Johnny Gandelsman: This Is America - An Anthology 2020-2021
In a Circle Records

If ever a recording invited the words “an embarrassment of riches,” it's This Is America. Featuring twenty-four new works commissioned and performed by Brooklyn Rider violinist Johnny Gandelsman (thirty-three tracks in total), the project weighs in at a hefty four hours and features alphabetically sequenced pieces by American and US-based composers such as Kinan Azmeh, Rhiannon Giddens, Tomeka Reid, Terry Riley, Matana Roberts, Tyshawn Sorey, and Anjna Swaminathan. It's a staggering accomplishment on purely logistical grounds, but it impresses in musical and thematic ways too.

As intimated by its title, This Is America constitutes a collective response by Gandelsman and his collaborators to the tumultuous challenges American citizens currently face and have recently wrestled with. His instructional guideline to the composers was simple yet clear: “reflect on the moment we're all living through.” Certainly there was much for them to consider: racism, police brutality, political corruption, the pandemic, climate change, unemployment, etc. Some of those he approached are friends of long-standing, others musicians he performs with in ensembles, still others fresh contacts. The thematic content that accrued ranges from anger, solitude, exhaustion, uncertainty, and loss to hope, healing, gratitude, and joy. While the works by Layale Chaker (Sinekeman), Dana Lyn (a current took her away), and Akshaya Avril Tucker (Pallavi - a Meditation on Care) were written prior to this commissioning project, their themes of isolation, climate change, and recovery dovetailed so seamlessly with those in the project proper their inclusion felt right.

Space doesn't permit discussion of every work, so a representative sampling will hopefully suffice to convey the general character of the release and its panoramic breadth. Testifying to its importance, an extensive number of videos were created for the project (viewable at the release's Bandcamp page), and the triple-CD physical version comes with a forty-page booklet featuring commentaries by the composers about their pieces.

While many settings are scored for unaccompanied violin (four- and five-string), a number entice by adding other elements, vocals, primarily in the form of chants, singing, and spoken word, and in two cases tenor guitar and electric tenor. That the recording won't be solo violin only is announced by its arresting opener, O, by Brazilian-American composer-pianist Clarice Assad. In wedding her ghostly vocal swirl to the keen of Gandelsman's tremulous violin, O draws for inspiration from oxygen, the element not only necessary to sustain life but the one, Assad notes, that George Floyd so desperately called out for before dying. The violinist sings too, with his plainspoken, untainted voice gracing New York cellist and singer Marika Hughes' With Love From J, and the violin he plays throughout replaced here by tenor guitar as well. The song, a heartfelt tribute to composer, singer, and bandleader Jewlia Eisenberg who died in 2021 after a long-fought illness, is one of the project's most touching pieces for the sincerity of its gentle vocal and ukulele-styled guitar. It's a hard heart indeed that wouldn't be chilled when Gandelsman's multi-tracked chant, “Sky above us, ground below us, 360 support around us, cut discursive thought,” intones. The electric tenor guitar piece, Bojan Louis's Dólii, includes vocals too, though in this case it's a poetic recitation oozing portent (“Remember, please remember, the love you've brought belongs to no one”).

Some pieces are more memorable than others, among them Azmeh's Sahra be Wyckoff, its second half in particular where the tempo accelerates and the music builds to a furious, chant-prodded stomp, and Giddens's New to the Session, whose combination of rousing country fiddle melodies can't help but charm. Scored for violin and electronics, Rhea Fowler and Micaela Tobin's A City Upon a Hill? begins in a plaintive mode before morphing into a heady swamp of folk violin phrases, aggressive electronic combustion, and ululating voices. Arranged for violin and electronics and inspired by dark sky photographs, Angélica Negrón's A través del manto luminoso likewise arrests in its merging of ethereal synthesizer washes and violin textures. At album's end, Kojiro Umezaki's Breathe is similarly scored for violin and electronics, with open strings and the natural harmonics of the instrument bringing a contemplative focus to the material.

Many solo violin pieces register strongly, including Christina Courtin's Stroon for its tender expression of sorrow, Nick Dunston's Tardigrades for its wayward flurries of scrapes and plucks, Ebun Oguntola's Reflections for its pensive suggestions of desolation and sadness, and Tomeka Reid's Rhapsody and Matana Roberts's Stitched for their lyrical solemnity. Riley's solo five-string setting Barbary Coast 1955 is as noteworthy for its cheeky eleven-point account of its creation (number seven: “Then I wrote a mystical counter theme with double stops that gave Johnny cramps in his arms and hands after a few minutes”) as the musical material itself. Pieces by Aeryn Santillan (Withdraw), Tyshawn Sorey (For Courtney Bryan), and Conrad Tao (Stones) round out the solo violin settings.

August 2022