Glorious Mahalia is Kronos Quartet‘s third release for Smithsonian Folkways. It follows 2020’s Long Time Passing: Kronos Quartet & Friends Celebrate Pete Seeger, and 2022’s Mỹ Lai. It’s an homage to gospel singer and activist Mahalia Jackson’s work, music, life, and friendships. The idea for the album appeared to Kronos founder David Harrington in 2013 after seeing Clarence Jones, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s lawyer and speechwriter on TV discussing King’s “I Have a Dream” speech from the 1963 March on Washington. Jones provided King with written thoughts, about 15 paragraphs’ worth. As King spoke what he had been provided, Jackson, who had sung before him, was sitting near King and said, “Tell them about the dream. Tell them about the dream, Martin.”
Tag Archive: Kronos Quartet
One of the challenges for a group like the Kronos Quartet is to keep finding new pathways to explore. They’ve spent a half-century commissioning works from cutting-edge composers, collaborating with unlikely partners, and stretching the boundaries of what a string quartet can do. Where else is there to go? Their latest release, Forgive Us For, has a few answers: Palestine, Iceland, and Ukraine. The album features three very different pieces, each topical in its own way.
The opener is “Ya Taali’een el-Jabal” (Going Up the Mountain), a traditional song that Palestinian women would use to communicate with men in prison. The album notes date it to the British Mandate; other theories trace it back further, to Ottoman times. More recently, vocalist…