BRUITS | The New York Times

5 Classical Albums to Hear Right Now

‘Bruits’
Imani Winds (Bright Shiny Things)

The metaphor at the heart of this new album by the quintet Imani Winds is spelled out on the cover: “Bruits” in large, boldface type, above a pronunciation guide and a definition: “Noises made by blood moving through obstructed arteries indicating the body is at risk.” As a homophone it also brings to mind “brutes” — brute force, brutality.

“Bruits” takes its name from a work by Vijay Iyer, which, like Reena Esmail’s “The Light Is the Same” and Frederic Rzewski’s “Sometimes,” is given its premiere recording on the album. Iyer wrote it in 2014, for Imani Winds and the pianist Cory Smythe, responding to the killing of Trayvon Martin with a score that smoothly straddles fluid improvisation and taut intricacy, building toward a climactic, unified outburst.

Esmail’s piece — its title inspired by a Rumi poem’s observation that in a world of many religions “the lamps may be different, but the light is the same” — gorgeously intertwines two contrasting Hindustani ragas. One dark and the other light, their sounds flowingly inhabit the same space before coming together in a blissful dance.

There are contrasts, too, in the Rzewski, which plays the hopeful words of the Reconstruction scholar John Hope Franklin (spoken by his son, John Whittington Franklin) against the hopeless lines of Langston Hughes’s poem “God to Hungry Child” (sung by the soprano Janai Brugger). Between the two, the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” is deconstructed through a series of variations in which the theme never returns, and the ending is denied a clean resolution. JOSHUA BARONE