Four Words Named Sullivan Fortner’s New Album

In Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke, a woman steps out of a car and is told that she has left her purse behind. “Leave that in there,” she replies. Sullivan Fortner borrowed those four words for the title of his sixth album, due on 28 August. The line holds two stories at once: the private arithmetic of surviving Hurricane Katrina, and a pianist deciding that not every loose end needs to be edited out.

Fortner told the Guardian that earlier records involved multiple takes and long stretches of post-production. Leave That in There moves the other way. Latin-inflected acoustic piano, Hammond organ, Moog, a nod to Thelonious Monk and a wordless hymn for his late friend Linda Payne all remain in the same frame. The point is not disorder for its own sake. It is the sound of a musician allowing more than one version of himself into the room.

The record’s Louisiana roots are specific. Kayvon Gordon’s bàtá drums on the opener, “Sugarcane,” point toward the state’s history of sugar wealth built by enslaved labour. “A Poignant Time” and “Another Poignant Time” take their names from Wynton Marsalis’s observation in Lee’s film that catastrophe exposed what was wrong with America. Fortner was 18 when Katrina struck. Watching CNN from Oberlin, he saw his girlfriend and her mother waiting for buses outside the New Orleans convention centre while phone lines to his family were down.

His relatives survived, but survival is not presented as a neat cadence. Fortner speaks of people still living with lost homes, damaged health and grief, alongside those who returned because New Orleans remained theirs. That tension gives the album its shape. Church singing, electronic colour, mischief and fear are not resolved into a single dignified mood; they are allowed to keep rubbing against one another.

Fred Hersch helped Fortner trust that friction. When the younger pianist arrived at lessons with tunes carefully prepared, Hersch would ask him to play something unplanned instead. Fortner now describes a recording as a statement of a moment rather than a precious monument. In that sense, the woman’s purse is still in the car. So are the first instincts, the awkward edges and the parts a tidier record might have left behind.