The resurgence of interest in concert music by African-American composers has not benefited Ulysses Kay as much as it should have, and this well-executed program of Kay pieces by the composer's disciple Kevin Scott, leading New York's Metropolitan Philharmonic Orchestra (actually a group of freelance players), gives a clue as to why. Often the ear takes a bit of tuning to hear what Kay was getting at, and not because his music was written in one of the more difficult methods of his middle twentieth century heyday. The trick is in the nature of the African-American component of Kay's music, which, at least for listeners who come to Kay from European tonal composers, isn't attached to the usual framework of peppy French neo-classicism: as Scott points out in his detailed and helpful (but unfortunately sloppily edited) booklet notes, Kay's European models were German and Italian rather than French. Perhaps the ideal way to approach Kay is to listen to some jazz first: then, in both the more cinematic language of the Suite from The Quiet One (1948) and the more chromatic Scherzi Musicali and Aulos for flute and chamber orchestra of the 1960s, you might take a random wind line and find it jazzy or bluesy more often than not, even as his sevenths and ninths blend into the extended tonality of his various backdrops. Kay knew and was influenced by quite a variety of other composers of his time, but he forged a highly personal style nevertheless. The Suite from The Quiet One is not much heard these days but was quite celebrated when it appeared in conjunction with a neo-realist look at the coming of age of an African-American school child. Kay's score is inward, psychological, and Scott compares it convincingly with the music of Kay's friend
Bernard Herrmann. The Scherzi Musicali initially doesn't seem to be the playful work the title might suggest, but listen again -- except in its two interludes, which range across the timbres of its small group of winds and strings, it is focused on subtle explorations of alternation between pairs of instruments or groups of them. The work has a spirit of interaction that's quite characteristic of jazz, even as jazz rhythms are almost completely absent, and even the seemingly somber Adagio: Più mosso movement (track 10) might be considered a kind of scherzo. Kay's handling of the instruments is assured throughout, and the performances are clean and sympathetic. Here's hoping this disc furthers a Kay revival.