Will Liverman & Jonathan King: Show Me The Way
Cedille Records

For the title of his new album, baritone Will Liverman shortened its opening song “You Showed Me the Way,” but, in fact, the latter better encapsulates the theme of the project. While this terrific eighty-eight-minute release does celebrate American song, it's more pointedly a celebration of female composers and women who've inspired the Grammy-winning singer. Accompanied by pianist Jonathan King, Liverman honours his mother Terry, who sings on Alma Bazel Androzzo's “If I Can Help Somebody,” pioneering composers, including Amy Beach and Florence Price, and present-day innovators such as Sarah Kirkland Snider and Kamala Sankaram. He also pays tribute to women who've had a powerful impact on his development, among them mentor Renée Fleming. In all cases, the feeling imparted is one of deep gratitude for all of the ways these figures have brought him to where he is now.

The release builds on the acclaim Liverman's received for his work onstage and on record. Earlier recitals were issued in 2020, Whither Must I Wander, and a year later, Dreams of a New Day: Songs by Black Composers, the former pairing him with King and the latter Paul Sanchez. Live, Liverman's profile received a major boost when he recently appeared in The Metropolitan Opera's productions of Fire Shut Up In My Bones and X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X. Whereas the Met productions are full-scale, Show Me The Way brings things down to an intimate level when most of it features nothing but voice and piano. The singer's smartly enhanced the release, however, by strategically working in appearances by a small cast of singers and instrumentalists. In addition to his mother and Fleming, vocal contributions come from mezzo-soprano J'Nai Bridges and soprano Nicole Cabell, and violinist Lady Jess and cellist Tahirah Whittington guest with Cabell on an affecting treatment of Beach's impassioned duet “Ah, love is a jasmine vine” from her 1932 opera Cabildo, op. 149.

Recorded during summer 2023, the album instantly seduces with its opening number, “You Showed Me the Way,” a haunting rendition of a 1937 song co-credited to Ella Fitzgerald and the Chick Webb Orchestra. Delivered at a sultry tempo, the bluesy classic proves a tremendous showcase for Liverman's artistry, especially when his smooth, velvety baritone feels like he's channeling Nat King Cole and Johnny Hartman. Here too is immediate evidence that in King Liverman's got the ideal partner, someone attentive to his every vocal nuance and sensitively attuned to his timing and dynamics.

Two songs by Florence Price enhance the recording, the warmth of her music in “I Grew a Rose” helping to illuminate Paul Laurence Dunbar's words and “Songs to the Dark Virgin” an expression of romantic yearning set in 1935 to words by Langston Hughes. As he does throughout the release, Liverman honours the composer with vocal interpretations that are aligned to the material's intended meaning. The cycle Four Songs collects settings Margaret Bonds wrote to poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. To strengthen the formal unity of the composition, Bonds sequenced the four poems to create a narrative that progresses from a protagonist's loss of love to the gradual reclaiming of self and acceptance of a new reality. Having mourned love lost in “Even in the Moment,” the protagonist exchanges despair for determination in “I Know My Mind” and then relinquishes others to focus on the love found within herself in “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed.”

Balancing older works are new ones, with six pieces world premiere recordings, among them Jasmine Barnes's A Sable Jubilee, Rene Orth's A Prayer, Sankaram's Spell to Turn the World Around, Libby Larsen's Machine Head: Ted Burke Poems, and Snider's Everything That Ever Was. With a libretto by Tesia Kwarteng, Barnes's three-part work celebrates the richness of Black lives, excitedly and even at times ecstatically. Liverman joyfully rides the waves of Barnes's music during the rousing “Inspiration,” after which “Luxury” engenders a dramatic shift when its tone is tender and contemplative. The closing movement, like the second, follows without pause, “Elevation” reflecting the transcendence of Black experience in writing that's similarly uplifting and inspired. With Bridges joining him, the emotional impact of Orth's A Prayer escalates when the singers give impassioned voice to Sara Teasdale's poem. At times singing in unison, at others completing each other's lines, the two blend ravishingly on this plaintive supplication. Kathryn Smith's poem in Sankaram's Spell to Turn the World Around addresses the brutal destruction wrought by wildfire devastation, with King augmenting sparse notes with plucks from inside the piano to create an eerie, disorienting soundscape.

At almost twenty minutes, Larsen's eclectic Machine Head: Ted Burke Poems is the album's longest piece, with each of its three parts mirroring the character of its text. Jazz and blues inflections work their way into the music much as they do in the American poet's writing. “Rexall” places us near a ‘50s drug store where a cigarette-smoking father and comic book-desiring son wait in a car for the return of the boy's mom. The pensive “My Father Intercepts My Trio to Another Planet” revisits his childhood and his imagining of an old cardboard refrigerator box as a rocket ship, race car, and airplane. Energized by comparison is “Machine Head,” animated by a driving bass piano pattern. With both in superb vocal form, Liverman and Fleming elevate Snider's elegiac Everything That Ever Was with a magnificent rendering of Tracy K. Smith's words.

April 2024