AMERICANIST | THE ABSOLUTE SOUND

Not The Usual SuspectS

Andrew Quint

Dec 16th, 2022

The centerpiece of Americanist, Elizabeth Newkirk’s first solo recording on the adventuresome Bright Shiny Things label, may actually not be the performances but, rather, the heady 2500-word essay the pianist wrote to accompany the CD. Newkirk dissects the myth of the American dream with commanding intellectual precision, maintaining that an understanding of the country’s cultural identity is best accomplished through the lens of two important philosophical schools—the transcendentalist movement, personified by such thinkers as Whitman, Emerson and Thoreau, and the “New Negro” movement, led by W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and others. For Newkirk, it was largely Black intellectuals who were responsible for the reconciliation of the “serious” and “popular” aspects of American culture.