Roots

about this album

In 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, Juilliard-trained violinist Randall Goosby was developing the idea for his debut album. The resulting LP, Roots, is a celebration of the music of Black composers such as William Grant Still, Florence Price, and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, as well as those inspired by African American culture, including George Gershwin and Antonín Dvořák, much of whose work is steeped in the musical language of spirituals. “To have the chance to dive into this music was a pretty healing process,” Goosby tells Apple Music. “I thought about the difficulties and the challenges that some of the composers on this album must have faced in the 1940s and ’50s and even farther back. And I couldn’t imagine the sorts of hurdles that they had to overcome.” The classical music world is at last waking up to a side of its heritage that has for too long gone unexplored, and Roots is pointing the way forward. There are no less than three world-premiere recordings of pieces by Florence Price alone. The first African American woman whose music was performed by a major symphony orchestra, she created works that blend spirituals and traditional classical form to mesmerizing effect. We also hear William Grant Still, a man right at the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance of the early 20th century, and Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, whose boundary-crossing took him from arranging for Harry Belafonte to working with Igor Stravinsky, the influential Russian composer

tracks

more from Randall Goosby

Roots (Deluxe Edition)

Bruch: Violin Concerto No. 1; Florence Price: Violin Concertos

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Roots - Deluxe Edition

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Price: Adoration

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Randall Goosby plays Florence Price

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Perkinson: Louisiana Blues Strut: A Catwalk