ENNANGA | VAN MAGAZINE - REVIEW

ENNANGA

ASHLY JACKSON

by Olivia Giovetti
June 22, 2023

With works by Still, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Alice Coltrane, and Brandee Younger, “Ennanga” sits at an intersection where the past informs the future. Still’s work lends the album its name, its title referring to a type of harp played in Uganda. This was a critical link for Still in writing for the harp, an instrument that, as a young composer, both fascinated and frightened him. In exploring the instrument’s capacities, with both American and European orchestral traditions as well as its global iterations, however, Still came to settle on this work for harp and piano quintet, written originally for Lois Adele Craft. Even without explicitly working with musical styles from east Africa, Still recalled meeting a Ugandan man after a performance who said the music “reminded him of home.”  

That seems to be the central hook, and delightful paradox, of “Ennanga.” It sounds as much like home for the neoromantics as it did for Still’s audience member. In her liner notes, Jackson also points out the jazz motifs, among other styles of the Black Atlantic that make their way into the work’s final movement. She leans into these multiple influences and identities (even a melody in the second movement that resembles “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”), writing that her aim was to balance this recording of “Ennanga” with its two distinct predecessors (recorded, respectively, by Craft and Ann Hobson-Pilot), highlighting the work’s “rhythmic ambiguity and sense of improvisation.” 

It’s a beautiful piece, played with style and care by Jackson and her fellow Harlem Chamber Players. I was even more taken by Alice Coltrane’s “Prema,” arranged for harp by Jackson. As the Sanskrit name suggests, there are elements of the divine and love (“heart-melting love,” if you want to get specific) in the work. Time is both substantial and standing still, like a summer night that can’t shake the day’s humidity. Jackson’s sensitivity as an ensemble player on this track creates a textured and luminous landscape. You could lose yourself in it entirely without hesitation.