Rising - Primosch, Carthage
Carthage
music of James Primosch
Album Release – Today on Navona Records!
Sunrise, Thursday May 21
Happy Album Release Day! It’s been exactly two months since our last one. At that time, we quipped “we only get three or four of these a year.” True, but we didn’t realize then how grateful we’d be now for this one! We really miss singing together.
Welcome, Jim Primosch’s Carthage, an entire album of his contemplative, virtuosic, beautiful music – music that insists we pay attention. It makes us smile to listen to it, recorded under very different circumstances than these: that in the middle of July; out in the country with air and birds; frisbees and cook-outs during lazy breaks; intense, focused sessions; and the celebratory champagne toast that closes each of our recording sessions. Prior to these sessions, we had sung together every day for six weeks; we were in a groove, with a confidence that brings an airy, released feeling to even the darker, more complex moments in Jim’s music. We can feel summer pulling us outside.
Stream, explore, and purchase HERE.
A delightful irony about this release: the title track, Carthage, is about absence, perhaps the fundamental (mostly-unspoken) theme of this moment. In Carthage, absence becomes a character – a thing to be grappled with, to be better explored and understood via Jim’s journey through Marilynne Robinson’s words:
To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweet as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is foreshadowing—the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.
Carthage the album is a trek through Jim’s decades of grappling with life and spirituality. He does so in the monumental Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus, where Latin mass texts collide gracefully with Denise Levertov’s awe and uncertainty. He does so in settings of Thomas Merton and e.e. cummings – each their own, compact journey. He does so in the closing miniature of Wendell Berry:
When I rise up, let me rise joyful like a bird.
When I fall, let me fall without regret, like a leaf.
Let me wake in the night and hear it raining and go back to sleep.
A special Rising w/ The Crossing today.
Let me rise joyful...
With gratitude for the huge community who brought this album to life (see the whole list below).
Take a break this weekend. Listen to Carthage.
Share it with a friend whose absence is a presence.
Tell them you love them.
- The Whole Team @ The Crossing
Special thanks...
We are grateful for the generous support of Carthage,
and all our recordings, from Carol Westfall.
This recording is made possible through a generous gift of the New York Community Trust, with the kind help of Fr. John Kamas, S. S. S.
And gratitude to the amazing, vast team...
(How many people does it take to make a recording?)
Corbin Abernathy and Andrew Beck, Alliance Artist Management, Katy Avery, Nathaniel Barnett, Jessica Beebe, Wendell Berry, Bill and Sandy Bixby, Kelly Ann Bixby, Karen Blanchard, Mitchell Bloom, Jonathan Bradley, Steven Bradshaw, Mark S. Burrows, Evelyn Carpenter, Esther Cole, Phil Cooke, Colin Dill, Micah Dingler, Elizabeth Dugan, Jeremy Edelstein, Robert Eisentrout, Katie Feeney, Edward A. Fleming, Ryan Fleming, Tuomi Forrest, Joanna Gates, Dimitri German, John Grecia, Hunter Gregory, Mary D. Hangley, Ryan Harrison, Michael Herring, The High Point at St. Peter’s in the Great Valley, Lisa Husseini, Steven Hyder, Cindy Jarvis, Michael Jones, John Kamas, Tom Kasdorf, Anika Kildegaard, Heidi Kurtz, Jeff LeRoy, Mark Livschitz, Mary Kinder Loiselle, Bob Lord, Chelsea Lyons, Alexandra McFadden, Shannon McMahon, Brandon MacNeil, Michael M. Meloy, Maren Montalbano, Jennie Moser, Rebecca Myers, Donald Nally, New York Community Trust, Conner Newkam-Ulrich, Patrick Niland, Becky Oehlers, Eric Owens, Lucas Paquette, Parma Records, Brett Picknell, Jeff and Liz Podraza, Dante Portella, The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, Jim Primosch, Pam Prior, Andrew Quint, Sam Renshaw, Rob Robbins, Marilynne Robinson, Carol Loeb Shloss, Daniel Schwartz, Kim Shiley, Rebecca Siler, John Slattery, Daniel Spratlan, Ryan Strand, Elisa Sutherland, Jon Sweeney, Daniel Taylor, David and Rebecca Thornburgh, The University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Van de Water, Kevin Vondrak, Laura Ward, Lara Warner, and Carol Westfall.
and a worldwide community of listeners and supporters connected through our art!
We are grateful.