BRUITS | Gramophone

Musicians have felt an increasing urgency over the past year to become engaged with issues of social justice. Imani Winds were already there well before most, having devoted themselves to giving a platform to marginalised voices since they started out in 1997. So the moral focus of their new album, which addresses the effects of systemic racism, reflects much more than a current trend.

Indeed, the title-work by Vijay Iyer was written in response to the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 – specifically, to the verdict of not guilty in the ensuing trial over the black teenager’s death. Playing on the multi-layered implications of the word, Bruits – French for ‘noises’ but also a medical term referring to the abnormal murmur (heard through a stethoscope) that indicates obstruction of arterial blood flow – is the most ambitious and experimentally cast of the album’s three works, all of which Imani present in their premiere recordings.

Iyer’s sextet scoring generates intriguing textural counterpoint from its juxtapositions of piano (Cory Smythe) with the wind quintet. One movement has the Imani players generate a menacing undertow of improvisational percussive noises with their instruments as they speak the text of Florida’s ‘stand-your-ground’ law (the basis for the verdict reached in the trial). Sombre, meditative solos abound; the ensemble’s hot rapport churns with conviction throughout, culminating in angrily, brutally propulsive final minutes.

Frederic Rzewski’s Sometimes likewise resorts to text to foreground its statement of social-political injustice. Applying his variation technique to the spiritual ‘Sometimes I feel like a motherless child’, Rzewski frames his work with a recitation of words by John Hope Franklin, an eminent American historian who specialised in the period immediately following the abolition of slavery, and a setting of a Langston Hughes poem as a bleak lullaby (sung with grieving tenderness by Janai Brugger).

Even without words, Reena Esmail transforms the wind quintet medium into a gentle paean to diversity in The Light is the Same (composed as a companion piece for her quintet arrangement of The Planets).The Rumi-inspired title reaffirms Esmail’s musical strategy of interweaving a pair of highly contrasting Hindustani ragas into a serene new whole.