Randall Goosby – Roots Deluxe Edition (Top Albums 2024)

After releasing his debut album, Roots, in 2021 with Decca, twenty-eight-year-old African-American violinist Randall Goosby offers a new edition of this opus. In this edition, he covers the vast majority of this repertoire, which explores the music of black composers and those inspired by African-American culture. In addition to works by Coleridge-Taylor Perkins, Florence Price, William Grant Still, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and George Gershwin, the album is expanded to include a number of pieces that complement the album’s character.

This includes Carlos Simon’s beautiful elegy for violin and piano Hold Fast to Dreams, based on a poem by Langston Hughes, with its lyrical lines and melancholy accents, but from which luminous moments emerge. To the Coleridge-Taylor Perkins piece Blue/s Form, Goosby adds the Louisiana violin miniature Blue Strut: A Catwalk, which reprises the same blues inflections with a festive, boisterous bite. Florence Price’s first tracks are joined by the piano piece Elfentanz, whose gentle character is reminiscent of nineteenth-century salon music, contrasting with her two fantasias and the more dramatic and introspective Adoration. In the same pious, introspective vein, there is also the arrangement for violin and piano of William Grant Still’s melody Here’s One, which Goosby renders with consummate elegance. The final addition to this deluxe version of the album is the “Cavatine” from Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Suite for Violin and Piano, an early work composed at the age of 17 and imbued with great romanticism. Antonín Dvořák’s Sonatina in G major, with its American-inspired musical lines, symbolically concludes this album, whose musical material, without having undergone profound changes, is enhanced by pieces of generally more interior workmanship, adding a more complex and personal depth.