Smith's work was recently featured at the London Festival of Music, which had a special focus on African-American classical composers. It makes sense given that his ambitions as a writer have long taken him into the realm of complex orchestration. This very beautiful album, celebrating the spirit of civil rights icon Rosa Parks, is another well conceived, multi-faceted project in which Smith's own works, as well as excerpts by Anthony Braxton, Steve McCall and Leroy Jenkins, are assembled into an absorbing song cycle that conveys key episodes in Parks' story, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and its global resonance with anti-oppression initiatives like the movement against apartheid in South Africa. To do full justice to such weighty subject matter Smith has arranged string and trumpet ensembles, percussion and electronics to create a suite that is questioning, unsettling, soothing, intimate and expansive, making much of the personalities of opera singer Karen Parks and Min Xiao-Fen, a virtuoso on the Chinese pipa, an instrument with a delicate but incisive timbre that is vaguely banjo-like, but with more of a ‘slash’ effect on some chords. Ultimately, there is a grace and gravitas in Smith's music, and it carries with it a clear sense of the enormous sacrifice and profound love of the individuals he is addressing. At its peak the oratorio has an Ellingtonian grandeur that is fit for any opera house in the world, or any audience interested in historical figures who should not be forgotten.