JAC Redford’s beautiful new CD
I am back at last from my adventures as ‘Visionary in Residence at Biola in Los Angeles, and one of the highlights was my musical collaboration there with Steve Bell and JAC Redford. Happily my visit coincided with the release of JAC’s new CD ‘Let Beauty be our Memorial. It’s a stunning record with 18 beautiful, original choral pieces, all composed by JAC and sung by the excellent St. Silas Singers. It has settings of texts by CS Lewis, Scott Cairns, and passages of scripture and liturgy but I am delighted and honoured to say that it also contains settings of eight of my sonnets; my whole Advent Antiphon sequence, and also an exquisite setting of Love’s Choice, my sonnet about receiving Holy Communion. With JAC’s permission I am uploading the recording of Love’s Choice here, to give you an idea of what this CD is like. You can get the CD directly from JAC’s own Website, or as a download from CD Baby, or Amazon. It’s also available on iTunes.
So here, is ‘Love’s Choice:
Love’s Choice
This bread is light, dissolving, almost air,
A little visitation on my tongue,
A wafer-thin sensation, hardly there.
This taste of wine is brief in flavour, flung
A moment to the palate’s roof and fled,
Even its aftertaste a memory.
Yet this is how He comes. Through wine and bread
Love chooses to be emptied into me.
He does not come in unimagined light
Too bright to be denied, too absolute
For consciousness, too strong for sight,
Leaving the seer blind, the poet mute,
Chooses instead to seep into each sense,
To dye himself into experience.
With JAC and Steve Bell in LA. They are holding one another’s CDs!
Malcolm Guite 