When the band Snowglobe was most active in the Memphis scene, back in the aughts, they had a run of albums and live shows that any group would envy, culminating in 2010’s Little More Lived In, their sixth release. After that, it seemed the core players — Nahshon Benford (trumpet, flute), Jeff Hulett (drums), Brad Postlethwaite (vocals, piano, guitar), Tim Regan (vocals, piano, guitar), and Brandon Robertson (bass) — went their separate ways. Yet there was never a definitive breakup, as their sporadic reunion shows through the teens proved. Indeed, though band members moved around and their live performances grew less frequent, they began recording new material soon after Little More Lived In, though those tracks would not emerge until 2016’s Snowglobe was released. By then, the band had grown to include Luke White on guitar and John Whittemore on pedal steel.
Now, with a similarly long gestation period, and extra time thrown in for health issues and a pandemic, their eighth and ninth releases, The Fall (an LP) and The Climb (an EP), will both drop this Friday, courtesy of Regan’s Nine Mile Records, based in Austin, Texas.
And while many bands now assemble whole albums from parts recorded in the members’ home studios, these new tracks were generally created the old-fashioned way, with the band convening in a studio. “This happened over plus or minus five years, maybe?” says Regan. “Like, we’re all always writing stuff, and we’re all buddies. So we would just get a weird text from Brad saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got the studio booked for this time, let’s go do something!’ Then I’d come to town and whoever was around would go in there and start messing on stuff. It was all done in Memphis. I mean, I probably did a handful of overdubs from my house, but most of the stuff was cut in a studio with engineers.”
(above) The Fall and The Climb (below) by Andrew Kosten
Those engineers, Regan is quick to point out, were almost always Toby Vest and Pete Matthews of High/Low Recording, though some recordings were done at American Recording Studio when Vest and Matthews operated in that space, before renovating a dedicated building of their own. As Regan explains, working with professional recordists helps the band focus. “I think one of the benefits of getting in the studio is not coming back to find out that Posty [Postlethwaite] put 68 tracks on something. Which happens a lot. He’ll put everything and the kitchen sink in there. So it helps to be working with Pete and Toby and Kevin [Cubbins], who will tell you, ‘We don’t really need six guitars on this.’”
That said, the new tracks are, like much of Snowglobe’s output, rich with layers of ear candy. Though often grounded by chords on an acoustic guitar or piano, the arrangements fill out from there with all manner of harmonies, synthesizers, or electric guitar riffs and hooks. That’s partly a result of the many cameos by friends of the band, invited into the studio sessions over the years. There are so many appearances like this that Regan and the band lost track of who plays what.
“Talking with the guys, it’s like, ‘Who played on this? I don’t remember.’ That’s kind of how it goes. There are two or three where you can tell it’s Paul Taylor playing drums. I think I’m playing drums on one, and Jeff’s on a lot of stuff. It’s just whoever was there, whatever needed to happen.” Other guest players, according to the press release, include Mark Edgar Stuart, Ken Stringfellow, Jonathan Kirkscey, Krista Wroten, and Jana Misener.
“There’s a song of mine on the EP called ‘Need to Know’ that I actually got Kat Brock from Dixie Dirt to sing because I realized that I’d written and recorded it out of my vocal range. We said, ‘Oh, well, we can either re-record this or get someone who can sing better than me to sing it.’ So I called up Kat for a favor and she knocked it out — it sounds damn cool.”
Yet Regan makes it clear that what sounds the coolest to him is a song that stands as a milestone of sorts in the Snowglobe catalog for guitarist Luke White. As the Memphis Flyer reported in 2019, White had a seizure that year that revealed a cancerous brain tumor. While he’s been on a roller coaster of medical treatments ever since, he’s mostly hopeful about that process. “He’s in pretty decent spirits,” says Regan, adding that “his song ‘Willow Tree’ is so damn beautiful. And it’s also the first one that Luke’s written [with Clay Qualls] for us. Not that he hasn’t been a big part of our recordings before, but with this one, he brought it to the table and said, ‘I’ve got a song.’ We were all like, ‘Let’s do it!’ It’s his first writing credit with Snowglobe.”
It’s a challenge for this reporter to write objectively about an old friend like Misty White, but any time she returns to Memphis is news. The rarity of such occasions contrasts sharply with her ubiquity in the city’s underground culture when she lived here — before moving to Toulouse, France, a decade ago — as noted by none other than Greg Cartwright, a well-known fan of her music who, in a 2022 interview with the Memphis Flyer, noted that he met Alicja Trout through White, back in the ’90s. “That’s how we got to know each other: [me] teaching [Alicja] songs for Misty White’s band. So there you go, Misty White is the Kevin Bacon of Memphis!”
Indeed, at the end of the last century, the characters who orbited around her sprawling rental house on Harbert were a veritable who’s who of Memphis rock auteurs, including Ron Easley, Suzy Hendrix, Tav Falco, Amy LaVere, and Alex Chilton, all drawn to a Bohemian atmosphere there thick enough to cut with a knife (but not before inhaling deeply). Along the way, the onetime Deadhead became a garage auteur herself, writing songs and forming groups that were all sparked by the mischievous twinkle in her eye. Her drumming powered those pioneers of all-female garage rock, the Hellcats, before their breakup around 1990, and then she blossomed as a songwriter, sharpening an approach that might best be termed “campfire rock-and-roll,” reminiscent of Jonathan Richman if he were high.
After resettling in Cooper-Young, she met the love of her life, French musician and indie label owner Phillipe Lombardi, and he became an ardent fan of her music. They married and moved to Toulouse, where she lives as Misti Lombardi to this day, preserving her husband’s memory since his unexpected death in 2016. They recorded her songs together in the years leading up to that tragedy, releasing an EP and her first album on his Bang! Records imprint, and she’s carried on ever since.
Now she’s releasing her third LP on Bang!, Dis-Moi, already out in France, and some of which she’ll perform during the three public appearances she’s making this week. The first will be this Thursday, April 4th, as the Zippin’ Pippins, last active about 15 years ago, take the stage at Bar DKDC.
“The original lineup was me, Kristi [White Witt, Misty’s twin sister], Amy LaVere, Suzy Hendrix, and Diana Powell was on keyboards,” White says. “For this show, we’ll have me, Kristi, Amy, and Suzy,” plus two Hellcats, Su Hartline and Lorette Velvette.
The group sprang from her activist days with Save Libertyland, an alliance of Quixotic citizens bent on dissuading the city fathers from dismantling the beloved amusement park and its vintage roller coaster, The Zippin’ Pippin, which Elvis Presley famously enjoyed. In the end, the citizens were thwarted, as documented in the Mike McCarthy short Destroy Memphis, but the band named after the fair ride lived on somehow.
“One of Kristi’s songs is ‘Mid-South Fair,’ about riding the Ferris wheel and falling in love. So many did at the Mid-South Fair. One couple even got married on the Pippin,” says White.
The band will also feature White’s song “Sex Talk,” written well before the group had formed, though it’s only now being featured on White’s solo album. Yet that LP is primarily marked by its newer material. “With this album, I didn’t have a whole album’s worth of old songs that hadn’t been recorded yet. I wrote songs for the record, and that was really interesting, to not have songs I’d played a million times. But yeah, I can still write songs! That’s what that proved.”
It’s fitting that the Zippin’ Pippins are incorporating some Hellcats in the mix, as that group will also be active in the days to follow. On April 10th, superfan Cartwright will moderate an album event and discussion at the Memphis Listening Lab centered on the Hellcats’ full-length LP, Hoodoo Train, produced at Doug Easley’s backyard studio before he moved into the former Onyx Studio building.
After the listening event, various Hellcats will perform their songs in the round at the Lamplighter Lounge. “They all know the Hellcats in France because we were on New Rose,” White says. “Anybody that was on New Rose is kind of held in a higher light because it was such a great label.”
Few musicians are as familiar around town as the indefatigable Graham Winchester, the drummer/multi-instrumentalist who plays with the Sheiks, Jack Oblivian, Turnstyles, Devil Train, the MD’s, and a few others. Along the way, he founded Blast Habit Records with Lori McStay and her late husband, Jared, and is now producing other artists — like Cheyenne Marrs — in his home studio. Yet that last achievement, ironically enough, was only made possible by the quarantine years of Covid, when Winchester was forced to relax the furious pace of his gigging schedule and delve into himself more, writing and recording songs entirely on his own. Now the product of that time is emerging as an LP, Nobody Waters the Flowers, on Red Curtain Records, and Winchester’s gearing up for a record release show at Bar DKDC on March 22nd.
The album has been available on streaming platforms since December of 2022, and, given the album’s provenance, it’s understandable that he was impatient to get it out in the world well before it could exist on vinyl. For this record is a document of another time, the lockdown prompted by Covid and those trepidatious months that followed it, from 2020-2021.
“I think that in the isolation of the shutdown era of the pandemic, anything I was writing was for me. I didn’t even know if there was going to be a future of playing on stage with my friends anytime soon,” Winchester says now. “The songs came from an intimate, personal place and most of them were written and recorded between 2020 and 2021. And a lot of them come out of a place of self-reflection, and reflection about the world we live in. Not being able to be busy made me meditate and think about my own life more.”
Song titles like “Quietly,” “Coming Down,” and “I’ll Be Sad With You” evoke Winchester’s frame of mind at the time. “It was a necessary slowdown for me, personally,” he says. “Obviously, I wish there was no Covid and no isolation, but I made the most of it, I guess.”
Indeed, many families untouched by Covid directly found more quality time during lockdown, and the Winchesters were no different. “There’s a song on the album called ‘From the Start’ that I’m singing directly to my children. And that was inspired from being around my boys all day every day for the first time. Since they’d been born, I’d spent any waking moment I could with them, but I’m a busy guy, a busy dad. To be able to just sit in the backyard on a picnic blanket with my sons brought us so much closer to each other.”
Other songs are not as bound to Winchester’s own life, but spring from his penchant for the pure craft of writing. “‘Nobody Waters the Flowers’ is more of a story song,” Winchester says. “That’s me trying to get into that old country music storytelling zone. ‘Can’t You See?’ as well — sort of like The Band’s approach, or even Creedence Clearwater Revival’s.”
While the album does include the odd garage stomper like “Lab Rat,” listeners who largely associate Winchester with the amped-up sounds of Jack Oblivian or Turnstyles may be in for a surprise. Yet he’s actually been cultivating his quieter side for some time now, often leading songwriter nights at Bar DKDC. The way Winchester tells it, the less raucous approach is really at the core of his compositional style.
“I’ll usually even write Turnstyles songs on the acoustic in sort of a folky way,” he says. “And then I’ll bring it to Seth [Moody] and go, ‘I need help rocking this up.’ So we might put a more aggressive beat on it, he puts his distorted, Jaguar guitar surf-ness on it, and then it becomes this rock song. But when I approach songwriting I think, ‘Is this a song that can be played in any style? Do the lyrics and the chords stand up on their own, to where anybody can adapt it?’ I’m not a huge riff songwriter. I like to start with melodies and chords. And a lot of times I’m writing on piano. I’m really coming at it from a songwriting standpoint, where the song can be taken any kind of way.”
Leonard, Marshall, and Phil Chess in the 1960s (Photo: Courtesy Marshall Chess)
It’s only appropriate to bring news of the new Chess Records revival today, for it was on March 12, 1917, that Leonard Chess, the label’s co-founder, was born. In truth, he was christened Lejzor Szmuel Czyż at the time, when the family lived just west of Pinsk on the Yaselda River, Poland at the time, now Belarus. When they moved to America, settling in Chicago with Anglicized names, Lejzor became Leonard and his brother Fiszel became Phil. Together they would go on to found one of the most groundbreaking and influential independent labels in the history of blues, jazz, and especially rock-and-roll.
Memphian Robert E. “Buster” Williams, whose Plastic Products Company pressed and distributed vinyl, was involved with the brothers early on, and it was Williams who suggested that Leonard and Phil name their new label “Chess.” (This and more can be found in Nadine Cohodas’ excellent history of the label). Indeed, the label had many ties to Memphis, from Chess Records hits like “Rocket 88” and “Moanin’ at Midnight” being recorded by Sam Phillips, to young Memphian Maurice White joining the house band.
That tradition only continues with the involvement of Memphis virtuosos Eric Gales and MonoNeon in a recent album by The Chess Project, New Moves, as detailed in this week’s music feature.
Yet the album is but a piece of a larger plan now being pursued by Leonard’s son Marshall, who was in the thick of the label’s business until Leonard and Phil sold the company in 1969. Leonard would die at the age of 52 later that year. Since that time, as ownership of the label’s catalog shifted over the decades, Marshall remained as the keeper of the family’s real legacy: their memories. And lately, he’s more committed than ever to telling their story.
Partnering with Marshall Chess on this mission is longtime friend Richard Ganter, who worked with Marshall to promote the Legendary Masters series in the mid-1990s. Five years ago, Ganter suggested they create a richly illustrated, high-quality coffee table book, and during the onset of Covid they made it happen, Chess Record Corp.: A Tribute, with Marshall providing the foreword.
Upon the book’s release, Ganter and Chess also started the YouTube channel, Chess Records Tribute, to promote the book and provide a multimedia venue to showcase the legacy of the Chess family — with Marshall’s full support.
“The channel covers blues, rock-and-roll, soul, gospel, and jazz, plus comedy — the entire Chess history,” says Ganter. After the soft launch in July 2020 and a fuller launch this January, the YouTube channel now offers over 500 videos. Recently the pair have started to produce podcasts concerning the history of Chess Records as well, sometimes touching on Marshall Chess’ time as the first president of Rolling Stones Records in the 1970s.
All in all, it’s a music historian’s dream, and a treasury of ripping good yarns as well — a fitting memorial to Leonard Chess and worth a visit on his birthday.
Josh Aguilar and Jeff Williams (Photo: Michael Donahue)
Jeff Williams has been in two groups since he began playing guitar: Sacrum and his newest band, Light and Shade.
Sacrum was the heavy metal band he was in when he was in his mid 20s, says Williams. “‘Sacrum,’” he says, “sounds heavy. It’s so hard. Every metal band always had some name like ‘Rotting Corpse’ or ‘Rotting Death Carcass.”
They wanted a name like that, but they didn’t want to “go all horror movie with it.”
Fast forward 13 years to Light and Shade. It’s not heavy metal. It’s all instrumental. It even has a saxophone in it. People have called their sound “modern jazz” and “post rock,” Williams says. “People have called us ‘psychedelic.’”
“Anything can be psychedelic if you take enough,” adds saxophonist Josh Aguilar.
Others have also called them “folk” or “post folk,” Williams says. “I think of ‘folk’ as some dude sitting in an old smoky club singing some Dylan-y stuff.”
Their music has “that film thematic sound to it,” which makes it perfect for movie soundtracks, Williams says.
“Honestly, I just think of it as good instrumental music.”
Light and Shade, which also includes Harvey Waldman from Sacrum on drums, released its self-titled album in December.
When he was writing songs like “The Haunting” and “The Eyes” for Sacrum, Williams also was writing instrumentals similar to Light and Shade material. He didn’t want all his songs to be that “heavy metal gray kind of thing,” Williams says. “I wanted to paint with some different colors.”
He wanted to write instrumentals because he wanted to make people feel good. “I wanted to write some stuff anybody could listen to and not have to be a music nerd. I wanted people to feel it.”
A native Memphian, Williams “grew up on everything from classic rock, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Doors — stuff my dad listened to. Grand Funk Railroad.” He also listened to his brother’s tapes. “Anything from your hair metal stuff. Your Winger and Warrant. And your Whitesnake and your Dokken.”
Later it was grunge. Stone Temple Pilots and Alice in Chains.
Sacrum was “a power groove metal band,” Williams says. “The music was kind of progressive. People called us death metal or black metal, but we weren’t. It was just because we were so heavy and my brother was screaming.”
Sacrum, which was together from 2005 to around 2011, “did end up opening for a lot of national acts,” Williams says, adding, “We were going after it pretty hard. We had a lot of ‘almosts’ and ‘what ifs’ like everybody does.”
But, he says, “It just started to dissipate after a while of making no money. We all just had to get jobs and do whatever.”
Williams even thought about getting out of music altogether. “There was a period where I really thought about saying, ‘Fuck it.’ We’ve done it so long. I’ve made zero dollars. I only put money into it. We were all poor. Nobody had a rich uncle who could be the angel investor and help us make a record.”
Things changed in 2012 when Aguilar got a job at the Jimmy John’s where Williams was working at the time. They began jamming together. “Anybody could record shitty demos on their computer.” But, he says, “Shit started sounding like something. Sounded better.”
After more than 10 years of writing new songs, newer versions of the songs, and refining arrangements, they decided to go into a studio “to get a better sound,” Williams says. “We had the longest pre-production ever.”
They recorded “the whole album in five or six days” at Young Avenue Sound.
Waldman, who lives in Los Angeles, was still able to add his drum parts. “We recorded the whole album to a click track.” The drummer was “only in town for a couple of days and he knocked everything out at once.”
Light and Shade doesn’t totally get away from his old sound, Williams says. “Jafar,” one song on the album, has “heavy distorted guitars on it.” And, he — perhaps fondly — adds, the song “brings back a bit of the metal.”
This year’s Folk Alliance International (FAI) conference and awards show, which just happened in Kansas City last week, was especially meaningful for Rachel Maxann. It was on this, her third visit to the annual gathering of global folkies, that she was first featured as an artist in the conference’s Official Showcase. And that’s causing her to look back in wonder at the musical journey she’s been on since moving to Memphis.
“I think living in Memphis really helped me embrace the folksiness of my music in a way that I hadn’t before,” she reflects now. “Because, as a Black female, I’ve always written songs like this, but I hadn’t really thought of myself as a folk musician. I would just call it ‘indie singer songwriter’ because I hadn’t seen that representation before. Of course, I admired the greats like Tracy Chapman, who’s finally getting her flowers once again.” Indeed, Chapman just garnered a Lifetime Achievement Award at the FAI last week. Yet not long ago, learning of the many other uncategorizable artists beyond Chapman was an epiphany of sorts for Maxann.
“It wasn’t until I moved to Memphis that I heard people like Valerie June, or Amythyst Kiah, or Allison Russell, and all these other amazing like Black female folk artists,” she says. “I really started embracing that. And then of course, the community of Memphis and Music Export Memphis [MEM] were full of people that were like, ‘Yeah, you’re a folk musician!’ And I’m like, ‘You know, I am.’ It was Elizabeth [Cawein of MEM] who reached out to me about signing up for the FAI. Here we are a few years later.”
She’s been busy in that time, having followed up her 2019 debut, Fickle Hellcat, with last year’s Black Fae, and the sonic evolution between the two has been striking. Whereas her debut captured the sound of her band running through a set of her eclectic originals, Black Fae aims for more ambitious production and offers more surprises. It first reveals Maxann’s embrace of her inner folk artist, opening with only her voice and acoustic guitar on “Wait for Me.” But it ranges far and wide from there, often with her well-honed band, but sometimes beyond that. The sweeping synths of “Goddess,” for example, could be one of those ’90s tracks by Brian Eno and John Cale, if they’d had Annie Lennox singing. For Maxann, reaching in these ways is the point, and that’s especially true of her latest single, “The Tides,” slated to drop on March 4th.
“When I release the song, it will be a version with just me and my guitar, singing solo, but there’s also the band version. I’m going to be doing both the versions at Folk Alliance as well. And then there’s also a version with my trio [featuring Tamar Love on cello and Alice Hasen on violin]. There are so many versions of the song! I will also be releasing the trio version as a lyric video. So you know, whatever version of ‘The Tides’ you like the best, it’ll be out there. Choose your own adventure!” she laughs, then adds, “Those are my favorite types of books.”
In the meantime, not overly concerned with genre tags, Maxann will continue to go where her deepest feelings take her, always expressed through her powerful voice, steeped in soul but with the plainspokenness of folk. Some call it the latter, but don’t expect any political anthems: Maxann embraces more of the personal side of folk than the music’s more activist tradition.
“I just take whatever I’m feeling and transform it into a cathartic experience via music,” she explains. “I did an interview a while ago, and one of the questions was, ‘Do you feel the need to write about being Black, or being queer, or being a woman in folk?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, not necessarily. I feel that just by writing the songs that I do, singing my experience, that in itself is singing about being Black, female, queer, or whatever. I feel like I’d be forcing it if I tried to sit down and write a protest song. If it inspires me one day, if it comes to me like that, I totally will. I’m not against it. It just hasn’t ever really hit me like that.’”
Rachel Maxann will appear at Hernando’s Hide-a-way on Friday, March 8th, as part of a songwriters-in-the-round show, and on March 28th, opening for Dale Hollow.
Recently, in the wake of the Memphis Flyer‘s coverage of the local classical scene, a reporter asked me what venues I would recommend to hear exciting, new composers at work. After listing a few of the usual suspects — the Green Room at Crosstown Arts, the Cannon Center, the Germantown Performing Arts Center, etc. — I wrapped it up with the words, “Oh yeah, there’s also this bar …”
A bar where one can hear composers of new music? Yes indeed, thanks to the venturesome spirit that is alive and well at B-Side Bar in Midtown. The club nestled among the various shops of Minglewood Hall has become a favorite of the experimental set (among many other genres) in recent years, and one regular there has been David Collins.
Since before his 2021 debut album, Memphis, Collins has demonstrated a knack for inhabiting the interstices between classical, jazz, rock, and “new music,” whatever that is. Along the way, he’s been incredibly prolific, not just in composing his own music, but in tackling other composers from the worlds of both jazz (e.g., Horace Silver) and classical (e.g., Erik Satie). And he’s often performed at B-Side, typically with his primary group, Frog Squad.
As of July of last year, he ramped that up considerably, as his spin-off group, Freak Squid, took up a residency there on the last Tuesday of every month in order to work out some of Collins’ newer material. It still preserved Frog Squad’s rock-friendly approach to instrumental music — “sometimes we had four guitars, which was awesome,” Collins quips — but with a slightly different feel.
And, because of the quality of the sound at B-Side, usually overseen by live sound veteran Joe Holland, that July-December residency will soon yield more tangible fruits. Having recorded every Freak Squid performance from last year, Collins has now mixed the best cuts into a new collection, due to drop later this week. “It’s maybe more indie-rock-ish, like Radiohead-ish,” he says of the imminent album. “We also have some really free stuff on there. I’m gonna put it out in two parts. And the second part is going to be a lot more aggressive kind of avant garde. It will be released under my name David Collins, and the title is Freak Squid One.”
Meanwhile, Collins has already moved on. Now he has a group simply called David Collins’ Acoustic Septet, and they currently occupy the coveted last-Tuesday slot. “I’ve got a new band, and probably in six months I’ll have another new band after that,” Collins remarks. “I’m hoping that every six months I’ll do a new band and then we’ll record it live, so I’ll get two albums a year from this residency. This new band features two guitarists, me and Logan Hanna. Ethan Baker’s on violin, Ben Walsh is on double bass, Aaron Phillips is on bass flute, Delara Hashemi is on alto flute, and Haley Ivey is on concert flute.”
David Collins’ Acoustic Septet (Photo courtesy David Collins).
This material is decidedly less indie-rock, particularly as it has no drums. “This is nice because it’s really quiet. Kind of intimate,” says the composer. “I’ve got everything arranged. There’s a few tunes that just have lead sheets for the rhythm section, but flutes are generally scored out. The idea is that the flutes will have a calliope kind of sound.”
David Collins’ Acoustic Septet appears on Tuesday, February 27th at B-Side Memphis, 10 p.m., and the last Tuesday of every month after that.
Two years ago, only a month into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Memphis Symphony Orchestra (MSO), the Memphis Symphony Chorus, and the University of Mississippi Concert Singers, before their rendition of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, launched into the national anthem, “Державний Гімн України,” aka “The Glory and Freedom of Ukraine Has Not Yet Perished,” and suddenly all the audience felt, as if through high-voltage cables, a direct through line to Ukraine’s history via a song written some 160 years earlier. The audience rose to their feet, stirred but also reassured, it seemed, to be sharing that historical moment in real time, celebrating a righteous cause through music.
A similar electricity surged through the crowd at the opening of a significant concert earlier this month. All were awaiting the premiere of the Harriet Tubman Oratorio by Memphis composer Earnestine Rodgers Robinson, when the familiar first strains of introductory music caused the audience to rise from their seats and sing along: It was “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the 1900 hymn that’s now embraced as the de facto national anthem of Black America. Given today’s troubled racial politics, it was no less galvanizing than the Ukrainian national anthem had been in 2022, as a massive, diverse crowd stood to sing of hope and empowerment for all. In both cases it was that venerable old institution of the fine arts, the symphony orchestra, offering insight into today’s struggles by keeping history’s songs alive. It was as if remembering the past had become an act of resistance, as in Orwell’s 1984, and here was the MSO leading the charge, radically challenging us with our own cultural memories.
Earnestine Robinson (Photo: Alex Greene)
But even as the MSO and other classical ensembles offer that link with history, they’re also taking chances, delving into unexplored territory, and nurturing the music of the future. And it’s making this city’s classical scene one of the most vibrant in the country.
“I’ve Got Two Strikes Against Me”
As it turned out, the Harriet Tubman Oratorio premiere succinctly captured what is fomenting in the Memphis classical world today. While honoring the historical figure of Tubman, devoted abolitionist and leader in the Underground Railroad, the oratorio itself was absolutely contemporary, the latest from Memphis’ self-taught composer Earnestine Rodgers Robinson. Though her first major work, The Crucifixion Oratorio, premiered at Carnegie Hall as early as 1997, and the Czech National Symphony Orchestra performed her piece, The Nativity, in Prague more than 20 years ago, this would be the first time any of Robinson’s orchestral works would be performed in her hometown.
And so when the room swelled with the strains of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” that night, it was in tacit recognition of both Tubman and the composer herself, two Black women whose voices were set to be lifted to glorious new heights by no less than the MSO, four star singers from Opera Memphis, the Memphis Symphony Chorus, and the Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church Choir. “Yet with a steady beat,” sang the choirs and the crowd, “Have not our weary feet come to the place for which our fathers died?” In that moment, for one night’s performance at least, it felt as though we had.
As the night went on, Robinson’s new oratorio lived up to the moment in all its gravitas, juxtaposing Tubman’s own words, brought to life by storyteller and griot Janice Curtis Greene, with Robinson’s memorable melodies woven into the intricate orchestrations of her arrangers, Heather Sorenson and Francisco Núñez, the chorus of voices sometimes exploding with earthshaking power. It was a testament to Robinson’s vision, matched with the vision of a major symphony orchestra embracing works from outside the conservatory. The fact that it was happening in Memphis’ own Cannon Center made clear how far Robinson had come since her first forays into writing devotional music half a century ago.
It all started in the 1970s when Robinson was tasked to organize an Easter program for her brother’s church, and a melody poured out from her unbidden as she read some Bible verses. Encouraged by her late husband Charles, an accountant who played classical piano (and worked for Mercury Records for a time), Robinson continued to compose over the years in the same way. “I have to have the words first,” she says of her process. “Then the words dictate the mood. They tell the story and that tells you how the music goes. It dictates to your spirit and you go with the flow.”
Working out the melodies thus, Robinson then records herself singing her compositions and mails the recording to herself, the dated postmark serving as proof of her authorship. “Then, once I’ve done that, I’m ready to give it to a person to score for me. They tell me these melodies I write are intricate. I don’t know they’re intricate, though. I just know I’m singing what I heard.”
Now 86, Robinson is still a little stunned that she’s found such acceptance in the classical milieu. When her work was performed in Prague, she says, “I was intimidated. I said, ‘Oh, my goodness! I’m in the wrong place, with all these supposed composers.’ I didn’t know how they were going to accept me. I’m Black, and I’m a woman, so I’ve got two strikes against me.”
Yet, as it turns out, the classical establishment’s embrace of her work reveals an increasingly progressive tendency in that world, and helps explain how the National Civil Rights Museum came to sign on as a sponsor of the concert. As Kyle Dickson, the MSO’s assistant conductor who led the orchestra through the Harriet Tubman Oratorio, says, “In the last four years there have been many classical organizations that have embraced this idea of performing more composers of color, or just simply presenting more concerts that are more inclusive, that reflect more of the communities that they exist in. These are composers whose contributions have been swept under the rug for so long.”
The McCain Duo (Photo: Sara Bill/courtesy The McCain Duo)
There are other signs that composers of color, both old and new, are being taken more seriously. Pianist Artina McCain, associate professor of piano at the University of Memphis Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music, often curates Celebration, a Black composers festival in Austin, Texas, that’s now in its 18th year. That in turn has led her to program concerts here with a similar brief, most notably in her Mahogany Chamber Music Series at Crosstown Arts, a series of chamber music concerts spotlighting Black and other underrepresented composers that McCain began in 2019. (This year’s edition of the series takes place February 25th at Crosstown Theater.)
A major element in the revival of Black composers has been reaching back into history to revive writers who were neglected at the time, such as William Grant Still or Florence Price. “Florence Price is making a resurgence these days,” McCain told the Memphis Flyer in 2019. “She seems to be the composer of preference as far as being a female of color that symphonies are programming. People are becoming more aware of her musical style. And the rhythms and harmonies that she uses are very familiar in American folk music. Black composers wanted to fuse the genres that were more readily associated with Black Americans — jazz, blues, gospel — with their training. So they came up with this genre that’s a thing in itself.”
That “genre” is regularly being celebrated by the MSO, as in their recent concert celebrating the 100th anniversary of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which opened with four compositions by Still, who was blending jazz with classical years before Gershwin’s famous work. Also including the eerie harmonies of Kurt Weill’s take on American jazz, and pianist Zhu Wang on the Gershwin piece, the concert was a study in diversity, from the repertoire to the audience to the musicians themselves.
Robinson’s daughter, Michelle McKissack, who sits on the MSO board, feels this diversity makes the MSO unique. “Memphis really is leading the way,” she says. “You just don’t see the level of diversity in other orchestras, compared to what you see here in Memphis.”
Opera Memphis has also taken a commitment to diversity to unheard-of levels. Only a week before the Harriet Tubman Oratorio, they presented a recital of art songs crafted around the writings of Langston Hughes, including works by Still and Price. It felt as though the Harlem Renaissance, in which both Hughes and the composers were key players, had sprung to life once more, a century after the fact, through the voices of Marcus King, Kayla Oderah, and Marquita Richardson — opera singers who all happen to be Black.
In Search of Tomorrow’s Music
Yet the classical world of Memphis is not only pushing the envelope in terms of traditional racial biases. Local ensembles are also embracing a diversity of sounds, a plurality of musics, if you will, in the form of contemporary composers. Championing what is sometimes called “New Music” has become a fundamental mission of some groups here, to the point where they’re helping bring new music into being by commissioning the works directly.
McCain, for example, while introducing the works she and her husband Martin (a trombone instructor at the U of M) performed at Grace-St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in late January, noted that “90 percent of what you’ll hear in this program is music that’s been commissioned by us.” Music for piano-trombone duets being rare, this is partly out of necessity, but also springs from the McCains’ commitment to fuel the continued evolution of classical music.
They’re not alone in commissioning new works. What was once called the Iris Orchestra, now the Iris Collective, has fostered new music for more than two decades. Conductor Michael Stern, onetime artistic director of Iris and still an advisor to the collective, noted in 2022 that “commissioning new works is part of our mission statement. When we started Iris 22 years ago, the express intention was, in part, to nurture and promote the music of our time, especially American composers.”
One notable Iris commission, in 2020, celebrated the city of Memphis itself, in a symphonic tour de force by Conrad Tao inspired by Charlie Patton’s “A Spoonful Blues,” simply titled “Spoonfuls.” The piece’s inventiveness was bracing, as samples of Patton’s original recordings were followed by a brash, playful symphonic commentary that echoed the bluesman’s original singing, but with stop-start sonic blasts that made full use of an orchestra’s power.
Awadagin Pratt (Photo: Rob Davidson)
Another work that Iris co-commissioned at the time was slated to enjoy its world premiere here in Memphis, but was delayed when pianist Awadagin Pratt contracted Covid in 2022. This March 2nd, he’ll finally make good on that commitment at the Germantown Performing Arts Center (GPAC) with his performance of Jessie Montgomery’s Rounds for piano and orchestra. At the time, Stern’s enthusiasm for the new work was palpable. “Jessie Montgomery is one of the most compelling voices to rise to the top of the scene over the last two or three years, for good reason,” Stern said. “I was also co-commissioner of this piece with my Kansas City Symphony. So I’ve got a double connection with that piece. I’ve done quite a few of Jessie’s works now, and I think she is a wonderful composer. This piece especially, Rounds for piano and orchestra, is playful and dancing and really lovely. And Awadagin is making his solo piano debut with us, playing on Jessie’s piece.”
Commissioning Rounds has, in retrospect, revealed just how prescient Iris’ commitment to the new can be. This year the piece won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition, and Pratt is being recognized as one of the most accomplished pianists of his generation. It’s indicative of how great an impact commissioning new works can have, not to mention how the inventiveness of new music overlaps with challenging deep cultural preconceptions.
Indeed, Pratt has devised a multimedia experience focused on just that. On March 3rd, he’ll present (and perform a live soundtrack for) his film Awadagin Pratt: Black in Americaat the University of Memphis. As Rebecca Arendt of Iris notes, “It’s part live music, part film, and part panel discussion, and it really homes in on his individual story of racial profiling. We’ll also be joined by a representative from the National Civil Rights Museum to talk about racism in our country and reconciliation.” Incorporating Pratt’s live performance, the event represents a complete rethinking of the classical music experience.
The City of Tomorrow, a wind quintet with two members at the University of Memphis, is another ensemble committed to commissioning new works, and is creating some of the most inventive music in the city because of it. After their recent show at The Green Room at Crosstown Arts, one fellow audience member confessed to me, “I never knew that symphonic instruments like that could make so many sounds!” And the pieces favored by the ensemble did lean into the unorthodox, sometimes relying on the sounds of valves clicking, spoken-word interludes by the players, or strangely expressive growls and toots from the flute, oboe, French horn, bassoon, and clarinet players comprising the group.
The final piece of that night, The Faculty of Sensing, had been co-commissioned by the group and featured another composer being widely celebrated now, George Lewis, who has won MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships. Elise Blatchford, the City of Tomorrow’s flutist, notes that Crosstown Arts has played a pivotal role in presenting such cutting-edge work in the traditionally conservative town of Memphis. “I think Crosstown Arts is a big part of the story here,” she says. “Where I used to feel like if I wanted to see some really hard-edged new music, or anything that I’ve been reading about in The New Yorker, I’d have to take a trip up to New York. But now I just pay attention to what they’re scheduling over at Crosstown and I go there. That’s really been a shot in the arm artistically, for me personally, just having cool shows to go to.”
That was made abundantly clear last spring, when Evan Williams, a composer who’d taught for years at Rhodes College before taking a position at Berklee College of Music in Boston, returned to Memphis to premiere a new piece, Crosstown Counterpoint, commissioned by Crosstown Arts and written in honor of the very building where it was to be performed. With members of Blueshift Ensemble (since 2016, a key group in promoting new music locally) stationed in disparate parts of the concourse’s atrium, the work made full use of the echoing space which inspired it.
Subtitled “for two antiphonal string quartets and audio playback,” Crosstown Counterpoint made use of the concourse’s multiple levels, with one quartet on the ground floor and another on the mezzanine above. The stereo strings responded to each other’s hypnotic patterns as recordings of community voices were heard on the PA. In one moving passage, a Memphian observes, “The building has a personality,” then adds, “and layers of history,” a phrase which repeated as the strings played on, the words echoing through the very walls being remembered.
In such ways, the new music of today creates unexpected, inventive frames for our own history, just as “Spoonfuls” incorporated the voice of Charlie Patton, or Robinson’s oratorio evoked Harriet Tubman through her own words. In pushing the limits of traditional instruments or resuscitating the works of undeservedly obscure composers of color, new music is not discarding the past, but reimagining it.
And finally, last weekend’s performance of Debussy’s La Mer by the MSO reminded audiences of the personal dimension of the past, and the fragility of the local community that makes such leaps of inspiration possible. At one point, cellist Zuill Bailey, a featured soloist, broke out of the program to acknowledge the recent deaths of two performers, the late MSO violinist Paul Turnbow, for whom a chair in the violin section had been left empty, and Jimmy Jones, the organ virtuoso and husband of MSO music director Bob Moody, who died suddenly this month at the age of 41.
“I usually can’t find the correct way to say, ‘I’m sorry,’” said Bailey. “But I certainly can find it on the cello. And I’d like to play this for Jimmy and Bob, a piece by Gluck called Dance of the Blessed Spirits.” As the strains of a solitary cello filled the house, the silences seemed as eloquent as the notes, Bailey lingering over each pause with great care. As it ended, you could have heard a pin drop. Surveying the audience and the musicians, one could not have imagined a wider cross section of the Memphis melting pot. All of us shared the moment together, irrespective of race, class, or gender, to treasure the life’s work of two consummate music makers, and, by way of honoring them without prejudice, to simply listen with fresh ears.
There was a sizable Memphis contingent attending a press conference in Nashville last month, and not just because it concerned new bipartisan legislation known as the ELVIS Act. That’s not about naming another street after The King, but rather a recognition of how the distinctive, instantly recognizable voices of recording artists need new protections in the brave new world of artificial intelligence (AI). Officially speaking, it’s the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act, which Gov. Bill Lee’s office describes as “a bill updating Tennessee’s Protection of Personal Rights law to include protections for songwriters, performers, and music industry professionals’ voice[s] from the misuse of artificial intelligence.” And among the catalysts for the legislation, it turned out, was the concern one Memphian felt over the risks of such misuse.
That would be Gebre Waddell, whose company Sound Credit is focused on ensuring recognition of music industry workers’ contributions to the recording arts via a custom platform that catalogs credits, like the liner notes of your dreams. That being the sea in which Waddell swims, confronting AI’s ability to mimic artists’ work came naturally to him, but he didn’t do so as a representative of Sound Credit, or as the secretary/treasurer of the Recording Academy, or as a member of the Tennessee Entertainment Commission (other hats that Waddell wears).
Photo: Bing AI
Rather, it all began with some casual party banter. Last year, Waddell was attending one of many celebrations honoring hip-hop’s 50th anniversary when a common concern kept coming up in conversation. “So we were chatting on the lawn and conversations just started turning towards AI,” he recalls. “This was not long after the fake Drake/fake The Weeknd thing happened.”
That was the phenomenon where, as Billboard reported last April, “a track called ‘Heart on My Sleeve,’ allegedly created with artificial intelligence to sound like it was by Drake and The Weeknd became the hottest thing in music.” It was quickly pulled from streaming services after raising concerns over potentially widespread deep fakes of human hitmakers, but the issue lingered in the minds of music industry influencers.
“As we were chatting,” Waddell recalls, “I was like, ‘You know, we just need to add AI language into an existing state’s right of publicity law, and then that could create some momentum for a federal law.’ That was just an idea that I threw out there and people were saying, ‘That that would be great, you could probably pull some people together.’ So I came home and set up some Zooms.”
A “right of publicity law” is one that protects against unauthorized uses of a person’s name or likeness for commercial (and certain other) purposes, but there is no federal standard, only a hodgepodge of different states’ statutes. Tennessee has one of the country’s toughest right of publicity laws, but it does not feature language about AI. Waddell decided to fix that.
“I drafted a version of what the legislation could look like,” says Waddell. “Then I invited a number of people to a Zoom meeting to discuss it, and I showed them what I drafted. And it really created some momentum.” Clearly, this was permeating the zeitgeist, and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) soon drafted their own version. The momentum only increased. “Boom, the very next thing to happen was the press conference,” says Waddell.
The Recording Academy, which last year helped launch the Human Artistry Campaign to protect human-created music in the face of AI, was there in force, as were other organizations, all eager to witness the first proposed state legislation to explicitly target AI fakes. As the Recording Academy’s news page noted, “The ELVIS Act is expected to be quickly considered by the state’s legislature, and with support from the Governor could soon become the first law of its kind. And the Recording Academy hopes it will also become model legislation for other states to follow. That same day, leaders on Capitol Hill took a similar step to protecting creators’ identity with the bipartisan introduction of the No AI FRAUD Act (H.R. 6943).”
Waddell, for his part, is feeling encouraged. “I fully support it. I think that, as it’s currently written, it’s exactly what we need. And the thing I’m really proud of is that it carries a West Tennessee namesake: It ended up being called the ELVIS Act. It started with the involvement of a Memphian and ended up having a very Memphis kind of name.”
Singer Lisa Nobumoto launched the Jazz Masters Series nonprofit. (Photo: Wilcox Photography)
For Lisa Nobumoto, jazz is more than just a genre. It’s a mission, a way of life. That much is obvious with last week’s release of A Tribute to Jazz Singer Nancy Wilson by Nobumoto and the Jazz Masters Orchestra, arguably one of the most ambitious jazz projects to come out of Memphis in decades, and a labor of love for the singer that’s been years in the making.
That’s partly due to the scale of the ensemble, a 20-piece orchestra that’s a veritable who’s who of jazz heavyweights working in Memphis today. The album’s arrangements were done by Rhodes College faculty member Carl Wolfe, co-founder of the Memphis Jazz Orchestra, and the group was conducted by Jack Cooper, director of jazz studies at the University of Memphis. Pianist Eric Reed, the sole non-Memphian, is a lecturer and artist-in-residence at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the remaining players are similarly well-schooled professionals. And the proof is in the listening, as the group brings Wolfe’s arrangements to life with fluidity and nuance. Sailing over that swinging foundation, of course, is Nobumoto’s voice.
Album Art: David Lynch
A native of California with family roots in the Mid-South, Nobumoto relocated to Memphis some five years ago and promptly founded the Jazz Masters Series nonprofit to pursue her vision of fine jazz. That vision was honed over decades of performance on the west coast and touring the world. Her late husband, George Gaffney, was Sarah Vaughan’s pianist, but Nobumoto worked with many greats in Los Angeles. “I worked with Teddy Edwards for 32 years,” she says, “and the other players in that band were Jimmy Cleveland, Gerald Wiggins, Al ‘Tootie’ Heath, Nolan Smith Jr., and Larry Gales.” In short, she’s worked with some of America’s greatest musicians.
During her L.A. days, none other than legendary jazz scribe and composer Leonard Feather wrote, “Lisa Nobumoto’s distinctive phrasing and timbre could earn her a significant role on the upcoming vocal scene,” and indeed, Music Connection magazine named her the top unsigned artist in Los Angeles at the time.
Bringing that experience to Memphis, Nobumoto knew early on that she wanted to pay tribute to Nancy Wilson, a master of not only straight-ahead jazz but blues, soul, pop, and R&B as well. Beginning in the early ’60s, “The Girl with the Honey-Coated Voice,” as she was known, was a pop star of sorts, back when such a thing was imaginable for a jazz artist. “My mom played Nancy Wilson over and over and over again when I was a child,” says Nobumoto. “I knew every song.” Later, as she delved into Wilson’s work more deeply, Nobumoto found who Wilson had found her inspiration from: Little Jimmy Scott.
To those familiar with Scott’s soaringly high, somewhat androgynous delivery, that makes perfect sense. “He’s my favorite male singer vocalist of all time,” notes Nobumoto. “I met him and heard him perform on several occasions, and he’s the only man I’ve ever seen start a show with a ballad — and then go on to a slower ballad. He could have you crying, where you can’t hold your tears back. And Nancy basically took his sound. I mean, she studied him a lot. They came from the same part of Ohio.”
Nobumoto has a gift for interpretation, negotiating this material with a grace akin to Dinah Washington and echoing Wilson’s conversational style — but always with Nobumoto’s individual stamp. “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” is transformed into a steamy, confessional ballad, worlds away from Frankie Valli’s pop stomper. Stevie Wonder’s “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” is more up-tempo than either the original or Wilson’s 1966 version, taking it into boogaloo territory, yet with a relaxed delivery that brings wit and humor to the song. With Wolfe’s arrangements, the album’s timeless jazz classicism makes it hard to pin down chronologically: It could have been made any time in the last half century.
Recalling the two legendary singers who most inspired her is bittersweet for Nobumoto, who performed with so many jazz greats before moving to Memphis. “They’re just gone. Everybody I knew from that era, so to speak, has passed. But when you get to a certain age, you stop thinking about money or fame and you’ll give up everything just to live this broke-ass lifestyle. And I get to see things like this manifest. I really want the nonprofit to build into something that I can leave behind for someone else to carry on.”
