Bray/Vann/Grainger/Schofield
(Chandos)
The easy fluency of Bray and pianist William Vann guides us through familiar and less well known Kurt Weill songs with the haunting Youkali as the lodestar on our journey
Y
oukali, for Kurt Weill, was the land of desires, promised but never to be attained – a strong image for an exiled and itinerant composer. The 1935 song in which he captured the idea, a lilting tango, forms the lodestar of Katie Bray’s voyage through Weill’s chameleonic songwriting career, undertaken alongside the pianist William Vann, accordionist Murray Grainger and double bassist Marianne Schofield, the latter moonlighting from the Hermes Experiment.
