This collection celebrates rebirth and renewal, the cycles of life that allow us to start again, try again - to emerge, like the tender young things growing from the earth and the budding blooms unfurling from their casings. To shrug off the coats and cares of winter, and step ahead into a warm new day.

NKEIRU OKOYE: WHEN YOUNG SPRING COMES

When young spring comes, With silver rain, One almost could be good again.

-Langston Hughes

Nkeiru wrote this piece for me at the start of this year. It’s the first of a new set of piano pieces, wordless songs for a new generation. And it’s the start of a new friendship. Nkeiru and I both know a thing or two about beginning again. We’ve both learned that sometimes the most beautiful things come when you have to start over, when you open your heart and try the impossible. When a silver rain washes over you and you can be good again.

ALVIN SINGLETON: CHANGING FACES (ISRC QMEU32105697)

There’s a magnolia tree outside my window, and every year, there’s a day when it all of a sudden bursts into bloom. These giant, miraculous flowers seem to spring free of their buds overnight and my world is transformed. They don’t last long. A couple of weeks and they’re gone again. But in the meantime, I’ve remembered how beautiful the world can be. Transformation is possible. Maybe sometimes we forget that. But we can change ourselves. We can open up and show our beauty, again and again.

H. LESLIE ADAMS: ECSTASY OF LOVE (featuring Jordan Bak)

I think there’s no falling in love like when you fall in springtime. It’s like all of nature has conspired to heighten every emotion and sensation. Everywhere you turn, colors are impossibly brilliant - scents are impossibly delicious - the world is impossibly glorious. And your heart explodes along with everything else. Fall in love in springtime, and you’re 16 again, falling for the first time. Falling forever. Free fall, into the ecstasy of love.

BETTY JACKSON KING: SPRING INTERMEZZO

An intermezzo is what comes in between - a transition from one movement to the next. A pause, a reset, a reprieve. We need that now. Take a moment. Forget how hard things have been, and how hard we’re hoping for what comes next. Just close your eyes, breathe deep, listen. Find quiet, find peace. Find a moment to just be here, now, in the beauty of a new spring.