Kronos Quartet & Friends – Long Time Passing
Smithsonian Folkways – 9 October 2020
The Kronos Quartet have been around for over 45 years, reimagining the string quartet and exploring the edges between music genres, blurring them to the point that boundaries do not matter. It was one of their 60 plus recordings You’ve Stolen My Heart: Songs for RD Burnam’s Bollywood, with Asha Bhosle, released 15 years ago, that got me hooked on to what the Kronos Quartet are about. They have performed and recorded work built around the music of Africa, the jazz of Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk, the rock of Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend, as well as 20th-century composers and minimalists, particularly Terry Riley.
Long Time Passing blurs the boundaries with the music of Pete Seeger. The album is a tribute to his musical legacy but it is also much more. It is an affirmation of Seeger’s political philosophy, a reflection on the social impact that Seeger had on the USA and on the world. It is also a comment on the fact that the things that Pete Seeger wrote about in the last century are still causing pain and suffering today.
The album has15 songs, most of which will be familiar but arranged for the Kronos Quartet and their friends. Their friends include Sam Amidon, Maria Arnal, Brian Carpenter, Nikky Finney, Lee Knight, Meklit, and Aoife O’Donovan.
You are left with no doubt about the side, the edge of Pete Seeger with the opening track Which Side Are You On? A great tune, the melody drawn from a Baptist hymn. The words were written in 1931 by Florence Reece after the police searched her home, terrorising her and her children, looking for her husband, an organiser of a miner’s union that was on strike. A more recent event brought about The President Sang Amazing Grace. Written by Zoe Mulford, it tells the story of the 2015 attack that claimed nine lives at the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. It first appeared on Zoe’s 2017 album Small Brown Birds and is sung here by Meklit, an Ethiopean-American singer-songwriter. The event occurred after Seeger’s death but if an example of his legacy were needed, combining music with activism and sociopolitical commentary, then this must be it.
You can quickly see that the album not only celebrates Seeger’s work but his eclecticism which fits perfectly with the Kronos Quartet. Another aspect of Seeger’s life was bringing music from all over the world to new ears. The Hindu devotional song Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram was sung by Mahatma Gandhi on the Salt March in 1930 and after learning it on a trip to India, Seeger regularly included it in his concerts. There is also Mbube, which sounds very familiar. Seeger found the song amongst a pile of discs from Alan Lomax and misheard the title leading to The Weavers releasing their version as Wimoweh, a later version charting as The Lion Sleeps Tonight.
The centrepiece perhaps of this broad spread of Pete Seeger’s legacy is the 16-minute plus Storyteller. Created by Jacob Garchik this is a fine rug of sounds from various points of Seeger’s life: excerpts from interviews, bits from radio shows, segments from concerts, all spun and woven into the overall piece that has the old Seeger telling how he gets the audiences to sing his songs now that his voice was going; a quietly chuckling Seeger saying that there were two classes of people in the US, “those that do not know that they are ‘a folk’ and those that do not think that they are ‘a folk’”; a very serious Seeger lamenting the excessive use of fossil fuels and the impact of climate change.
Elsewhere the album is peppered with well-known numbers: If I Had A Hammer; Kisses Sweeter Than Wine; Turn, Turn, Turn; We Shall Overcome and Where Have All The Flowers Gone, a song I can recall from those far-off days when my elder brother came home with a copy of it and played it several times until it was suggested that the household was given a break. The words came from some notes Seeger had made from a Cossack folk song. In 20 minutes he had it written, though Joe Hickerson added the final two verses about soldiers and graveyards.
I said earlier that I am a great fan of the Kronos and this album does not fail to continue my enjoyment of their work. It has all of the necessary elements, it is creative, displays their ability to distil the essence of the original, and has a sense of fun and enjoyment that pervades all their work. This album also comes with the most extensive and interesting liner notes that I have come across in a long time. This is an album of high quality and a great celebration of Pete Seeger, his sense of justice, his questioning of war and his encouragement to stand up for ourselves and our community. Definitely a great addition to any collection. Excellent.
What appears on the album as ‘Storyteller’ was performed as a commission by The FreshGrass Festival and captured live at Hunter Theatre, MASS MoCA September, 28th, 2019 by Beehive Productions:
Long Time Passing is out now on Smithsonian Folkways