Lord, when you send the rain is the new record from Byron Asher’s Skrontch Music, an 11-piece large ensemble based in New Orleans. Considered by the composer to be a single long-form work, the album is a meditation on the blues, looking to the history of that music tradition as a socio-political cultural production rooted in the Mississippi Delta with central ties to the formation of jazz in New Orleans.
Through this music, Asher pushes the listener to reconsider the blues not just as a Mississippi Delta musical style or a 12-measure musical form, but more broadly as a worldview, or following scholar Clyde Woods, a “Blues Epistemology” -- a specifically Black American, working class worldview born out of the struggle for freedom in the Delta, but not limited to it. The blues transcends a particular historical decade or a particular city or region in the country or a particular genre-specific musical expression. And it is, in its own way, a form of resistance, to white supremacy or to economic, class-based oppression, and in pursuit of, as Woods puts it, a more general “global social justice.” This is the project of this record, on display through a collection of recompositions of classic blues songs from the 20s, archival samples and sound collage, collective improvisation and orchestral large ensemble composition.
The title, “Lord When You Send The Rain,” is taken from an untitled 1989 poem by James Baldwin, a central figure in the literary tradition of the blues. The evocative cover photograph is an image from the 1927 Mississippi River flood that inundated the Delta, displacing thousands of primarily Black working-class Southerners. New Orleans’ relationship to flooding and climate change is a secondary theme on the record as Asher includes a recomposition of Bessie Smith’s Backwater Blues immediately following a piece called The Break, which samples an oral history detailing one New Orleanian’s experience during 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.
credits
released April 19, 2024
Personnel:
Byron Asher - reeds, compositions
Aurora Nealand - reeds
Reagan Mitchell - reeds
Ricardo Pascal - reeds
Shaye Cohn - cornet
Emily Frederickson - trombone
Steve Glenn - sousaphone
Oscar Rossignoli - piano
James Singleton - bass
Doug Garrison - drums
Peter J Bowling - live electronics
Recorded February 2022 at Esplanade Studios
Engineered by Misha Kachkachishvili
Edited by Byron Asher and Brian Seeger
Mixed by Brian Montgomery
Mastered by Gene Paul at G&J Audio
Produced by Brian Seeger with Byron Asher
All compositions by Byron Asher BMI
List of Samples included:
The Problem With Mississippi: Fannie Lou Hamer
The Break: Interview with Pamela Mahogany by Joshua Guild, June 4, 2006, U-0243, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Ma Rainey’s Barrelhouse Blues: Ma Rainey from “Barrelhouse Blues” (1923)
“Lord, when you send the rain” is a quote from James Baldwin’s 1989 poem Untitled, used with permission from the James Baldwin Estate.
Front cover photograph of the 1927 Mississippi River flood, courtesy of the Archives and Records Services Division, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
Back cover photograph by Camille Lenain
Layout by Brice White
This project was funded and supported by a MacDowell Fellowship and grants from the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation, the Threadhead Cultural Foundation and the University of New Orleans School of the Arts Department of Music. Thank you.
Deepest gratitude to the band and Brian Seeger for their attention, rigor, and artistry. Thanks and love to Lydia, for introducing me to a higher level of thinking about the blues, among many other things. Big thanks to Scott and Brice. Thanks also to Camille, Noé, Andrew at the Broadside, Clay, Monica and Xander, and all of our friends, families and lovers.
Acclaimed New Orleans bassist James Singleton taps a versatile sextet for eight extended doses of transcendent experimental jazz. Bandcamp New & Notable May 11, 2022
