Amabile Family Tree

The CD's Christmas cover may be demure, but the thunder of Überlebensgross that kick-starts this disc lets you know Family Tree features some of my most intense work. It also contains some of my most psychologically and emotionally profound work, and more than any other Hatfield CD, celebrates and explores feminine perspectives, from immigrant mothers and their descendants ("Take A Step", "Family Tree"), to young women who show enormous courage in the face of helpless love ("A Maid That's Deep In Love", "Dwa Serduszka") to earthy temptresses and queens of dance ("Las Amarillas", "O Sapo") to voices of children and mothers of earth and sky, breathing sorrow and joy from beyond the grave ("For Elizabeth", "Let Me Ask You"). Hatfield connoisseurs have long singled out the rarely-heard "Set" as one of my brightest and best, driven by one snapping-hot band that made seamless hairpin turns between lounge-lizard Latin, funk and boogie-woogie. I have intense sentimental memories of the session for "Double Lotus", a tribute to comparative ancient theology and Armenian sacred and secular styles. Recorded at the end of a long, broiling hot day, with the church sunk in twilight and the singers dead on their feet, we assumed we would have to record the piece in sections and edit them together. So we started, ready for an uphill struggle, and instead found the choir had entered some kind of post-exhaustion rapture where they didn't need to stop -- they scarcely seemed to need to breathe. The choir delivered a single take performance that left everybody in the church in awe. It remains one of the most electric musical experiences of my life. I wish you could have been there. Erin Smyth, who sang a solo as timeless and mysterious as a desert wind, listened to the take through headphones and sighed, "It's like chocolate. It just never stops." And then, to top it off, "When The Night Is Sweet With Starlight", my Christmas Cantata with Mary as its focus, one of my very very best and deepest works, which the choir sang with a tone so gorgeous that American tenor Nathan Granner suddenly called out, halfway through the piece, "Oh...my...God". Conducted by John Barron and Brenda Zadorsky with me as a very active third wheel, and the peerless Ted Marshall at the soundboard.