When in Need, Turn to Lizz Wright for Solace and Hope

There is a performance by the singer Lizz Wright with her longtime accompanist, Kenny Banks Sr., of Bob Dylan’s “Every Grain of Sand” that has accumulated more than 95,000 YouTube views, several hundred of which are mine. Lines like, “In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need,” eventually led to a message that helped get me through the pandemic, which, for a lot of us, was just such an hour.Introduced by Mr. Dylan on his 1981 album “Shot Of Love,” the song is one of the most eloquent and poetic arguments for the existence of God that has ever been written. That it happens to also be set to a beautiful melody, so that someone as wonderful as Lizz Wright can sing it, makes it even better.Ms. Wright, who now has a new album and a new video that she recently celebrated with a performance at City Winery, is one of several outstanding contemporary artists who started in the jazz field — or at least in the jazz divisions of major record labels — but don’t limit themselves to any strict definition of what that means, or what they can and can’t sing. In these recent performances, I have heard her sing not only Mr. Dylan, but Neil Young, k.d. lang, Allen Toussaint, Glen Campbell, Nina Simone, and Rodgers and Hammerstein.If I were coming to Ms. Wright for the first time, using the musical equivalent of GPS, I would locate her singing as somewhere along the borders of jazz, gospel, and R&B. Unlike the vast majority of singers who travel anywhere near those generic borders, Ms. Wright doesn’t over-sing. Usually we expect the contemporary soul-gospel-jazz style to be a caricature of Aretha Franklin or Mahalia Jackson, with a lot of belting and shrieking and just plain yelling. Ms. Wright sings everything straight ahead, in a crisp, clear-cut voice in which every word is understandable. She communicates even the strongest emotion without so much as raising her voice; rather, she uses a technique I associate with Cassandra Wilson: When she wants to make an especially important point, instead of her getting louder, the band just gets quieter. At 42, Ms. Wright both looks backward to the legendary Simone and forward to Cécile McLorin Salvant.Ms. Wright’s new releases are a live performance taped in 2018, “Holding Spaces — Lizz Wright Live in Berlin,” and a 15-minute documentary about the concert, also currently available on YouTube. (Here’s hoping more numbers from the concert get released there; the documentary surprisingly contains very little actual performance footage.) Musically, thematically, and conceptually, the opener, “Barley,” seems like a relative of Sting’s “Fields of Gold,” especially in that both songs are informed by traditional and folk sources. “Old Man” comes from Neil Young’s 1972 album “Harvest,” and “Wash Me Clean” is from k.d. lang’s 1992 “Ingenue.” Ms. Wright makes both interpretations sound more urgent than the originals, and injects a much stronger rhythmic sensibility into the second, especially since k.d. lang sings virtually everything rubato. Ms. Wright’s keyboardists, Kenny Banks Jr. at the Winery and Bobby Ray Sparks II on the album, double on Hammond B3 organ as well as piano, which gives a lot of the proceedings a down-home, church-y feeling. It seems like nothing for her to move from the spiritual “Walk With Me Lord” to an Allen Toussaint dance number that was a country hit for Glen Campbell, “Southern Nights.” Ms. Wright is the first interpreter to make me realize that much of the lyrics to “Southern Nights” are actually a prayer for peace. She makes the spiritual numbers dance and the dance numbers pray.The Berlin concert also includes several outstanding originals, including “Somewhere Down the Mystic” and “The New Game,” co-credited to her along with Larry Klein and David Batteau. There’s also a particularly moving piece titled “No More Will I Run,” which, as she announced at the Winery, was written for her by Toshi Reagon, and which seems like a spiritual and a civil rights anthem at the same time. This leads directly, on the album, to the most romantic, even erotic song here, “Seems I’m Never Tired Lovin’ You,” written by Cortez Franklin but which she doubtlessly learned (as did most of us) from the classic 1969 album, “Nina Simone and Piano.”Much of the material from the Berlin concert, as well as “Every Grain of Sand,” may be heard on Ms. Wright’s 2017 album “Grace.” After the first of several standing ovations, she concluded the City Winery set with “You’ll Never Walk Alone” — yes, the anthem-hymn from “Carousel.” If she’s taking requests, I’d love for her to consider a whole album of Bob Dylan’s religious songs (such as “You Gotta Serve Somebody”), which are some of the most beautiful yet strangely neglected works of his larger canon. Of course, the beauty of hearing Lizz Wright on a Saturday night is that it eliminates the need to get up early the next morning and head to church. She delivers a message about the meaning of God that’s at least as potent as any preacher or minister’s I’ve ever heard.

When in Need, Turn to Lizz Wright for Solace and Hope

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