Lawrence Brownlee: Rising album review — high-wire songs inspired by the Harlem Renaissance

In June 1979, President Carter inaugurated the first Black Music Month. The idea was to celebrate the influence that black music has had on culture in the US, and that tradition continues in June each year, since renamed African-American Music Appreciation Month by President Obama.

In his new project, Rising, tenor Lawrence Brownlee has devised a programme of songs inspired by the African-American poets of the Harlem Renaissance, which he says will focus on “themes of uplift, elevation and rebirth” after the challenges of the past few years.

For the occasion, Brownlee has commissioned six composers to write new songs, some more interesting than others, alongside existing works. Each composer is represented by a short group, the first three by Damien Sneed, who establishes the tone with a defiantly upbeat setting of James Weldon Johnson’s “The Gift to Sing”.

Among the other new songs are a thoughtful, warm-hearted duo by Jasmine Barnes, the first hymning the brotherhood of men, the second an invocation to ancestral spirits. Joel Thompson’s “My People” sports jazz-inspired panache, sending Brownlee’s high tenor up into its stratosphere. Shawn E Okpebholo’s “Romance” takes him higher still.

These are high-wire performances, accompanied with spirit by Kevin J Miller, that make the most of Brownlee’s vocal range, familiar from his Rossini operas. Among the older works are two appreciable short cycles setting Langston Hughes, Robert Owens’s lucid Silver Rain (1958) and the happy, romantic Songs of the Seasons (1955) by Margaret Bonds.

★★★★☆

‘Rising’ is released by Warner Classics