Bonds: Two Songs for Peggy Lee: Don't Speak and Bunker Hill [CVR:C142]

Although Margaret Bonds’s remarkable ability to synthesize classical and non-classical styles is well known, almost all her jazz and popular songs have become obscure and the music of her late California years remains all but completely unknown – even though that final half-decade was arguably the most stylistically diverse, artistically productive, and socially engaged period of her entire extraordinary career. The two songs published here for the first time, both written for jazz great Peggy Lee, offer a glimpse into the workings of Bonds’s genius as it had come to exist by 1968. “Don’t Speak” is a love song of great tenderness and eros-tinged intimacy, while “Bunker Hill” is a hard-hitting critique of the human costs of urban renewal and gentrification, named for the storied Bunker Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles whose poor and underserved community of immigrants and minorities was heartlessly displaced in 1958 so that the area could be redeveloped with high-rise, high-rent, and predominantly white-owned facilities.

Composer: Margaret Bonds

Edited by John Michael Cooper and Christopher Washington

Words by Janice Lovoos

Medium Voice and Piano