This album’s wonderfully varied programme is more than a showcase for baritone James Martin’s engrossing artistry or a historical survey. It also represents his longstanding efforts to champion the creative legacy of Black Americans whose voices have been overlooked if not outright excluded from mainstream repertoire. The century of song gathered here offers ‘a mere sampling of the finest of those neglected voices’, as Martin writes in his booklet notes, but nonetheless suggests how vast is the range of styles and idioms they incorporated into their respective palettes.

Many of the 22 numbers here evoke the model of the art song, with excursions into the old-fashioned parlour song (‘Elysium’ by the composer, arranger and baritone HT Burleigh, an associate of Dvořák), work song (the bluesy ‘On the Dusty Road’, arranged by Hall Johnson), Broadway (Margaret Bonds’s boogie-woogie stylings in ‘The Way We Dance in Harlem’) or other popular styles. Only one of the songs is a traditional spiritual (‘O Le’ Me Shine’), which Martin transcribed from a performance by the composer and tenor Roland Wiltse Hayes. Another traditional number, also passed along via Hayes, is the catch song ‘Lit’l Girl’.

Three of the composers selected are women (Florence Price, Margaret Bonds and Dorothy Rudd Moore, who died in 2022). The youngest on Martin’s playlist is Anthony Davis (b1951), whose setting of Quincy Troupe’s poem ‘Bells’ intrigues with its interlacing of linguistic and musical ideas. Lynn Raley, Martin’s partner at the keyboard, leans into Davis’s bebop-inflected, quasi-improvisatory rhythmic energy and sparkling tintinnabulations. Raley’s rapport with the baritone is also especially appealing in the passionate undertow of Price’s ‘Song to the Dark Virgin’.

Martin projects a dramatically vivid presence throughout, always attentive to the sense of story contained in each song. His expressive diction and finely calibrated vocal coloration underscore the singer’s admiration for the poets whose work is likewise represented on ‘Wide as Heaven’. The selection pays particular homage to the flourishing, cross-pollinating creative spirit of the Harlem Renaissance, with no fewer than eight pieces set to texts by Langston Hughes: these cover a spectrum from witty evocations of place (Dorothy Rudd Moore’s ‘Harlem Sweeties’) to the introspective questions in ‘Prayer’ (set to music by H Leslie Adams). The closing trilogy, a miniature song-cycle by Robert Owens (to poems by Claude McKay) that inspires some of Martin’s most riveting singing, confronts America’s shameful history of racism yet holds out hope for redemption.