Track Listing

1. Narration #1
2. Intro / Opening Statements
3. The Beginning Of The End
4. Narration #2
5. Oral Traditions Of The South
6. The Elder Negro Speaks
7. Narration#3
8. Color Lines
9. Narration #4
10. Ballad Of A Hot Long Night
11. Narration #5 / Beat
12. Narration #6
13. The Lynch Mob (You Better Run Boy Run)
14. Hoppin' And Hollerin
15. Narration #7
16. The Prayer / Final Words
17. Narration #8
18. The Sacrifice / The Mourning
19. Narration #9 / Falling Leaves Yet Growing Trees / Ah Yes The Blues

Product Details

• Released on: 2005-03-14
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Import
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .24 pounds

From Amazon.com
In 1939, Billie Holiday recorded "Strange Fruit," a chilling protest song about lynching. The Crescent City trumpeter Irvin Mayfield, who co-leads the sizzling Latin jazz group, Los Hombres Calientes, transforms that legendary song into a nine-movement jazz oratorio with the 17-piece New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, the Dillard University Choir, and narrator Wendell Pierce of HBO’s The Wire. The work is reminiscent of Wynton Marsalis’s Blood on the Fields and All Rise, and the storyline features a doomed interracial romance in 1920’s Louisiana. Mayfield possesses a sturdy sound that swoons and swoops throughout the jazz tradition, which encompasses the joyful, second line syncopations of "The Elder Negro Speaks," the down-home, spiritual backbeats of "The Prayer/Final Words," and the Afro-Caribbean cadences of "The Lynch Mob (You Better Run Boy Run)." Mayfield’s revelatory riff on this jazz classic exudes with visionary vitality and profound pathos. --Eugene Holley, Jr.