Tag: civil rights movement

Kronos Quartet Wants You To Know Mahalia Jackson’s Impact

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

“If Mahalia Jackson were singing right now, I would have figured out a way that we would be able to perform with her,” says David Harrington, co-founder and violinist of Kronos Quartet, an ensemble that in its more than 50 years has consistently set new standards for what a string quartet can be.

He laughs as he leans into the camera on a Zoom from his San Francisco home, his white hair sticking straight up.

“You can count on that.”

Of course, that’s impossible. Mahalia Jackson, the New Orleans-born gospel singer, voice of the Civil Rights Movement, mentor to Aretha Franklin, confidant of and advisor to Martin Luther King Jr., died in 1972 at age 60. But Harrington got close. A little while back he commissioned composer Stacy Garrop to craft musical settings for excerpts from a 1963 interview conversation Jackson did with Chicago radio host Studs Terkel, a longtime friend of hers, and from performances broadcast in 1957.

The result is Glorious Mahalia, a five-part suite and the title piece of a new Kronos Quartet album featuring the ensemble’s recent lineup of Harrington, John Sherba (violin), Hank Dutt (viola) and Sunny Yang (cellos). It’s insightful and bold, the music echoing and enhancing the conversations, at times cordial, but also at times testy between these two friends as Jackson tells Terkel that he can never understand the experience of Black people in America.

And in one segment, Harrington gets right up next to his wish, as Kronos performs to a recording of Jackson singing “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” It is, indeed, glorious.

Mahalia Jackson photo by Lacey Crawford (courtesy of the National Museum of African American History & Culture.)

This is complemented by another suite, “Peace Be Till,” commissioned by Kronos from composer Zachary Watkins, incorporating reminiscences by King lawyer and speechwriter Clarence Jones as recorded by Harrington about the friendship between King and Jackson. At its core is the moment in a 1963 rally as he watched Jackson interrupt the written speech King was giving, shouting to him, “Tell them about the dream, Martin,” spurring one of the most impactful orations of modern times, the extemporaneous “I Have a Dream.”

An instrumental arrangement by composer Jacob Garchik of Antonio Haskell’s hymn “God Shall Wipe All Tears Away,” based on a 1937 Jackson recording, serves as a perfect interlude between the suites. Kronos has performed the song for years, including a stunning version with Mali’s Trio Da Kali on the 2017 album Ladilikan.

Kronos has long used spoken oral histories in its vast, wildly eclectic career. There is 1988’s landmark Different Trains, composed for the quartet by Steve Reich, juxtaposing audio accounts from a former Pullman porter and survivors of Holocaust transports, and last year’s Witness, by composer Mary Kouyoumdjian, with audio from survivors of the Lebanese civil war and the Armenian genocide. Glorious Mahalia’s themes of social justice also connect to, among many others, 2020’s Long Time Passing, a celebration of Pete Seeger, and 2022’s My Lai, the Jonathan Berger/Scott Chessman opera about the 1968 U.S. Army massacre of a Vietnam village. The new album follows those latter two as the third Kronos release from Smithsonian Folkways.

Harrington discusses all of this in a generous, wide-ranging chat for BGS, edited for length and clarity.

What were your first experiences with Mahalia Jackson’s music?

David Harrington: I think I heard her on television as a kid. But it was Hank Dutt, our longtime violist, who gave me an LP of hers in the late ‘70s. It just blew me away. Have you seen Summer of Soul, that film [Questlove’s 2021 documentary about the 1969 Harlem Music Festival]? Then you’ve seen Mahalia on that. Our family watched it, my daughter, son-in-law, grandkids, wife, and I watched together. And wow, when Mahalia got on, I said to everyone, “I have never seen a singer with a full-body vibrato before!” [Laughs] That was one of the most amazing performances I’ve seen in my life.

Glorious Mahalia springs from the conversations between Mahalia and Studs Terkel, and then it feels like Stacy Garrop joins the conversations with her music, and then Kronos join in too, all of you in a four-way exchange.

That’s a beautiful expression of it. I’ve never thought of it that way. What I wanted to do was hear all the interviews [Terkel] ever did with Mahalia. And that’s where my conversation started with Stacy Garrop. I think she knew a lot about his work, so it started there, really. We wanted a piece that celebrates their friendship and relationship, and what they brought to our society and our country.

It’s not always an easy conversation between Terkel and Jackson. She pushes back on him, even snaps at him that he can never know what it’s like to be her, to be Black in America. Was that part of your process with this, to consider, culturally and experientially what your place is in terms of presenting her views and experiences?

It gets back to wanting to perform with Mahalia Jackson. [Laughs] It’s like, every once in a while I hear a musician – I’m lucky as an explorer of music – I’ll hear something that is just so amazingly powerful. I want to find a way of bringing it into my own experience and that of the other members of Kronos and of our audience. And so I think I’ve been really consistent about that through the years.

The question is, what gives me the right to do that? I guess I’ve never really asked that question too often, because this is what musicians do. I’m absolutely convinced that if Beethoven would have heard some of the amazing musicians in India or various places around the world in his time, he would have wanted to bring elements of that music into his work in some way or another. Beethoven did a lot of transcriptions of Scottish music!

The first thing we hear on the album is Jackson’s voice, alone, singing the words “hold on.” It’s gripping and powerful, and must be even more so in a darkened theater for both you and the audience, hearing that before you even start playing.

Yeah, it’s about as good as it gets!

And then, from there, your task is to enhance and echo and illustrate the tone of her voice.

We’re also commenting, and our role takes on different kinds of complexities, being there as a platform for [Jackson’s and Jones’s] thoughts and voices to exist.

You have a history of projects that let others tell their cultural stories and experiences, from the oral histories of Different Trains and Witness to working with composers and musicians from many different places and traditions around the globe. This one is more centered on one person, though.

It goes back a long way, and thinking how to present this on a Kronos album – not only the voice, but the personality, the force, just the being of Mahalia Jackson. [That] was what I felt would be a good thing to do. That really came into focus when right around the 50th anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech, Clarence Jones was on television and he recounted how the speech became the speech as we know it.

When he described that moment of hearing Mahalia Jackson, someone King relied on in moments of need, Clarence spoke of when she would sing to him on the phone. I mean, when you think of anybody in the universe, a leader like Martin Luther King Jr., a civil rights leader, a spiritual leader, and he’s getting sustenance from a musician!

So then the speech is happening and, from what I can gather, she wasn’t quite hearing what she needed to hear from her friend. And so she called out to him: “Tell them about the dream.” When I heard that story I thought, “Okay, I get it. Mahalia Jackson has defined to me the role of musicians, the musical community in our world.” It was so clear. And what we get to do as musicians is listen. We listen to our inner selves, we listen to our families and our friends and our society.

In this case, Mahalia Jackson used her musical ability and listened to Martin Luther King and then gave him feedback. “Come on. I’ve heard you do better.” Now, am I imagining this? I don’t know if I am. I don’t even care, because it kind of defined something for me about my own role and the role of Kronos and musicians. So at that moment I thought, “I need to get in touch with Clarence Jones.”

This project started a few years back, but it’s coming out as the U.S. celebrates its 250th birthday. How does that timing feel, especially with the current political and cultural climate?

We’re doing a triptych, “Three Bones,” that’s premiering at Carnegie Hall [on April 25]. Part one will [draw on] Indigenous cultures. Part two will be African American, particularly Gullah Geechee [of the Southeastern U.S.]. Part three will be Chinese and Chinese American.

I’d like to make an experience that brings these three essential elements of American society to the stage at Carnegie Hall as our contribution to the 250 years. It’s about listening. It is just growing from listening. That kind of gets back to Mahalia.

Back to the idea of a conversation, it seems like it’s not just with Jackson and Terkel, but with the nation, with the cultures and the experiences, and not a static situation from 60 years ago. Does it feel like your relationship with Mahalia, her music, and her mission is something living and evolving?

I am very happy when Kronos gets to play this music on a college campus and for audiences that maybe never heard Mahalia Jackson, never heard about her, [or heard] that an artist can have very powerful ideas about life and our society. [About] what’s good and what’s right, and can express them as beautifully as Mahalia Jackson and Studs Terkel and Clarence Jones. You put these leaders together and it’s very impressive. And I don’t think there’s an expiration date there.

Photo Credit: Lead image of Kronos Quartet by Lenny Gonzalez. Inset image of Mahalia Jackson by Lacey Crawford courtesy of the National Museum of African American History & Culture.

Mavis Staples Finds a Place to Call Home in Frank Ocean’s “Godspeed”

Posted on by Editor

Mavis Staples counts herself among the legion of Frank Ocean fans and she’s just released her rendition of “Godspeed” as a sign of her admiration. Of course Staples is an iconic voice of her generation through her groundbreaking music with the Staple Singers on “I’ll Take You There,” as well as the family group’s participation in the 1960s civil rights movement alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. For this heartfelt track, Staples and producer Brad Cook bring in songwriter and Youth Poet Laureate Kara Jackson for spoken word vocals.

“Channel Orange was my first introduction to Frank Ocean and I was just amazed at the writing and soulfulness coming from his voice,” Staples said. “And I loved Blonde when that record came out. That first line in ‘Godspeed’ of ‘I will always love you’ just crushes me every time I hear it… or sing it. It’s just such a beautiful song and he sounds amazing on it so I was a little nervous if we could pull it off. I was honored to sing his words.”

This weekend in Canada, Staples will sing at jazz festivals in Ottawa, Toronto, and Montréal before crossing back over the border for shows in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Brevard, North Carolina. After a number of American concerts in July, she’ll pause just long enough to celebrate her 86th birthday. Then she’s bound for dates in Norway, the Netherlands, and Sweden in August, with even more stops scheduled throughout the U.S. through early October.

Yes, she’ll take you there… but only if you can keep up. Check out the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame member’s cover of Frank Ocean’s “Godspeed” released by ANTI- Records below.

Photo Credit: Myriam Santos

Emmy-Nominated Docuseries Highlights the Impact of STAX Records

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

It all began way back, nearly seventy years ago in Memphis, Tennessee, when an almost unremarkable thing happened: A record store opened its doors.

That a record store might exist in the home of the blues in 1957 was itself no remarkable thing. But this store, Satellite Records, was quite literally a sister operation to the recording studio next door. Satellite’s owner, Estelle Axton, was the older sister of the studio’s founder, Jim Stewart.

Stewart was a fiddler with a passion for country music. Long before the dominance of indie labels, Stewart had the idea to start his own studio and label, to get his music out to the masses. As luck would have it, his original country songs were… just fine. Nothing groundbreaking. But his work sparked the imagination of a young musician named David Porter, who strode into the studio one day and asked if he could lay down some tracks.

Long story short, Porter recruited some other artists who became a band known as Booker T. and the M.G.s – eventually the studio’s de facto house band. Suddenly, the label – named STAX as a combination of Jim and Estelle’s last names – was off to the races.

Now, a three-part docuseries from HBO titled STAX: Soulville USA is available for streaming on MAX. The series premiered at South by Southwest earlier this year and earned two Emmy Award nominations (Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series and Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Nonfiction Program). While the series did not prevail in those categories, it is a powerful, thorough, emotional telling of the relationship between music, its makers, and the world in which they live.

The series’ director – Peabody, Emmy, and NAACP award-winner Jamila Wignot – strung together an incredible array of rare and never-before-shared footage of the rise and fall (and rise again) of STAX Records between 1961-1975. But footage isn’t just from inside the studio walls. We see musicians on their first trips to Europe, relaxing in the pool at the Lorraine Hotel – a frequent STAX hangout before it became the scene of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. There is footage from civil rights protests and speeches and moments of great grief and outrage. There are contemporary interviews with the musicians and staff of STAX and Satellite Records, including Axton and Stewart.

And always, at the heart of it all, there’s the music.

In a For Your Consideration panel also available on MAX, Mignot admitted that, when she was approached to direct the series, she was “really just into it for the music.”

“I thought it was going to be this great-big, beautiful music story,” she adds. “As I started to do more research, and particularly looking into the work that [STAX biographer] Rob Bowman had done, I understood that it was a much bigger story that touched on social issues, history, and [it] really was this beautiful story of these folks who were, I think, led by intuition and desire, and weren’t necessarily trying to do more than the things that they loved. But they were very responsive to the world that was around them.”

Of course, outside the walls of STAX studio and Satellite records, Black people were subject to the cultural and legal realities of living in the Jim Crow South.

“[Jim Crow] was too strong a system to tear down,” bandleader Booker T. notes. “In Memphis, you had to keep your mouth shut and hope for the best. Or fight.”

While that was the rule of the road outside, inside STAX studio, Booker T.’s band had two Black members and two white. Together, they developed an approach to Southern soul music that would become one of the most influential sounds of the 20th Century.

Granted, as the civil rights movement went through its various waves in Memphis and beyond, and STAX players marched on picket lines without their white bandmates beside them, this complicated interpersonal relationships in the studio. But the music continued to compel everyone forward. As a result, music fans got to find solace in some of the greatest roots recordings ever made.

The docuseries’ executive producer Michele Smith commented on the artists’ legacies in a recent phone conversation.

“Those artists were just teenagers who had a love for the music,” she says. “[They] just wanted to be heard. What they did not know at that time was they were forging a path to history. They were working, they did know that what they were doing was technically illegal in the Jim Crow South. … They were young people who just wanted to make music. And they did a whole lot more than that. Their music, to this day, will … outlive all of us. It’s globally renowned and it’s some of the best R&B soul music out there, sampled by young people today.”

Being able to watch this music get made is certainly one major draw of the series. Isaac Hayes and the Bar-Kays developing the “Theme from Shaft”; Sam & Dave rolling out “Soul Man” for a live audience the first time; and Otis Redding onstage at the Monterey Pop Festival.

In interview clips, STAX alumni recall how out-of-place Redding and his band were – sober and polished in their well-pressed suits – among the mostly white hippie, dropped-out crowd. Recognizing the one thread that connected him with his seemingly polar-opposite audience, Redding started his set by asking, “This is the love crowd, right? We all love each other, don’t we?” The crowd roared, so he closed his eyes and lit into “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” with a passion and emotional clarity that was absolutely intoxicating.

“Otis Redding hit the stage,” recalled trumpet player Wayne Jackson. “All those hippies got quiet. They ain’t seen anything like us.”

Though that was the truth, it often was in those days of STAX artists making the rounds with their groundbreaking sound. But, certainly, nobody present for any of it – no matter if STAX was on its way up or its way down – would ever forget the way the music turned their soul.

Watch STAX: Soulsville USA via MAX.

Images courtesy of HBO.

Carolina Calling, Greensboro: the Crossroads of Carolina

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

Known as the Gate City, Greensboro, North Carolina is a transitional town: hub of the Piedmont between the mountain high country to the west and coastal Sandhill Plains to the east, and a city defined by the people who have come, gone, and passed through over the years. As a crossroads location, it has long been a way station for many endeavors, including touring musicians – from the likes of the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix at the Greensboro Coliseum, the state’s largest indoor arena, to James Brown and Otis Redding at clubs like the El Rocco on the Chitlin’ Circuit. Throw in the country and string band influences from the textile mill towns in the area, and the regional style of the Piedmont blues, and you’ve got yourself quite the musical melting pot.

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This historical mixture was not lost on one of Greensboro’s own, Rhiannon Giddens – one of modern day Americana’s ultimate crossover artists. A child of black and white parents, she grew up in the area hearing folk and country music, participating in music programs in local public schools, and eventually going on to study opera at Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio. Once she returned to North Carolina and came under the study of fiddler Joe Thompson and the Black string band tradition, she began playing folk music and forged an artistic identity steeped in classical as well as vernacular music. In this episode of Carolina Calling, we spoke with Giddens about her background in Greensboro and how growing up mixed and immersed in various cultures, in a city so informed by its history of segregation and status as a key civil rights battleground, informed her artistic interests and endeavors, musical styles, and her mission in the music industry.

Subscribe to Carolina Calling on any and all podcast platforms to follow along as we journey across the Old North State, visiting towns like Durham, Wilmington, Shelby, and more.

Music featured in this episode:

Rhiannon Giddens – “Black is the Color”
Andrew Marlin – “Erie Fiddler”
Carolina Chocolate Drops – “Cornbread and Butterbeans”
The Rolling Stones – “Rocks Off”
Count Basie and His Orchestra – “Honeysuckle Rose”
Roy Harvey – “Blue Eyes”
Blind Boy Fuller – “Step It Up and Go”
Rhiannon Giddens, Francesco Turrisi – “Avalon”
Carolina Chocolate Drops – “Snowden’s Jig (Genuine Negro Jig)”
Barbara Lewis -“Hello Stranger”
The O’Kaysions – “Girl Watcher”
Joe and Odell Thompson – “Donna Got a Rambling Mind”
Carolina Chocolate Drops – “Country Girl”
Carolina Chocolate Drops – “Hit ‘Em Up Style”
Our Native Daughters – “Moon Meets the Sun”
Rhiannon Giddens, Francesco Turrisi – “Si Dolce é’l Tormento”

BGS is proud to produce Carolina Calling in partnership with Come Hear NC, a campaign from the North Carolina Department of Natural & Cultural Resources designed to celebrate North Carolinians’ contribution to the canon of American music.

Photo Credit: Ebru Yildiz

Enter to win a prize bundle featuring a signed copy of author and Carolina Calling host David Menconi’s ‘Step It Up and Go: The Story of North Carolina Music,’ BGS Merch, and surprises from our friends at Come Hear North Carolina.

The Show On The Road – Blind Boys of Alabama

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

This week on The Show On The Road, in honor of Black History Month, we bring you a conversation with members of foundational gospel group, The Blind Boys Of Alabama, including longtime singer Ricky McKinnie and beloved senior member Jimmy Carter, who has been with the group for four decades.

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Formed in the late 1930s with talent discovered at the Alabama Institute For The Negro Blind, the Blind Boys of Alabama have superseded limitations to bring their own high-spirited version of jubilee gospel throughout the world. Their music was often the backdrop to the Civil Rights Movement as Martin Luther King Jr. toured the south, and Jimmy and Ricky are both amazed and grateful that their message is still ringing true throughout the latest iteration Black Lives Matter movement that grew during the tumultuous last year.

While the members of the band have changed through time, the group has stayed steadfast to preserving a kinetic, church-based music that doesn’t seek to evangelize, but can bring people of all faiths together. Indeed, watching Jimmy and the other bespectacled members walk with hands on each other’s shoulders into the youthful crowds of adoring festival-goers, from Bonnaroo to Jazzfest, is really something to behold.

The Blind Boys’ body of work continues to grow. In the last few decades they’ve gamely collaborated with a wide range of secular artists from Peter Gabriel to Ben Harper to Bonnie Raitt, they made an album produced by Justin Vernon, AKA Bon Iver (2013’s stellar I’ll Find A Way), and they shrewdly reworked the ominous Tom Waits classic, “Way Down In The Hole,” which became the theme for HBO’s The Wire.

Their newest full length album, Almost Home, is a particularly moving treatise on morality and mortality. It features songs written by Marc Cohn, Valerie June, The North Mississippi All Stars and many others and was the last record that longtime member and bandleader Clarence Fountain was a part of before he passed away. He was a member of the Blind Boys of Alabama for nearly sixty years.

As Jimmy playfully mentions throughout our conversation, the Blind Boys of Alabama never let being blind stand in the way of doing what they do best: putting on a show. They’re entertainers at heart and it’s no small feat that they’ve brought a nearly lost form of swinging, soulful (and expertly arranged) gospel from the small southern towns where they grew up, all the way to the White House, where they’ve held court for three different presidents. And they’ve won five Grammy Awards along the way.

Stick around to the end of the episode hear their rich cover of Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.”

Photo credit: Jim Herrington

Kronos Quartet and Friends Salute Pete Seeger With ‘Long Time Passing’

Posted on by Editor

“There’s no place like home,” says David Harrington, co-founder and leader of the venerable Kronos Quartet, with a little chuckle.

It’s not just because of the smoke from California fires or the pandemic lockdown at his San Francisco home. With the new album Long Time Passing — Kronos Quartet and Friends Celebrate Pete Seeger, Kronos, after more than 47 years of redefining the very nature of a string quartet through explorations of music traditions and contemporary composers from around the world and, to many ears, exotic, is having something of an Oz moment.

Seeger, of course, was one of the key figures of American folk music, from the early 1950s until his death in 2014 at age 94. The album includes interpretations and adaptations of some of the most beloved songs of the folk canon, among them “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” (which gave the album its title), “Turn, Turn, Turn,” “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine,” “If I Had a Hammer,” and “We Shall Overcome,” which Seeger helped bring to national prominence during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. All are transformed through the Kronos prism, which has made magic with everything from Thelonious Monk tunes to Bollywood soundtrack songs to young Iranian and Afghani composers and, spanning decades, an ongoing relationship with American avant-garde composer Terry Riley.

Among the friends on board are young American folk singers Aoife O’Donovan, Brian Carpenter, Lee Knight and Sam Amidon, Spain’s Maria Arnal and Ethiopian-born Meklit. Amidon is making a repeat appearance, having been one of four singers along with Rhiannon Giddens, Natalie Merchant and Olivia Chaney, who joined Kronos for 2017’s Folk Songs album. That collection of American and English-rooted songs is something of a precursor to this new one.

Harrington resists the notion that this is somehow a break from what Kronos has done in the past. “I think all of our work is related,” he says. “For me, Pete Seeger’s work is an extension or a variation of [composer George Crumb’s] ‘Black Angels’” — a keystone in the Kronos repertoire and the work that inspired the group’s formation in the first place — “and Bartók and Beethoven and all kinds of music.”

Making that point emphatically is the piece that is arguably the core of the album: “Storyteller,” a 16-minute sonic collage combining Kronos’ playing with audio of Seeger from interviews and on-stage talk throughout the years, all composed and assembled inventively by Jacob Garchik, a regular Kronos collaborator. The ambitious work made its concert debut last year at Kronos’ San Francisco festival.

“He has been part of our work for probably 15 years,” Harrington says. “It’s so wonderful to see him flower as a musician. Jacob and I have had innumerable conversations about all aspects of music from traditional cantorial music to pygmy songs. It seemed really natural that Jacob would be part of Long Time Passing and that he would make a piece that would bring Seeger to life.”

As well, there is no lack of global cultural reach here. There are songs in Spanish, German, and a South African dialect, plus the instrumental “Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram,” associated with Mahatma Gandhi’s 1930 Salt March protest, which Seeger learned on the instrument bhajan on a trip to India and made a regular feature of his concerts. In one “Storyteller” passage, Seeger himself is heard singing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” in German. Arnal sings two songs, recorded in Barcelona last year, one being the Spanish Civil War ballad “Jarama Valley,” a bloody tale of fighting the fascists, written to the tune we know as “Red River Valley.”

And then there is “Mbube,” the South African tune that transformed into the international staple, “Wimoweh/The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” This serves as tribute to Seeger’s lifelong dedication to finding and sharing songs from other cultures, following in the footsteps of his father Charles, a musicologist, folklorist, and composer.

“Alan Lomax [the famed folk archivist and producer] gave him a pile of LPs that they were going to throw out at the Library of Congress,” Harrington said. “Lomax said, ‘I’ve got these LPs from Africa. Would you like to listen to them?’ Seeger comes over and in the middle of the pile somewhere is that song. I mean, what a story! The Weavers [the ‘50s group Seeger was in that launched the folk boom] started singing it. Then the Tokens had the big hit. And then Disney picked it up for The Lion King. I mean, that’s culture. That’s the way it works. But what an ear Seeger had!”

Meklit’s performance is not in Ethiopian. Rather, the Bay Area-based artist was asked to do the elegiac “The President Sang Amazing Grace,” a relatively new song by songwriter Zoe Mulford, inspired by President Barack Obama singing the hymn at the pulpit of the Mother Emanuel American Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, shortly after the 2015 mass shooting there.

“I have always been a fan of Pete Seeger and his empathetic yet passionate advocacy for the people,” says Meklit. “This is a song about how music carries us when the limits of language can’t meet our deepest grief, anger, and heartbreak. It’s about a President who understood that and offered us empathy made of melody. It’s about how the violence of racism and white supremacy continue tear at us and cost people their lives. Ultimately I hope the song provides the smallest bit of catharsis in our ongoing season of reckoning with America’s ghosts.”

Having an East African-born singer do this song honoring Obama, with his Kenyan ancestry, brings a lot together, and while it’s the only song on the album that was not part of the Seeger canon, coming after he died, it fits perfectly in his sensibilities.

“There are all sorts of connections,” Harrington says. “They just happen. It’s part of the texture of our society.”

The real magic of the album is finding the new, the current, in the old material, of bringing into vivid life Seeger as an artist, an organizer, an explorer. It’s there from the opening song, “Which Side Are You On?” a question that as much in Kronos’ hands, with Knight almost channeling Seeger, demands a definitive answer. And it’s there in “Garbage,” again with Knight and a child’s chorus, linking today’s concerns with climate change to the environmental concerns Seeger championed through his life, from well before it was a “movement.”

“In terms of the moment in which we live now, obviously Pete’s music and his sensibilities and his spirit came from troubled times,” he says. “He grew up privileged and he knew it. And he paid it back. He was able to adapt throughout his life and address the struggles and issues that were coming in. He saw a real continuity of it. Now we’re talking about civil rights. Not we’re talking about the environment. Now we’re talking about racial divisiveness. It felt like it was all one thread, the same thing. You can see [today’s issues] through that lens, and you can see it through the continuity of what Pete was through his life and what he experienced.”

Harrington stresses that while the album itself seems like something different for Kronos, he can connect it to the very first work written specifically for the quartet back in 1973, “Traveling Music” by composer Ken Benshoof which quoted “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine.” And that is by no means the only thing on this album with which Kronos has history. He notes that his kids and more recently his grandkids have been raised on Seeger recordings, and that a few years ago the group played “We Shall Overcome” for a third-grade class taught by his daughter. But the song has been in their world for much longer than that.

“The idea of doing ‘We Shall Overcome’ is something that we tried out in New York in the early 1980s,” he says. “At that point we did not have the right arranger. I didn’t know how to do it. We tried it, but it didn’t work. But the flame was always there.”

They finally had success with it a few years ago, in a concert that included a piece featuring tapes the voices of gospel great Mahalia Jackson and Chicago writer, labor activist and radio host Studs Terkel, on whose show Kronos had played a few times. Also in that concert was a piece incorporating recordings of Clarence Jones, Martin Luther King Jr.’s lawyer, telling the story of the “I Have a Dream” speech.

“The only thing we could imagine doing as an encore was ‘We Shall Overcome,’” Harrington says.

So yes, Long Time Passing is, for the Kronos Quartet, an act of coming home.

Photo credit: Jay Blakesburg

Jim James, ‘The World is Falling Down’

Posted on by Editor

“The news is really very sad,” so goes a line in Abbey Lincoln’s 1990 song “The World Is Falling Down,” a poetic lament with the contrast of jubilant horns laced through. Singing through the Civil Rights movement and nearly up to her death in 2010, she is one of music history’s most dynamic and under-appreciated figures, particularly in the mainstream: While lovers of jazz would hold her modern influence as tantamount, particularly as a vocalist, she didn’t become the kind of household name to survive the internet generation.

Jim James, of My Morning Jacket, tried to change that in his version of “The World Is Falling Down,” off of his new LP, Tribute To 2. It’s a follow up to his first record of covers, 2009’s Tribute 2, devoted to George Harrison. This time, James picks songs that could easily have come straight from current times — and, looking back on 2017, it has often felt as if the world was indeed falling down. And fast. Beneath the news and the Twitter feeds and the noise, it’s hard not to panic, and even more difficult to find beauty beneath it all. James takes Lincoln’s version and slows things down into a gorgeous, acoustic folk song, gently singing in the softer side of his range through lyrics that so closely mirror our daily struggle. But he makes sure to reinforce the most important point: When times are tough, reach out. Find a hand to hold, and walk together through turmoil. And don’t let go. “The world is falling down, hold my hand.” Don’t let go.