Up to his death in 2014 at the age of 94, Pete Seeger remained a steadfast activist. If he wasn’t out attending anti-fracking rallies in New York, he was offering words of encouragement to others. In 2013, together with Jeff Haynes, world-renowned percussionist and producer, he released an audiobook titled Storm King. It featured a collection of stories, narratives, and poems that were set to multi-genre music from around the world.
On the lead up to the release Pete said: “People are combining traditions like never before and finding somehow a fundamental unity for this human race of ours. I think working with each other as Jeff Haynes has done here—we may be surprised to find what deeper unity all human beings have.”
Those words came back to me as I heard the news of a new Kronos Quartet album which seemed to be carrying on that vision – Long Time Passing: Kronos Quartet and Friends Celebrate Pete Seeger, is a tribute to the music, political philosophy, and social impact of Pete Seeger.
Joining the much-celebrated group on this album are Sam Amidon — who appears on Kronos’ 2017 album Folk Songs (Nonesuch Records)— Maria Arnal, Brian Carpenter, Lee Knight, Meklit, and Aoife O’Donovan. These artists give voice to the plainspoken songs of struggle that Seeger both wrote and collected in his seventy-plus years as a musician, while Jacob Garchik and Kronos’ arrangements movingly (and seamlessly) translate his banjo-playing for the group’s two violins, viola, and cello. Together, the collective pays moving tribute to Seeger as a man and activist and makes plain the continued relevance of the moral and political arguments he authored and amplified.
Listen to the latest album single below, “The President Sang Amazing Grace” by Kronos Quartet & Friends, featuring Ethiopian-born, San Francisco-based vocalist Meklit, was released this week. This striking song tells the story of the former President Barack Obama publicly mourning the 2015 attack that claimed nine lives at the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, USA. First appearing on Zoe Mulford’s 2017 album Small Brown Birds, it soon became internationally recognized and was voted Folk Alliance International’s 2018 Song of the Year. After Joan Baez heard it on Berkeley, CA radio station KPFA, Baez commented, “I was driving when I heard ‘The President Sang Amazing Grace,’ and I had to pull over to make sure I heard whose song it was, because I knew I had to sing it.” She covered it on her Grammy-nominated album ‘Whistle Down the Wind’ for which she was also our Artist of the Month.
The Kronos Quartet version of the tune offers a uniquely lush arrangement and meditative mood. Kronos violinist David Harrington says, “’The President Sang Amazing Grace’ could not exist but for the life’s work of Pete Seeger. If he were here today, he would be singing this song, voicing something we all hoped to express if only we knew how.”
Long Time Passing: Kronos Quartet & Friends Celebrate Pete Seeger is released on 9 October via Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.