RMI Records, a division of the nonprofit Resonant Motion, is proud to announce the release of Noah Baerman’s Right Now Volume One: Songs of Conflict and Comfort. The release of this potent and still-relevant music from the 1950s through 1980s comes less than three months after the project was conceived in the wake of the 2024 election and is the first of a four-volume series.

While this is ostensibly a solo recording in that it is Baerman alone, there is only one solo track, his plaintive reading of Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend” on Wurlitzer. On the rest of the tracks Baerman plays duets and trios with himself with various combinations of piano, organ, and Rhodes and Wurlitzer electric pianos.

In mid-November, Baerman found himself with an unexpected day off. “I was still buzzing with grief and worry,” he says, and “I needed to do something to express all that was bubbling up in this purgatory-like period between election and inauguration.” He set up to do some makeshift recording and just allowed himself to play the songs that felt expressive of the moment. Three songs came out of that day’s session. One was a piano and organ duet on Charles Mingus’s swinging yet scolding “Remember Rockefeller at Attica,” one was a piano, organ, and Wurlitzer reading of Jimmy Cliff’s defiant “The Harder They Come,” and one was a soulful “trio” rendering of his favorite song of reassurance, the Five Stairsteps’ “O-o-h Child,” the closing lyric of which inspired the name of the overall project.  

That initial burst of inspiration set the tone for what was to come in two ways. One was that this mix of sentiments became inescapable; while anger, defiance, and soothing might initially seem like surprising bedfellows, he came to accept that this cycle of responses was inevitable in response to what was going on. “What initially felt like a sort of indecisiveness about the message turned out to be necessary to evoking the big picture of big feelings that so many in my life were and continue to be grappling with” he reflects. The other was that while at-home recording abstractly lent itself to micromanagement, it felt important to go in the opposite direction and let his first emotional and musical impulses guide which songs to play and how to interpret them, recording soon after deciding upon an approach and using first takes most of the time. A few days later he had an album’s worth of material and after two more such spurts in December, four albums’ worth of material had been laid down.

The remaining songs on the first volume elaborate on this spectrum of emotion and the genre-diversity of the material. The album opens with the tender wistfulness of Pete Seeger’s ballad “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” on which layers of sound are progressively added, ballooning from solo organ to a trio with Wurlitzer and piano. The rhythmic amorphousness of that rubato approach stands in contrast to the driving jazz waltz rhythm with which he interprets Peter Gabriel’s social critique “Games Without Frontiers” with piano and Rhodes. The Rhodes takes center stage as the rhythmic driver on two of the performances, a rave up on the Four Tops’ uplifting “Reach Out, I’ll Be There” and a samba interpretation of Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson’s lyrically pensive but musically ebullient “The Needle’s Eye.” The snarling of Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders’ “My City Was Gone” is preserved while transforming it into a hard-swinging shuffle on Rhodes and organ, while the piano and Wurlitzer duet on Abdullah Ibrahim’s anti-Apartheid anthem “Mannenberg” is the track most reverent to the original interpretation, in part in response to that landmark recording somehow being currently out of print.

On a musical level, the keyboard work is powerful and expressive throughout. The stylistic diversity leads the listener down some different roads than one might expect from an artist associated with the jazz world, but those familiar with Baerman’s recent work will not be surprised. Of this, he says “while I certainly aimed for a good mix of sounds, ultimately these choices were dictated as much as anything by the messages of these songs, the sort of amplification of experience and emotion that first drew me to the storytelling of music when I was young.” While he makes no claim that the music here can protect society from adversity, he hopes, in his words, “that at least this can provide a soundtrack to the processing so many of us are doing, right now.”

Available for streaming on YouTube, Spotify, Amazon, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer, etc.