This piece is an arrangement of the soundtrack of my life, a transcription of my day to day, a reverent homage to the incomparable power of Black American music. Music that to me can tug at the heart, move the body, speak to the soul like no other. Those peerless verses, bridges, and choruses accompanied me and my family through the highs of a holiday cook-out to the low mundanity of an overlong car ride. This music is core to my lived experience, yet as an artist myself I felt I hadn’t spoken to that love. Some jazz influences here, some blues vocabulary there, I had certainly alluded to these traditions, but I knew I could be more explicit and daring. I could pay my respects not only to those older styles so readily adopted by the modern Western composer, but also the more contemporary popular music I felt underrepresented. Where was the funk symphony? The neo-soul string quartet? The hip-hop opera? These influences existed in the modern repertoire sure, but not nearly at a level representative of their impact on popular music.

At the time I was musing the idea of a personal retooling of Malcolm Arnold’s Prelude, Siciliano, and Rondo. I would use the forms and styles of Arnold’s classic work and put a twist on them. It dawned on me slowly: that twist would be my tribute to the music I love so much. As I worked on the piece over the next year, much of that architecture fell away to better serve my ambitions. You might still hear the Prelude in the first movement and the Siciliano in the second, but the piece became so much more than that original idea.

The title Soul Album isn’t just a tongue-in-cheek pun. This work is a collection of the souls that colored in my life, a sonic museum of influences and inspirations. It is a photo display of the facets of my own soul, memory-tinted Polaroids packing every page. It is an emphatic thank you to the culture I was and am immersed in, and an overdue effort to pay her back.

That’s what Soul Album is to me.