She got to know the songwriter before she recorded him

Oscar Brown Jr. was a songwriter, a poet and a civil rights activist, and his subject was the lived experience of Black Americans, written into songs. He would have turned a hundred on 10 October. The Los Angeles jazz singer Amber Weekes marks that on 7 August, when Amber Inn Records releases "To Oscar with Love".

It holds twelve songs: eight newly recorded, four lifted from her earlier albums and reworked. Among them "The Snake", "Hazel’s Hips", "Mister Kicks", "Afro Blue", "Brown Baby", "Work Song", "Hum Drum Blues" and "Rags and Old Iron". The titles alone say that Brown wrote about people rather than about feelings in general.

Weekes speaks of him without the usual distance: "Oscar Brown, Jr. is one of my musical heroes, perhaps the biggest one. It was a privilege to get to know both the man and his music." In the tribute-album trade, that is unusual. Most of them are made by people who only ever met the records.

Mark Cargill plays violin and is also the producer, the string arranger and the conductor. Around him: Paul Jackson Jr. on guitar, Scotty Barnhart on trumpet, Adam "Aejaye" Jackson on vocals. Greg Cook engineered it.

The night before release, on 6 August, there is a show at the Catalina Jazz Club in Los Angeles: doors at seven, music at half past eight. A centenary marked by singing rather than by a plaque.