RMI Records, a division of the nonprofit Resonant Motion, is proud to announce the release of Noah Baerman’s Right Now Volume Two: Songs of Solidarity. The follow up to the first volume, Songs of Conflict and Comfort, is the next in the four-volume series conceived in the wake of the 2024 election. The songs, recorded at home by himself, cover a seventy year span, unified by the determination to nourish those navigating their own struggles to keep showing up as forces of good.
As with the first volume, Baerman performs here on various combinations of piano, organ, and Rhodes and Wurlitzer electric pianos. Exceptions are two contrasting interpretations for solo electric piano. Punk icon Patti Smith’s anthem “People Have the Power” is reinvented here as a New Orleans-infused boogie on the Wurlitzer, while the album ends with a yearning free-time Rhodes interpretation of “Love In Action” by his friend and contemporary, jazz saxophonist/composer Jimmy Greene.
The remaining songs continue the projects pattern of variety in terms of genre of origin, mood, and degree of ubiquity versus obscurity. Woody Guthrie’s iconic “This Land Is Your Land” is perhaps the best-known among the choices, performed here with all four keyboards to create a journey from tranquility to chaos and back, something achieved in a different way in the bluesy, slowed-down interpretation of Oscar Brown Jr.’s “Brown Baby.” By contrast, Johnny Clegg’s anti-Apartheid song “Asimbonanga (Mandela)” maintains its sonic solemnity throughout.
Stylistic breadth notwithstanding, Baerman wanted to include a couple of hard-swinging, jazz numbers as well, ultimately landing on Abbey Lincoln’s “World Is Falling Down” and a reworking of the Grateful Dead’s “Ship of Fools,” both of which use organ-centered grooves and bright harmonic color to contrast the sardonic nature of the songs. And indeed, the contrast of uplift and concern so central to activism is present in much of the material. The Neville Brothers’ steadfast “My Brother’s Keeper” represents this balance amidst a rousing, gritty musical performance, as does Dr. Billy Taylor’s “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free” (like “Brown Baby,” best known by some via Nina Simone’s interpretations), which is taken here as a gospel-infused stomp.
Baerman’s arrangement decisions were generally spontaneous and most of the material was recorded in one take. “In most cases,” he states, “the time lapsed from deciding on an interpretation to laying down a performance and moving on was about a half hour.” As such, the more challenging decisions, such as playing Donny Hathaway’s iconic “Someday We’ll All Be Free” is taken in a more jazz-inflected direction in 5/4 time or finding a way to instrumentally interpret Sweet Honey in the Rock’s defiant a cappella declamation “I’m Gon’ Stand” were organic. He states that “while I have done plenty of meticulous arrangements in my career, the goal here was to capture whatever feeling was welling up with as much purity and immediacy as possible.” While he does not have outsized expectations of what a recording (much less an instrumental recording by a non-celebrity) can accomplish, the goal is, in his words “to put forth the vibrations that reflect what we all need to keep getting up each day to fight the good fight together.”
Note that the album is being offered on Bandcamp as a free download, as listeners are encouraged to donate instead to charities working to protect our world and its inhabitants from the current onslaught. For those who choose to purchase here in addition, all proceeds will go towards Claire’s Continuum, a Resonant Motion initiative, in Claire Randall’s memory, to commission first-time collaborators to create socially conscious art together.
