It hands back the music we’ve inherited, the songs we grew up with without ever quite listening to, and lets us hear where they might still take us.
Self Released
Sam Butler – trumpet; Garrett Fasig – alto sax; April Varner – vocals; Caleb Robinson – tenor sax; Jeff Parker – trombone; Alex Turner – guitar; David Linard – piano; Alex Hoberty – bass; Francis Bassett-Dilley – drums
The big celebration on Washington’s National Mall was supposed to bring the country together. Instead, performers dropped out, the event became tangled up with Donald Trump, and what should have been a national celebration turned into another political fiasco. If this is what America’s 250th birthday is supposed to sound like, somebody needs to change the music.
Fortunately, there are better ways to celebrate 250 years of American history. Of the People, by the Visions Jazz Ensemble, is one of them.
Sam Butler and Garrett Fasig take spirituals, folk songs, country standards and other pieces of the American musical landscape and run them through a modern jazz ensemble. The result isn’t a flag-waving exercise. It’s something more useful: musicians taking familiar American music they love and reimagining it for today.
The album opens quietly with “Simple Gifts,” the old Shaker song that Aaron Copland borrowed for his Appalachian Spring. Pianist David Linard sets up the rhythmic currents while April Varner gives the familiar melody a warm, assured reading. Then the band takes “Take Me Home, Country Roads” somewhere far from John Denver’s sunny original. Varner sounds wistful, while Butler’s arrangement gives the song a melancholy edge, turning the home we used to know into something that may be getting harder to find.
That tension runs through the album. Linard’s scattered piano notes resemble distress signals before the band gathers force on “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” the story of the Great Lakes freighter that sank with all hands in a Lake Superior storm. A veteran’s struggle with the aftermath of war gets a quieter, more personal treatment on “Not a Bad Man.” Varner’s sensitive vocal works in tandem with Fasig’s moody arrangement.
There is plenty of American mythology here, too. “Ghost Riders in the Sky” gets a spacious treatment, with Butler’s trumpet soaring over it like something moving across a wide-open western landscape. “Revolutionary Tea” looks back to the Boston Tea Party with Fasig’s score filled with a sense of defiance, while the soul of Ray Charles runs through Butler’s bluesy reading of “America the Beautiful.”
Paul Robeson left a strong imprint on the spiritual when he recorded “Deep River” in 1927. Here, soft brushes, guitar and Varner’s voice build slowly, giving the song a sense of longing that never needs to be shouted. “Hard Times,” an 1854 parlor song, bookends the album with the same-era “Simple Gifts” as a reflection on life in the United States—that even this land of plenty is subject to deprivations.
Of the People doesn’t try to tell us what America should be. It hands back the music we’ve inherited, the songs we grew up with without ever quite listening to, and lets us hear where they might still take us.
