Spratlan: Invasion — Music and Art for Ukraine

Album review

Only one work by Lewis Spratlan on this release by pianist Nadia Shpachenko directly touches on the Russian invasion of Ukraine: Invasion, for piano, saxophone, horn, trombone, percussion, and mandolin, was written in 2022, but that is not nearly the end of the album's relevance to the topic. For one thing, Shpachenko commissioned Ukrainian artists to respond to Spratlan's music, and some of the resulting works reproduced in the booklet (the physical CD release is highly recommended here) grow from the wartime situation. For another, Shpachenko and Spratlan have worked together in the past, and she had an idea of what to expect. The piece titled Invasion is not a wartime dirge but a mix of elements overturned by the war, "a counterpoint of moods -- between ominous undercurrents, folkloric touchstones, and a modernist 'authorial' commentary," in the words of annotator Peter Yates. This work is echoed in the Six Rags for solo piano, which are not classical piano rags but juxtapose ragtime rhythms with modernist passages in various ways, and in the final Wonderer for solo piano, a work likewise depicting a journey through a trauma-strewn landscape. The artists' "reflections" included suggest other resonances the program may have in time of war. This is certainly one of the first releases to reflect the war in Ukraine; it may go down ultimately as one of the richest and best, and it serves also as a reference for the remarkable late-life creativity of Spratlan, in his ninth decade when he composed Invasion.
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