"Gild The Black Lily" - Queen Esther

• artist:Queen Esther
• featured artist:Queen Esther
• region:New York City
• release year:2021
• style(s):Jazz, Americana
• country:USA
• formats:CD (Compact Disc)
• record posted by:Esther, Queen
• label:released by artist
• publisher:BMG Rights Management (US) LLC
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Gild The Black Lily’s Black Americana sound was curated by Harlem-based vocalist, songwriter, musician, and producer Queen Esther. Her creative output musically is the culmination of several important Southern elements, not the least of which are years of recording and touring internationally as frontwoman for several projects with her mentor, harmolodic guitar icon James “Blood” Ulmer, including a stint in his seminal band Odyssey. Queen Esther was raised in Atlanta, Georgia and rooted in Charleston, South Carolina’s culturally rich and enigmatic Lowcountry, a region with African traditions and Black folkways that span centuries and continue to inform her work.

These 13 songs include originals from Queen Esther as well as covers from Son House, Chip Robinson of The Backsliders, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, The Eagles, and George Jones, with performances from guitarist Boo Reiners (Demolition String Band), bassist Hilliard Greene (Little Jimmy Scott), organist and Thelonious Monk specialist Gregory Lewis, guitarist Jeff McLaughlin and drummer Shirazette Tinnin.

With each song, the Blackness that raised her moves steadily from The Old West (The Black Cowgirl Song) and the foundations of the Black church (John The Revelator) to heartbreak (He Thinks I Still Care) with soulful declarations (All That We Are) and country-rock reworked into black country soul (Take It To The Limit) and back again. Ultimately, the album illuminates other facets of the Black sonic experience.
credits

"Queen Esther’s fourth studio album Gild The Black Lily highlights the gift of being an African-American woman willing to make daring, reclamation-driven musical navigations into unexpected sonic spaces. It audaciously succeeds at crafting a narrative thread from gospel blues vocalist Blind Willie Johnson to The Eagles’ soft rock to her own heartwarming Black Americana. Notably, the album grows in distinction when Esther’s artistry expands beyond her prodigious roots and profoundly connects with the listener’s emotional core." - Parton and Pearl

"It’s revealing that “black” is often used as a qualifier before describing Queen Esther‘s music. Whatever music you are listening to is black music. In fact, Queen Esther descends from the Low Country, a foundational source of food, music, and community traditions for all modern America. We should call everyone else’s music 'Americana a la Queen Esther'." - American Standard Time

"If we look back at the basics of everything we now experience as American, there is a good chance that the origin is different from what we had previously thought. Much of what belongs to the Americana can be traced in part to the culture of those who came to the United States as enslaved people and often it is a woman who set things in motion. Often these are women who have since disappeared under the blanket of history and whose customs, cultural expressions and customs have been incorporated into what we now experience as Americana. Queen Esther's fourth studio album 'Gild The Black Lily' is often described genre-wise as “Black-Americana”. Actually, this is a kind of a step back to the original Americana and a tribute to those who formed the basis of a number of musical movements that we now capture under that umbrella concept, but actually roots music would be an even more accurate description." - The Next Gig (The Netherlands)

"Queen Esther has let the muses come, she has let God take the helm and has let herself be carried away, making all her roots flow naturally, reuniting the roots of American folk music around the mother root, the blues." — Rock Bottom Magazine (Spain)

"She is depicted with a banjo on the cover, but it is the mandolin that is the dominant string instrument here, as well as what sounds like standing bass. In some songs it is laid on a light organ, elsewhere a little guitars, a steel guitar here and there, it is super nice screwed together, but it is always her voice, her crazy voice, that gets to shine and give the songs, both her own and the cover songs, wings. Not a single track is weak. No dead center." -- Egon Holstad, Feedback (Norway)

"It's almost as if Buddy Miller, Rosanne Cash and Leyla McCalla would have made a record together - strong songs presented in a rather unpolished package. Actually, the genre designation (Black Americana) is quite uninteresting, the important thing is to note that Gild The Black Lily is a minor masterpiece. " -- Pierre Erikssen, LIRA (Sweden)