Huey Copeland writes... HERE TODAY combines the artist’s revelatory new tracks with covers of famous standards by Georges Bizet, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and Stevie Wonder. As ever in Hall Moran’s work, a range of musical styles, tones, and tempers are dynamically cross-wired and recombined. Her inimitable operatically-trained voice–at turns sly and simmering, sophisticated and soulful–unites her expansive aesthetic vision and places black female being at the heart of the modern world. At once looking forward to futures that might be and looking back on tragedies that continue to unfold, Here Today offers us allegories of the present. Indeed, this album carves out sonic space for luxuriating in the wonders of Hall Moran's voice while reckoning with the dark histories she enjoins us to witness. Not unlike her fellow black vanguardists working in other media, such as painter Glenn Ligon and poet Nathaniel Mackey, Hall Moran takes up the Western lyrical form only to turn it inside out with the nuance, force, and prophetic urgency of black feeling. The resulting album is both a script for survival in today’s dark times and a model of black study for the ages, with an edge as insurgent as it is incisive. - Huey Copeland, PhD © Yes Records