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The cover photo of Angelica Dass, suffused with that pale "haint blue" typical of the ceilings and porches of the American South, traditionally Georgia and South Carolina, is inspired by a famous 1969 portrait, "Lawdy Mama," by Barkley L. Hendricks. As in other cases (not many), the image expresses an immediate synthesis of the album's consequent contents: the fusion between conceptual art and music thus becomes total, in its intense awareness. This is where Blackbirding , Queen Esther 's latest effort , begins ; we remember her in James "Blood" Ulmer's band and working with the avant-garde performer Elliott Sharp.
A concept with a very specific identity, sponsored by the NYC Women's Fund For Media, Music, and Theatre (a program designed to fund creative activities), the work matured during a period (around 2020) the artist spent at the Gettysburg Battlefield, the city's military park, the site of one of the most important and bloody battles of the American Civil War in 1863. This is the fulcrum around which the twelve pieces revolve, a massacre that merits a rereading of history, an experience that allows them to touch on timeless themes such as slavery, segregation, and racism. The attentive eye is that of the author, a modern "Black feminist" descended from that area where "the blue of notes is a way of life" and according to which certain practices (such as blackbirding , an exercise in forced and deceptive recruitment) simply have never completely disappeared. “Many of those black boys were kidnapped and sent south, but slavery didn't end, it just evolved.”
Steeped in this belief, Queen creates a profound, cultured, indomitable album, whose essence even transcends genres and in which the combination of notes, accents, and fragments of narrative is the fruit of in-depth research, just as, perhaps more so, than her previous albums, Gild The Black Lily and Rona , 2021 and 2023, respectively. The work inevitably draws on a 360-degree musical tradition, that stylistic vocabulary made up of country, blues, soul, jazz, and alt-Americana for all. The twelve songs, starting with the emblematic " Are You Thirsty?" (Les Vivandieres Theme Song),, are the nature and principle of the narrative. The introductory piece tells of the women who dispense wine on the two lines, (“le Beaujolais est bon”), red as blood; the soundtrack is the result of a minimal and pulsating blues, with excellent harmonic development, similar to Can't No Grave Hold My Body Down , a spiritual with a restless acoustic soul dedicated to Lincoln Cemetery, still home to at least thirty members of the “US colored troops” who have not found rest in the national cemetery: “because segregation continues even after death”.
Songs of desperation and resilience, such as Hold Steady , “whipped” by the double bass, pervaded by soul atmospheres (thanks to the Hammond) and a penetrating guitar solo or like The Devil May Care (But Jesus Knows) , with its intense, electric arpeggiated harmonic progression and Oh My Stars (The Gettysburg Variation) , shadowed by a moving minor fourth. The story unfolds through country music, invigorated by the lap-steel of Hey Virginia! and the more threadlike style of I Feel So Alive , becoming more stimulating on the notes of Rebels , a gripping country rock with a Southern influence, and finding the necessary relief in the acoustic Magic (“a sacred intimacy between the living and the dead”) by Olivia Newton John, as in When I Get Home , with its arrangement stripped down to just the beating of the heart, condensed into a poignant “holler.”
The musicians are essential to the success of the project: Hilliard Green on double bass, Steve Williams on drums, Greg Lewis on organ, Sharp Radway on piano, Jeff McLaughlin on guitar, Raphael McGregor on steel (and lap) guitar, as well as backing vocals; all members of the Black Americana and Jazz Collective. As well as the textbook finale, Robert Palmer's You're Gonna Get What's Coming : a warning, for a discussion that is not yet over. Beautiful.