The Harlem Chamber Players – a collective of several dozen musicians named after the Upper Manhattan community they serve – have chosen wisely by devoting their debut commercial album to Adolphus Hailstork. Not quite 45 minutes in duration, it ignites a curiosity to explore more of his music.

In recent years, HCP have been developing relationships with living composers who mirror the diversity of their audiences. The album comprises two works of recent vintage that were premiered by HCP. This is music with immediate appeal that simultaneously gives a glimpse of this distinguished composer’s versatility.

Born in 1941, Hailstork continues to add to a prolific catalogue of more than 250 compositions spanning all the genres. He frequently writes in an attractively lyrical style centred around ‘the singing line’, as he terms it, which is evident in these performances of his piano quintet Detroit and the concert aria Nobody Know. Also characteristic are a rhythmic vitality and expressive urgency that identify Hailstork’s amalgam of influences from Black American styles, mid-20th-century American predecessors such as Barber, Diamond and Copland, and Anglican choral music.

Hailstork received several commissions early in his career from the Detroit Symphony. He pays tribute to the city in his piano quintet, which was composed over several years, ‘a little bit at a time’. The HCP musicians evoke the various aspects or moods Hailstork personally associates with Motor City, as indicated by the titles he gives each of the four movements: ‘Detroit Grit’, ‘Detroit Nocturne’, ‘Detroit Rise’ and ‘Prayer’. At one point, they enthusiastically mimic a Motown horn section, while in the final movement, prefaced by David Berry’s touchingly introspective unaccompanied piano, the ensemble reflect on the choral tradition Hailstork got to know in Detroit through the conductor Brazeal Dennard, one of his mentors.

Nobody Know, for baritone and string quartet, originated as a commission from HCP to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the first documented arrival of enslaved Africans in America in 1619. Hailstork partnered with Ohio-based poet and librettist Herbert Woodward Martin, to imagine the perspective of ‘the guilty thief’ – one of the two thieves crucified on either side of Jesus. His viewpoint is filtered through a Black individual’s experience as ‘a sinner a-rolling through an unfriendly world’ who asks to be remembered. Baritone Kenneth Overton establishes and sustains a mood of sorrowful introspection, compressing the impact of a chamber opera into one-third of an hour.