With ‘All My Chums,’ Aoife O’Donovan Composes a Soulful Historical past Lesson and Call to Circulation on Girls folk’s Rights
When the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra in Central Florida requested Aoife O’Donovan to write 5 songs commemorating the centennial of the 19th Modification, she sent sketches to orchestrator Tanner Porter and made up our minds to device on speeches and letters by activist Carrie Chapman Catt, whose work helped perform it imaginable for ladies to at closing perform the lawful to vote in 1920. A 2nd commission from the FreshGrass Basis gave O’Donovan the resources to story extra songs and pay for sessions all round the nation—in Nashville, Los Angeles, Pasadena, Brooklyn, Enormous apple, and Berkeley, in addition to to Central Florida, Vermont, and Massachusetts. The result is All My Chums, a mode-blurring album with 9 songs that skillfully alternate between orchestral actions and aloof passages, blending folk/Americana and orchestral flavors for a potent combine that feels supremely related because the U.S. heads toward any other fiercely divisive presidential election.
Given the latest political climate, an album about suffrage and women’s rights could maybe without complications be, well, bleak. As any other, All My Chums is an ravishing, exquisitely paced meditation that doubles as a name to action. The musicianship is uniformly horny, too. On songs love “Any individual to Be conscious” and “The Upright Time,” the album will get its Americana flavor from contributions by O’Donovan touring compadres Alan Hampton (bass) and Griffin Goldsmith (drums), plus Make a choice Burger (accordion and keyboard), Noam Pikelny (banjo), Jim Becoming (harmonica), and Luke Reynolds (pedal steel). The young ladies of the San Francisco Girls Chorus, headed by Valérie Sainte-Agathe, elevate their A game to songs love “All My Chums,” “Daughters,” and “The US, Come.”
Two of the a number of highlights are Anaïs Mitchell’s vocals on “Over the Enact Line” and Sierra Hull’s mandolin solos on “Crisis.” The 30-one thing-stable Knights chamber orchestra, led by Colin Jacobsen and Eric Jacobsen (who’s moreover O’Donovan’s husband and the song director of the Orlando Phil), turns in masterful performances; the Unique York-basically based fully Westerlies brass quartet contributes arrangements, race, and subtlety. Resulting from ravishing arrangements and a major-notch combine by Darren Schneider, O’Donovan’s singular boom and her guitar playing—on her 1934 Martin 0-17 and Collings 01 Mh—remain the focal aspects. No matter the wide diversity of textures, one will get the influence that these songs, which vary from sweeping (“Crisis”) to intimate (“Over the Enact Line”), will sound big onstage in any configuration.
Sooner or later of, O’Donovan invites us to take a seat down with the burden of historical past while immersing us in song that’s soulful, and now and then even mischievous (dig that new resolve on Bob Dylan’s traditional downer “The Lonesome Demise of Hattie Carroll,” organized by Gabriel Kahane). The active intergenerational dialog between Catt, O’Donovan, and the subsequent abilities is rooted and optimistic, and in particular on songs love the surging “The US, Come,” taken from Catt speeches in 1917 and 1918, the total build is extra thrillingly uplifting than one could maybe predict. In these tumultuous times, All My Chums is an spectacular masterclass in revisiting the past with an peep on the future.
