artistry is presented with nothing else competing for attention. A folk song such as “Down by the Riverside” is never less than mesmerizing when heard in this single-instrument arrangement, especially when its melodies are rousingly expressed. Well-known for the version recorded by Nina Simone in 1967, Billy Taylor's “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free” receives an uplifting solo interpretation where glimpses of stride can be heard sneaking in if you listen closely.

July 2020