GRAMOPHONE Review: A Change is Gonna Come – Nicholas Phan/Palaver Strings

There is liberation in the timelessness of these songs and settings, be they old or brand new. And timelessness is what makes this quirky and haunting collection – a tapestry, if you like, of protest – memorable. Even the singer, the striking Nicholas Phan, is possessed of a voice which apparently makes no distinction between the shifting centuries of his repertoire and lends a wonderfully direct purity to a spiritual like Harry T Burleigh’s ‘Lovely, Dark and Lonely One’ at once deeply consoling and ravishing. So too the timeless resonance of ‘Freedom is a Constant Struggle’ and the Paul Robeson classic ‘I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill’ which sounds so eternal, ending as it does in Phan’s melting head voice – as far from Robeson’s sonorous bass as it’s possible to get. 

I think it’s the apparent contradiction of styles that makes the album so intriguing. Dominic Salerni’s arrangement of Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ blends folk and baroque in a magically earthy and unvarnished way replete with gruff double bass solo (not unlike Dylan’s own voice) and even the obligatory harmonica. I love the way in which Joni Mitchell’s ‘Fiddle and the Drum’ is kind of catapulted into the here and now with alarming string slides and a seismic disquieting upheaval in the final stanza. 

Then there are the pithy and unsettling classical references which Salerni throws into Seeger’s ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’ from the funeral march of Mahler’s First Symphony to Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet and Shostakovich’s war-torn Eighth Quartet. The Palaver Strings collective hurl themselves from one to the other like they naturally belong in the same universe as Seeger’s classic. Protest is protest no matter how you frame it. The disc even flashes back to 1673 and a fleeting duo from Biber’s Battaglia a 10 which evaporates in a spiral of smoke before we can fully grasp it. 

The here and now – does the struggle ever end? – is represented by Errollyn Wallen’s specially commissioned Protest Songs. ‘Boom Boom’ (her text) makes good use of Phan’s plangent upper register and indeed the distinguishing factor both here and in ‘Song for the People’ (Frances Allen Watkins Harper) is the uplift inherent in Wallen’s rangy vocal lines. They really sing. 

Final thoughts for the most potent of these songs forever immortalised by the great Billie Holiday – ‘Strange Fruit’. Farayi Malek invokes her memory and her refusal to be silenced and Jonathan Bingham’s arrangement has her seductive vocal sitting on a comforting bed of strings, that in itself belying the proximity of the Lynch mob.