The deep south in all its quiet majesty: Lizz Wright conjures radical gospel blues power
The Georgia singer’s upcoming album Nearness with pianist Kenny Banks Sr. strips away the studio varnish to explore the subversive history of the spiritual and the healing power of the space between notes.
Nearnes is a collaborative album with her long-time musical foil Kenny Banks Sr., scheduled for release on 25 September via Blues & Greens/Candid Records.
Produced by Wright guitar mainstay Chris Bruce, the 11-track record cuts through the contemporary noise to document a twenty-year musical relationship forged in the crucible of the American South.
Shared soil
To understand Wright’s trajectory is to understand the Black church of the Deep South. Born in Hahira, Georgia, the daughter of a minister and church music director, she cut her teeth directing youth choirs before breaking onto the international stage in the early 2000s. A string of landmark albums for Verve -most notably Salt (2003) and Dreaming Wide Awake (2005) – established her as an artist who refused to be fenced in by the rigid taxonomies of the jazz market. Wright operates in a vast, uniquely American landscape where jazz, folk, gospel, and blues bleed into one another, delivered with an ego-free, low-simmering gravity that values silence as much as sound.
I’ve seen Lizz live a few times, in Mayfair in a little bar, best of all in Soho at the Soho Revue Bar in 2008 – read my review run on Jazzwise – and at the Barbican.
In Banks, she has the ideal conversational partner. A foundational pillar of the Atlanta jazz ecology, Banks is a master pianist whose vocabulary stretches effortlessly from classical rigor to the deep-grooved phrasing of rhythm and blues. He has shared stages with everyone from Wynton Marsalis to Gladys Knight. The pair first collided at an Atlanta jam session two decades ago, improvising a version of “Amazing Grace” that essentially forged the blueprint for their ongoing creative dialogue.
Lays your burden down
While Nearness introduces itself via the traditional spiritual ‘Soon I Will Be Done’ as its lead single, it’s track of the week on marlbank, the project instantly evokes the bone-deep weight found in ‘Trouble of the World,’ a cornerstone spiritual Wright memorably inhabited on Dreaming Wide Awake.
‘Trouble’ carries an immense historical and cultural weight. It was forever canonised by Mahalia Jackson, whose shattering, tear-streaked rendition in Douglas Sirk’s 1959 film Imitation of Life became a sonic pillar of the Civil Rights movement. Since then, it has been filtered through various radical lenses – from the stark, weathered folk of Odetta to the fierce, minimalist ache of Sinéad O’Connor on her 2002 traditional outing Sean-Nós Nua.
The lyrics, on their surface, trace an individual’s longing to discard earthly burdens:
“Soon I will be done with the trouble of the world / Going home to live with God.”
But within the tradition of the African-American spiritual, the text is dual-layered. For enslaved people, “going home” was frequently coded language used on the Underground Railroad to signal a physical escape to freedom in the North or Canada.
More than that, the song acts as a profound piece of existential protest. In a society that legally codified Black people as property, declaring oneself a citizen of a divine kingdom wasn’t passive escapism – it was a radical, subversive assertion of absolute human dignity. It is that very same lineage of survival, resistance, and grace that Wright and Banks tap into here. A record of quiet, commanding beauty to watch for when autumn lands.
Hear Lizz and Kenny Banks at the 2026 EFG London Jazz Festival
