[.ca] Strange Fruit

From Amazon.com:
In 1939, Billie Holiday recorded "Strange Fruit," a chilling protest song about lynching. The Crescent City trumpeter Irvin Mayfield, who co-leads the sizzling Latin jazz group, Los Hombres Calientes, transforms that legendary song into a nine-movement jazz oratorio with the 17-piece New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, the Dillard University Choir, and narrator Wendell Pierce of HBO's The Wire. The work is reminiscent of Wynton Marsalis's Blood on the Fields and All Rise, and the storyline features a doomed interracial romance in 1920's Louisiana. Mayfield possesses a sturdy sound that swoons and swoops throughout the jazz tradition, which encompasses the joyful, second line syncopations of "The Elder Negro Speaks," the down-home, spiritual backbeats of "The Prayer/Final Words," and the Afro-Caribbean cadences of "The Lynch Mob (You Better Run Boy Run)." Mayfield's revelatory riff on this jazz classic exudes with visionary vitality and profound pathos. --Eugene Holley, Jr.

• Movement 1: Narration #1
• Movement 1: Intro/Opening Statements
• Movement 1: The Beginning of the End
• Movement II: Narration #2
• Movement II: Oral Traditions of the South
• Movement II: The Elder Negro Speaks
• Movement III: Narration #3
• Movement III: Color Lines
• Movement IV: Narration #4
• Movement IV: Ballad of the Hot Long Night
• Movement V: Narration #5/Beat
• Movement VI: Narration #6
• Movement VI: The Lynch Mob (You'd Better Run Boy Run)
• Movement VI: Hoopin' and Hollerin
• Movement VII: Narration #7
• Movement VII: The Prayer/Final Words
• Movement VIII: Narration #8
• Movement VIII: The Sacrifice/The Mourning
• Movement IX: Narration #9/Falling Leaves Yet Growing Trees/Ah Yes ...