Description
“Lives of the Saints: Portraits in Song with Words by David Hajdu” is a concept album with music by four composers released by Sunnyside Records on April 4, 2025. The composers: Dave Douglas, Aubrey Johnson, Renee Rosnes, and Helen Sung. When writer-producer Hajdu was growing up, he was drawn to a mystical book on his mother’s shelf entitled Lives of the Saints. This was a collection of tales of Catholic saints and their heroic martyrdom. Later in life, Hajdu began to collect his own stories of ordinary individuals who, through their deeds, attained exalted status in his mind, essentially created his own canon of secular saints. For his new recording, which borrows the same title, Lives of the Saints, Hajdu enlists an assemblage of first-tier composers and performers to tell the stories of ten remarkable people from history, all of whom happen to be women. Women who did extraordinary things but suffered in some ways for what did or what they believed. Hajdu has been writing songs about real-life figures and events for unique collaborations with jazz composers and performers for more than 15 years. Lives of the Saints is his fourth recording of such material. Viewing contemporary songwriting as autobiographical to a fault, Hajdu looks beyond his own experience for inspiration, bringing himself to the material through his idiosyncratic approach to language and creative collaboration. As Stephen Holden of The New York Times has described Hajdu’s songs, they are “an unexpected happy marriage of Stephen Sondheim and Joni Mitchell for the 21st century.”
