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04/30/2025
“Songs in Flight”
Shawn E. Okpebholo: Songs in Flight – An Echo, an Ending – Time – Sing, O Black Mother – I’m Sure
Rhiannon Giddens, Karen Slack (soprano), Reginald Mobley (countertenor), Will Liverman (baritone), Paul Sánchez (piano), Julian Velasco (saxophone)
Recording: Armerding Center for Music and the Arts, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois (March 9‑10 and 12‑13, 2024) (World Premiere Recordings) – 63’43
Cedille Records CDR 90000 234 (Distributed by Naxos of America) – Booklet in English
When Shawn E. Okpebholo was approached about composing a score based on Cornell University’s archive of over 30,000 ads from the 18th and 19th centuries offering rewards for the recapture of ‘runaways’ who escaped their ‘owners’, he felt “the weight of the subject matter gave me pause.” But when he started reading the accounts of those who risked their lives to escape their enslavement, he signed on.
Okpebholo collaborated with poet - curator Tsitsi Ella Jaji to represent the lives of a dozen ‘runaways’ and their fearless escapes. Interpreting those stories are singers Karen Slack, Reginald Mobley, Will Liverman, Rhiannon Giddens and musicians Paul Sánchez (piano) and Julian Velasco (saxophone). The result is an altogether stunning art song cycle. The ensemble performed it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023 and in concert, and it is just as powerful as rendered in this recording.
The minimalist poetry of Jaji, Tyehimba Jess and Crystal Simone Smith, are so finely crafted for Okpebholo’s ‘art song variants’ of tradition period forms: folk, hollers, spirituals, lullaby, anthem, field songs and dirge (but with a contemporary agency).
The album opens with the inspirational spiritual Oh, Freedom with Rhiannon Gidden’s halting, passionately grounded vocal souring through Sánchez’s discordant piano runs.
A prologue to Okpebholo’s In Flight: A Quiet Song is the chilling narration of a newspaper ad for the return of “Phebe...a 23 year old Black girl, a genteel looking servant formerly belonged to the estate of”...and “promising a reasonable reward will be paid for her recapture.” – Karen Slack’s silver soprano sings toward tragic expression in ironic interplay with Okpebholo’s floating piano lines, contrasting despair and hope. Tsitsi Ella Jaji comments on her own lyrics in real time with the end lines, “I strain to read – scar or sear? Her owner knew which cheek, which dress...How will we format history?...Her only truth: she gone...Watch Phebe fly away.”
Okpebholo composes a chaconne that accompanies Asko or Glasgow, set to Crystal Simon Smith’s poem about the relentless pursuit of ‘a Negro Boy’ who says his name is Asko or Glasgow, the harrowing circumstance of his escape in an anguished duet sung with haunting expression by Liverman and Slack.
Mud Song tracks the escape of Aaron, branded on his face, suspected of trying to find his wife who is enslaved in another state. Aaron escapes through the swamps with crocodiles, able to adapt to hostile environments on land and sea. Jaji’s lyrics ring out “...men who dare hunt men. Sweet swamp gas rising up. I will not drown again.”
Jack (and Paul) recounts the fate of Jack who escaped a prison after he had been captured on the run. There is towering gravitas in the combined voices of Mobley, Liverman and Slack singing Crystal Simone Smith’s verse with the wrenching opening stanza, “born a slave/I believed I had/no soul/this one life/I would not/die a slave...nor will I die in a jail cell.” The song slamming to an end with Slack holding a final note with symbolic perpetuity.
The cascading down eerie half-notes open the mournful waltz, Mariah Frances before the story of Matilda’s Tom – An Anthem with Liverman and Slack in a spirited duet. The first in an anthem, it briskly tells the story of escaped man who cleared his name, but was still hunted in I Go By Robert. Surviving injuries from bondage, Liverman anthemically sings the end lines “Every day I limp – no, swagger...on my own damn feet. O, there’s no equal to Free.”
Ahmaud eulogizes the death of Ahmaud Arbery, who was hunted down by a racist father and son in 2020 while Ahmaud was jogging on a country road. Jaji’s poem voices the words of Ahmaud’s mother, “I am captive to this grief. Run, my boy, run to Glory.” This song also alludes to a 19th century ad placed by one Shadrack McMichael, offering a $100 reward for the return of his 35 year old black ‘boy.’
Another song that merges past and present is Four Martins with lyrics invoking the coldblooded murder of 17 year old Trayvon Martin in 2015 and past racist killings of enslaved men named Martin. With Slack, Liverman and Mobley’s combined voices, it heralds justice within Okpebholo’s scorching dirge.
Liverman and Sánchez close out the cycle with the lament, Jubilee: Thomas Rutling (1854?‑1915) so fittingly a tribute to Thomas, who was freed in the field by Union soldiers. He learned to read and write English, something he had been barred from doing in slavery. While attending Fisk University, he joined their choir as a tenor, and established the Fisk University Choir, organizing national tours under the adage, “Dreaming of our flight, hands clasped, into starlight?”
Songs in Flight doesn’t back away from the facts of America’s genocide against black and brown bodies. But these songs are also indelible testaments of liberation, courage, dignity, resistance and humanity. Art as witness to history – more important than ever now in an era when some seek to erase that history and these voices of resistance.
Lewis J. Whittington
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