Monica Williams: Within Us All
Heart Dance Records

A fine follow-up to 2018's Journey of Tears, Within Us All is an uplifting New Age collection by flutist extraordinaire Monica Williams. While the album's material celebrates “the better angels of our nature” (words used by Lincoln in his first inaugural address and by Steven Pinker for the title of his 2011 book), specifically our capacity for compassion, resilience, forgiveness, and adventure, it also acknowledges the darker undercurrents that are also part of our psychic fabric. Each of the ten song titles, incidentally, is a mantra William uses as a daily affirmation of self-worth.

On the forty-seven-minute release, the classically trained Eastman School of Music graduate plays a number of different flutes, including the standard C, bass, Native American, Egyptian bamboo, Treble G, and Zi-Fi C, a hybrid instrument that blends a traditional flute with a Chinese Dizi and a reed instrument; on “You Are Memorable,” she even plays the Native American flute that belonged to a late student of hers.

While it's a predominantly solo project, Within Us All is enriched by contributions from fellow flutist Sherry Finzer, pianist Lynn Tredeau, percussionist Will Clipman, and guitarist Michael Kent Smith (on three tracks, Tredeau and producer John Herrera separately share composing credits with Williams). Though the material gravitates in different directions (to electronica for “You Are Resilience,” for example), Williams largely tends to overlay gently animated backdrops of synthesizer textures and percussive pulses with lead flute and other instruments.

With an arrangement enhanced by producer John Herrera's synth washes, “You Are Compassionate” opens the album on a high. Unfurling at a slow-motion pace, the stirring, heartfelt setting provides a magnificent showcase for Williams' bass flute artistry. Here and elsewhere, her soloing is always deployed in service to the composition and used to maximize the emotional tenor of the material. As affecting, “You Are Forgiving” benefits from Tredeau's elegant playing and the intertwining of Native American (Williams) and bass (Finzer) flutes. A sorrowful tone pervades the performance, suggestive perhaps of the difficulties involved in forgiving others and moving past anger and hurt. To be expected from a piece so titled, “You Are Not Alone” aspires to bring solace to those suffering the pain of loneliness, the gesture likewise emphasizing the healing dimension in Williams' music.

Elsewhere, Smith's lilting acoustic guitar patterns help elevate “You Are Happiness,” otherwise notable for rapturous outpourings of C and bass flutes, while the combination of Clipman's hand drums and Williams' Egyptian bamboo flute in the droning incantation “You Are Adventure” makes for mysterious, Eastern-sounding entrancement. Refreshingly irony-free, Within Us All is music of sincerity and authenticity whose emotionally wide-ranging songs repeatedly lift the spirits.

January 2020