For their fourth Naxos album, Arkansas’s Fort Smith Symphony led by music director John Jeter turn their attention from Florence Price and William Grant Still to Louis Wayne Ballard (1931-2007), described by Karl Erik Ettinger as ‘the first Indigenous North American composer of art music’. Their passionate performances introduce a composer of power and integrity rooted in the materials he is working with, whose mastery of traditional Western classical form and orchestration ranges beyond the indigenous instruments he occasionally uses.

In 1967 Ballard’s ballet The Four Moons celebrated Oklahoma’s 60th anniversary with a gala performance featuring four internationally known Oklahoma ballerinas in strongly characterised solos, including a great striding waltz for Rosella Hightower (Choctaw) and a plaintive cello solo for Yvonne Chouteau (Cherokee). Two magnificent pas de quatre evoke with Tchaikovskian flair what the composer’s wife described as ‘the spirit of their tribal ancestors’.

In Devil’s Promenade, named for the Quapaw area of Oklahoma where Ballard was born, commissioned by the Tulsa Philharmonic in 1973 and conducted at the Cabrillo Music Festival two years later by Dennis Russell Davies, an English horn and flute accompanied by a percussion battery slowly unfold a Sioux ghost dance song to moving effect.

Named for the humpbacked, flute-playing deity envisioned by Ballard as ‘the God of Music of Native America’, Kokopelli was the third of six Fantasy Aborigines based on indigenous mythologies, its more exotic soundscape dotted with brief moments of intense beauty. Scenes from Indian Life is, except for its concluding ‘Feast Day’, a good-natured depiction of Santa Fe, New Mexico in the 1960s, with lots for the clarinet, trombone and bassoon to do.