Aubrey Johnson, Helen Sung, Dave Douglas
‘Lives of the Saints: Portraits in Song with Words by David Hajdu’
Sunnyside Records

Niccolo Machiavelli’s “The Mandrake” is a tale that leaves a strong impression, though it’s probably not a play you’ve seen recently. One of the characters in this renaissance drama is Friar Timoteo, a cleric who, in his spare time, likes to read “the lives of the saints.” Machiavelli intends this ironically, as Timoteo is anything but a saint himself; rather, he’s the most corrupt and completely self-interested character in the entire story, and for Machiavelli that’s considerable.

In David Hajdu’s latest song-cycle, the journalist, educator, and, lately, songwriter has reversed that paradigm. With “Lives of the Saints,” he offers observations on the achievements of 10 remarkable women, none of whom are officially saints in the way that the Catholic church formally recognizes sainthood. Yet all of these women are saints in the practical sense, in that they’ve each done something that greatly aided humanity and furthered the cause of mankind.

As with his previous work, “The Parsonage” (2023), Mr. Hajdu is working with a group of composers — in this case, the pianists Helen Sung and Renee Rosnes, the trumpeter Dave Douglas, and vocalist Aubrey Johnson. In most cases, the lyricist and the composers would discuss the subject of each piece beforehand; Mr. Hajdu would then write the text, and then the composers would come up with the music to fit.  

The album, which features Ms. Johnson singing all 10 songs accompanied by Mr. Douglas and Ms. Sung, along with saxophonist Chet Doxas, cellist Marika Hughes, bassist Simón Willson, and drummer Rudy Royston, was officially launched earlier this month at Dizzy’s at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

At times, Mr. Hajdu and his collaborators evoke the time periods and appropriate musical genres of their subjects. “The Seafaring Maiden (for Bessie Hall),” with music by Ms. Rosnes, is a 19th century-style sea shanty on which Mr. Doxas’s clarinet approximates a fife or a pennywhistle to tell the story of a captain’s daughter who takes charge of a ship when her father is stricken with smallpox. She dauntlessly commands the vessel to safety, succeeding so well that the sailors address her as “Sir.”

“I Weathered the Storm (for Lena Horne)” tells of how the singer and actress started as a near-naked dancer at Harlem’s Cotton Club (“Barely sixteen, I danced the shimmy dance / Dressed in three feathers and lights”) and eventually became virtually the first Black woman to be accepted as a full-fledged star in the Hollywood studio system. The title is a variation on Horne’s signature song, “Stormy Weather,” and the tune aligns itself more with a traditional definition of blues and jazz.

Many of these courageous women were, in a sense, hidden figures whose greatest triumphs were obscured during their own lifetimes: “The Nanny on Her Day Off (for Vivian Maier)” gives us a French woman who spent 40 years working at Chicago as a nanny, taking pictures only intermittently but ultimately leaving us roughly 150,000 amazing images, the majority of which were not seen by anyone — even Maier herself — until after her death. The text speaks of “reflections of her shadow in a blur / A world in silver nitrate.”

Conversely, Hedy Lamarr, the Vienna-born movie goddess, was one of the most visible women of Tinseltown’s Golden Age; still, no one realized that in addition to having one of the most beautiful faces ever, she had an Oppenheimer-level intellect whose work helped lay the foundation for what eventually became the internet.  

“Who thought such a face could be hiding a brain?” Said brain, Ms. Johnson sings, gave us the “basis of wifi, email, and text / And whatever you’re using to Google me up now.” The melody is by Ms. Rosnes, but Mr. Douglas has a commanding trumpet solo here.

Mr. Douglas’s “Pure Thought (for Hypatia)” is dedicated to a philosopher and martyr, though to describe Hypatia as such is reductive in itself, as that fourth-century Greek woman was so many things. 

Ms. Johnson’s “The White Rose (for Sophie Scholl)” depicts the German activist who stood up to the Nazis and did not live to tell the tale, while the set starts with “Enchantress of Number,” for Ada Lovelace, the mathematician and daughter of poet Lord Byron who essentially devised the theoretical underpinnings of computer science and algorithms. 

As with Mr. Hajdu’s previous projects, the songs themselves are highly unique — they’re not like jazz standards, blues, or show tunes, and they’re not driven by familiar forms, the verse-chorus structure or the usual chord patterns. These are jazz-driven art songs of a type inspired somewhat by Billy Strayhorn, the subject of “Lush Life,” Mr. Hajdu’s groundbreaking 1996 biography of the iconic composer. Not surprisingly, the two pieces inspired by performers, those dedicated to Lena Horne and Hedy Lamarr, are the easiest to remember and hum.

Although “Lives of the Saints” has been in progress since well before the pandemic, it arrives at a propitious moment, when the death of the pope reminds just exactly what a saint is. The album ends with a funky tune by Ms. Sung, “Song for My Sister (for Barbara Ann Hajdu),” which we are to take literally. As the author describes his sister, “She wasn’t content / But she didn’t get mad / No none could tell what she had,” we are again reminded that there are many paths to sainthood.