New York City... August 20th, 2024 While in New York City for the 2023 Jazz Congress, Sylvia Brooks felt compelled to make a pilgrimage to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. Descending into the hallowed ground where nearly 3,000 people lost their lives, she experienced a musical epiphany as “Amazing Grace” swept over her.

Turning to Grammy Award-winning arranger John Beasley to transform that aural vision into reality, Brooks has created a wrenching, arrestingly beautiful rendition of the 18th century English hymn. Available on August 26th 2024 via download and streaming services, the extraordinary arrangement recasts the song’s personal anguish into a communal lament “that at some moments verges almost on discordant,” Brooks says. “It’s a very different version that evokes the melted steel and the souls that were lost there.”

Brooks provides all of the wordless vocals, and the sumptuous four-part harmonies evoke the awe and unspeakable sadness of the space. Beasley’s expressive piano transforms the familiar theme before Daniel Rotem’s almost spectral bass clarinet introduces the melody. Joined by Cameron Stone’s cello the piece gains mass and momentum as Beasley’s arrangement expands the hymn with Edwin Livingston’s supple acoustic bass and Jonathan Pinson’s understated drum work. Lost or found, this work seems to say, we are all wretches unequal to comprehending such loss.

Recently appointed president of the International Society of Jazz Arrangers and Composers, Beasley is among jazz’s most esteemed writers. Leader of  the acclaimed MONK'estra big band, he serves as music director for the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz’s global gala International Jazz Day concerts.  Beasley earned two GRAMMY©awards for arrangements in his Bird Lives and MONK’estra Plays John Beasley albums, and six of his twelve GRAMMY©  nominations are for arrangements with vocalists and big bands. Known for accompanying iconic singers, including Dianne Reeves, Kenny Rankin, Chaka  Khan, and Queen Latifah, Beasley creates an exquisite setting for Brooks’ voice and vision.

Possessing a sumptuous, velvet-rich tone, Brooks gained widespread attention with her first five critically acclaimed albums, which introduced her sensuous jazz-noir sound. In recent years she’s increasingly turned her attention to writing her own material with projects like 2022’s Signature, which draws on the cream of the Southland jazz scene with ace accompanists Tom Ranier and Christian Jacob.

Born and raised in Miami, Florida, Brooks came to jazz as a birthright. Her father, pianist/arranger Don Ippolito, wrote his own music for his Octet and Big Band which were performed in a series on PBS. As a first-call player, he worked with legendary artists such as Stan Getz, Buddy Rich, Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan and Dizzy Gillespie. Her mother, Johanna Dordick, was a conservatory-trained opera singer who also dazzled audiences singing pop tunes and standards at East Coast showrooms and resorts (she went on to found the Los Angeles Opera Theater in 1978). Initially drawn to acting, Brooks studied classical theatre at ACT in San Francisco under the tutelage of the great directors Allen Fletcher and Bill Ball. But it was the passing of her father that called her back to her jazz roots.

With “Amazing Grace,” the inimitable Brooks makes another creative leap. Instead of unraveling the mysteries of the human heart, she plunges into the ineffable, offering the succor of an aural embrace where words are insufficient.

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