From Spirit To Studio

An entire season and a major new album both reach a climax this week for Orchestra Nashville. Last night was the long-planned Music of the Spirit concert at Belmont Heights Baptist Church. Today begins two days of recording at Oceanway Studio with John Jorgenson and (tomorrow) the Turtle Island Quartet, who were part of last night’s excellent and wildly diverse show.

It was a picture perfect night on Belmont Boulevard...

The June heat evaporated and left only clean cool air and a perfect sunset to ponder as folks filed in to a bright and acoustically vibrant sanctuary. It was a sacred space for a spiritual concert, but the thematic material would wait for the second half. The concert’s first hour featured a guitar workout from Jorgenson. He played four works that he either composed or figured in the shaping of: David Balakrishnan’s Groove in the Louvre, a cheeky gypsy techno swinger called Deiter’s Lounge, and then two movements of what’s become Concerto Glasso, by John and Don Hart.

The concerto didn’t start that way. It was a one-movement work called Tarantella and Reverie that Jorgenson recorded with the Orchestra last year. Inspired by its grandeur and integration of gypsy themes with classical power, Don and John composed two more movements that had their world premiere last night. As with the other John and Don collaboration, they visited many moods but kept a through line of romantic and passionate tribute to the proud global culture of the gypsies and the guitar virtuosity of Django Reinhardt. They will be tracked today.

The Music of the Spirit half of the show struck many notes of the sublime. The hour-plus of music was invoked with a cantor’s song and the pleading tones of the shofar, the Jewish horn made of a horn. Odessa Settles and the Princely Players offered a taste of Negro spiritual, along with some well-chosen words of context. My favorite mood setter of the night was Sankaran Mahadevan’s singing. With an Indian drummer and a sitar-like drone, he sang sacred texts in a partly-improvised but highly formal manner, trading musical motifs with the Orchestra at times.

The concert took a cue from the bloggers who suggested spiritual works by turning to the amazing singer Mike Farris and his partner vocalists the McCrary Sisters to sing Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin On,” which is now firmly and pleasantly stuck in my head. Barber’s Adagio for Strings was enlivened magically by chorus in the less-often-performed vocal version of the famous work.

But the chorus (and five remarkable soloists) really uncorked on the night’s final work, Anima Mundi by J. Mark Scearce. He wrote the ambitious piece ten years ago for the Orchestra’s first Music of the Spirit concert, and after visiting a number of sacred places, it comes to a thundering crescendo, first dissonant and dark, then resolving to a euphoria inducing major chord of triumph. I hope it evokes a lot of thoughts on the blog today. If you were at the concert please comment and we’ll post the best items here on the front page.