A Tale of God’s Will (a requiem for katrina) (Blue Note Records)
Terence Blanchard
Released August 14, 2007
Grammy Award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album 2008
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lT4ZvEAsn3R2Xdyf0ojLj_2g0bWCv1TWI
Spotify:
About:
TERENCE BLANCHARD: In the aftermath of Katrina, when you’re faced with that level of devastation, you know, and you’re frustrated beyond belief, you’re hurt beyond anything you can imagine, I mean it causes you to dig deep and try to find some answers.
And after I went through the whole thing of blaming man for his neglect in servicing the levees, and blaming man for their neglect in rescuing and helping people, you know, I had to look at the bigger picture.
And people were asking me immediately in all of my interviews, you know, are you going to write music, you know, based on the hurricane? And I kept telling them, I said man, this thing is so vast it’s hard to kind of assimilate everything, and I don’t hear anything right now.
I stood in front of my mother’s house, and it was amazing, because the only thing I heard was silence. I mean–and it was very bizarre–I didn’t hear any insects, no birds, no dogs barking, nobody cutting the grass, no cars moving, nobody moving around. Nothing. Only air. Only the wind.
In the Christian faith, you know, we have a saying, you know: God acts in strange ways. So for me, I think this is a way for God to get our attention, basically. You know, we haven’t been paying attention to a lot of things, you know. And we’ve been letting a lot of things slide. So maybe this is a way for us to kind of stop and take a hard look at what we’re doing as a community.
When I saw the large numbers of people who were struggling to survive in New Orleans in the aftermath of the hurricane–that broke my heart. Then it also broke my heart to see how vast numbers of Americans came together to support and try to help people in need, you know, and that goes to the core of what I believe about human compassion.
With this album, you know, I mean, a lot of people have been talking to me and they’ve been saying the music has a lot of deep spiritual roots and it does. I mean, I grew up in a church. And that music has never–it’s always been a part of me, always, you know, and this album gave me a chance to kind of dig deep in that direction, you know. It gave me a chance to kind of not shy away from those issues but deal with them directly and just express how I feel based on my beliefs.
Recording it in a church–the thing I kept thinking about was, you know, I have to let my feelings go. I have to be honest. I’m not making an album for a certain demographic, you know what I mean? This is a project about human tragedy and the endurance of the human spirit, and I have to be true to that.
When we were listening to the playbacks, the thing that I kept thinking about with this music is that not only is it hopeful music but it embodies a number of other emotions: hopelessness, helplessness, anger, and frustration. You know, the piece itself, “Levees”–the strings represent the water that’s just everywhere, and the trumpet represents the cries for help that just went unheard.
What I hope for in New Orleans is the same thing I hope for the country, really. I mean, I really hope that, you know, as a society we really just ought to become more active, and I’m seeing it in New Orleans. The beautiful thing about being in New Orleans right now is that, despite all of the lack of support, you know, from the federal government there are a lot of people who are moving home, and a lot of people, a lot are doing it on their own. And granted we still have a very, very long way to go. There’s decades of work to be done to rebuild the city. But it’s really beautiful to see that pioneering spirit that we’ve always equated with being truly American.
Patti Jette Hanley (Religion & Ethics Newsweekly)
Track Listing:
1. Ghost of Congo Square 3:04
2. Levees (Terence Blanchard) 8:11
(Grammy Nominee for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo Performance 2008)
3. Wading Through (Terence Blanchard) 6:29
4. Ashé (Aaron Parks) 8:19
5. In Time of Need (Brice Winston) 7:53
6. Ghost of Betsy (Terence Blanchard) 2:09
7. The Water (Terence Blanchard) 4:09
8. Mantra Intro (Kendrick Scott) 3:22
9. Mantra (Kendrick Scott) 9:51
10. Over There (Derrick Hodge) 7:45
11. Ghost of 1927 (Terence Blanchard) 1:40
12. Funeral Dirge (Terence Blanchard) 5:54 13. Dear Mom (Terence Blanchard) 3:39
Personnel:
Terence Blanchard: trumpet
Brice Winston: tenor and soprano saxophones
Aaron Parks: piano
Derrick Hodge: acoustic and electric basses
Kendrick Scott: drums, percussion
Zach Harmon: tabla, happy apple
and the The Northwest Sinfonia
Conducted by Terence Blanchard
Contractor and concertmaster: Simon James
All songs recorded at Conway Recording Studios in Los Angeles, CA, and Bastyr University in Kenmore, WA.
Produced by Terence Blanchard
Executive Producer: Bruce Lundvall
Associate Producer: Robin Burgess
Engineers: Frank Wolf, Brian Valentino
Assistant engineer: Seth Waldman
Mastered by Gavin Lurssen
Review:
Jazz history isn’t exactly littered with great albums featuring string orchestras. There have been a few—tenor saxophonist Stan Getz’s Focus (Verve, 1961) and British reed player Tim Garland’s If The Sea Replied (Sirocco, 2005) are both masterpieces, but precious few others were recorded in the 44 years which separate them. All too often, string orchestras seem either to cramp an improvising musician’s style or deliver a truck load of sound and fury signifying very little, or both.
New Orleans’ trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s A Tale Of God’s Will (A Requiem For Katrina) is one of the genre’s infrequent successes. A majestic and emotionally-charged disc, it employs the sonic grandeur of the 40-piece Northwest Sinfonia to convey the magnitude of the devastation Hurricane Katrina wreaked on New Orleans in 2005, without at any time compromising the fundamental jazz character of the music. And it does so without bombast or overstatement, its layered and nuanced character avoiding literal evocations of raging wind and water, and suggesting instead measured grief and a quiet determination to rebuild and move on.
The genesis of the disc was director Spike Lee’s HBO documentary When The Levees Broke. Lee asked Blanchard, a regular collaborator, to provide music for the film, which also included footage of Blanchard’s mother returning for the first time to her ruined home. Lee’s budget didn’t run to orchestration, but Blanchard was subsequently able to persuade Blue Note to fund a re-recording of the material, with the Northwest Sinfonia featured throughout.
The nucleus of the album consists of four compositions originally recorded for Lee’s film. Melodically and structurally, the tunes are the same—each with its root, consciously or otherwise, in George Gershwin’s “Ain’t Necessarily So”—but the arrangements give each reading a strikingly different feel. The blues-drenched “Levees” evokes the quiet before the storm, an apparent stillness carrying an undertone of incipient menace; “Wading Through” and “The Water” convey the sheer, biblical vastness of the flood; “Funeral Dirge,” arranged as a slow march, with metronomic snare drum rolls to the fore, is a salute to the many people who died. Blanchard’s no-frills, in-the-tradition, testifying trumpet, which is the main solo voice, rings out powerfully and affectingly throughout. He blows like a blues player sings, by turns angry, plaintive, stoic, hopeful and elegiac—and, almost tangibly, always from the heart.
An ambitious and brilliantly executed album, and perhaps Blanchard’s most fully rounded artistic statement to date.
Chris May (All About Jazz)
