BRUITS | WRTI

Classical Album of the Week: Imani Winds' BRUITS Stands Up for Social Justice

BRUITS, a new album by the trailblazing woodwind quintet Imani Winds, tackles issues of race and social justice with three contemporary works by Reena Esmail, Frederic Rzewski, and Vijay Iyer, composer of the title work. 

Imani Winds musicians Monica Ellis and Toyin Spellman-Diaz talk about the role of music in responding to crisis and helping us move forward.

“Bruits” in medicine refers to the sound that blood makes trying to flow through a blocked vessel.

In the case of the title work by Vijay Iyers on Imani Winds’ new album, BRUITS, it's “a metaphor for something that is blocked in our society," says Toyin Spellman-Diaz, oboist of Imani Winds. Iyers uses music and spoken word in his powerful five-movement piece for woodwind quintet and piano about the 2013 trial and acquittal of George Zimmerman for the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

Also on the album is Reena Ismail’s 2016 philosophical piece about our common humanity, The Light is the Same, and Frederic Rzewski’s Sometimes, written in 2015, a three-movement tribute to Black historian John Hope Franklin that references and reconstructs the spiritual, "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child."

The pieces are not brand new, nor are the problems they address. “This was far before last summer’s racial upheavals and reckoning that we’re dealing with now,” says Monica Ellis, bassoonist in the group. “It’s something that’s been going on for generations in various forms.”

But the time felt right to take a stand.  

“We said, we really need to go into the studio and put these pieces together so that they can live in perpetuity as a collection," says Monica. “This is our statement on the times we live in. The moment is now.”