‘America Again’ concert to celebrate nation’s diversity
Lara Downes offered a musical answer to what defines America in her recent anthology “America Again.”
The wide-ranging selection of solo piano pieces by American composers features men and women, straights and gays; whites, blacks and Latinos.
Chatter Cabaret will present Downes in performance at the Albuquerque Museum on Sunday.
Although the CD title evokes a certain presidential campaign slogan, Downs based hers on the Langston Hughes poem “Let America Be America Again.” Hughes’ 1935 poem speaks of those for whom the American dream is only a fantasy.
Downes began working on the project in 2015. The album features music by Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Scott Joplin, the Puerto Rican-born Angélica Negrón and the African-American classical composer Florence Price.
“It’s been such a remarkable experience to live this American moment through this music,” Downes said in a phone interview from her home near San Francisco. “The reasons for it have intensified by huge proportions.”
At the time she launched the project, Downs was catalyzed by the 2015 Charleston, S.C., church shootings. During a prayer service, a 21-year-old white supremacist killed nine people (including the senior pastor). Downes wanted to highlight the diversity of American culture and to showcase the music of women and people of color.
“I am classical-trained, but my family background contains many different kinds of music,” she said. “My interest in American music has pushed me way beyond the classical.”
In Albuquerque, Downes will play music from “America Again” as well as Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and pieces from her recent “Billie Holiday Songbook,” including “God Bless the Child,” “I’ll Be Seeing You” and “It Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do.”