Shawn E Okpebholo: Songs in Flight
Cedille Records

Having earlier dedicated his creative energy to a work focused on Black suffering, Nigerian-American composer Shawn E. Okpebholo hesitated to take on another emotionally wrenching project when Martha Guth, the celebrated soprano and co-director of Sparks & Wiry Cries, pitched the idea of a song cycle based on the Freedom on the Move database. But after taking her 2021 call and familiarizing himself with the Cornell University archive of 30,000-plus newspaper ads for runaway slaves, Okpebholo felt an undeniable need to, in his words, “reaffirm the dignity and personhood of these lives.” Over the course of a year, Songs in Flight came to fruition, which we can now experience in its recorded form as a forty-three-minute work performed by vocalists Rhiannon Giddens, Karen Slack, Reginald Mobley, and Will Liverman and pianist Paul Sánchez. No account of the twelve-part cycle is complete without acknowledging the words Tsitsi Ella Jaji (who also contributed notes to the release booklet), Crystal Simone Smith, and Tyehimba Jess crafted for the settings.

Complementing it are art songs from four other Okpebholo cycles, two of which feature soprano saxophonist Julian Velasco and spotlight each Sánchez-partnered singer one at a time. As rewarding as these excerpts are, it's Songs in Flight that impresses as one of the most remarkable song cycles to have been created in recent times. Through Okpebholo's efforts, the humanity of these enslaved individuals is regained. The material is executed magnificently by the award-winning singers, who each become conduits for anguish, anger, and defiance but also hope, yearning, and desire.

The irony of the ads wasn't lost on the composer. In describing personal details about the runways and offering rewards for the recapture of persons who had fled to pursue freedom, the documents recognized the individuality of each and by implication their ineradicable value as people. Images of the ads appear alongside the song texts, such that a miniature portrait of a Black person in flight is visible next to the ad info. In replicating that gesture on the cover with the composer himself on the move, the image alludes to the ever-ongoing struggle to achieve liberation and equality. Many years separate the early records and ones that document current injustices, but an unbroken thread nonetheless exists between them. To that end, Faulkner's famous words, “The past is never dead; it's not even past,” are invoked multiple times in the release materials.

While Okpebholo's a classical composer, he's not averse to incorporating other styles, and in this case aspects of spirituals, folk tunes, elegies, and protest songs weave their way into the tapestry. As a composer, his voice is audacious, his choices arresting. Consider, for example, how startling the moment is when Sánchez's trudging piano unercuts Giddens' tremendous vocal in the setting of the spiritual “O, Freedom.” The gesture isn't random, however, but instead purposely designed to emphasize that liberation is always vulnerable to being sidelined. The first personalized portrait follows, with Liverman reciting the text of the ad for the escaped slave and Slack delivering the lyrics for “In Flight” with sensitivity and heartache. Giddens returns for “Mud Song” and its haunting lines, “Crocodile swims in the water / Crocodile takes a breath,” with a powerful parallel drawn between escaped slaves trying to move undetected and the crocodile's capacity for stealthy navigation. The singer gives voice to her tender side in the elegiac lullaby “Ahmaud” (named after Ahmaud Arbery, gunned down in 2020), whose impact is intensified by Okpebholo's quotation from the spiritual “Deep River.”

Whereas some songs feature one singer, “Jack (and Paul)” sees Mobley, Slack, and Liverman uniting for a powerful “field holler”; the trio also elevate the gospel-tinged “I Go by Robert” with soulful declarations and reunite for the declamatory dirge “Four Martins,” one being Trayvon Martin, who died in 2015 and whose killer, George Zimmerman, went “scot-free.” Other format changes arise: “Mariah Francis” alternates between Mobley's ad reading and Slack's impassioned vocalizing; sans piano, Slack and Liverman declaim in unison throughout “Matilda's Tom.”

March 2025