John Coltrane once declared that he wanted his music to be a force for good.

Without drawing inexact comparisons between a modern jazz revolutionary and a 21st Century troubadour we can easily determine that Morley would like her music to also be a force for good, recognizing  as Trane did that while there are negative forces in the world, deliberately out to do harm she'd also like her art to be a countervailing presence. Morley's music, built on the firmament of her warm, deep and soulful voice, resonant melodies and poignant lyrics, present listeners with a striking duality--a balm to noise-weary ears, a prodding force for good in the wilderness of social injustice. The quietude and introspection heard on Morley's new album is seductive and mesmerizing yet also serves to amplify the way her lyrics aim to disturb the peace in a time of war--not just the peace of the war-mongerers but that of anyone not fully present and attendant to their own emotional troubles.

When music is honest and driven into being by an urgency of expression and craft that supersedes commercial utility it can thaw out the most frozen of hearts and minds. It can also be, as we've known in this country since the advent of the so-called 'Negro Spirituals', a means for speaking truth to power, a rallying cry for action opposed to reckless and wanton power, exploitation and greed.

The songs Morley's sings on “Seen” enter the world with a desire for grace and troubled release. 'Sink until I hit my rock bottom' she sings on 'Behind The Rim (Addiction)' where  she reckons with abuses that have taken a friend 'closer to me than my own kin' then makes an indefatigable stand  for that person's enlightenment and life. A more universal theme compels the lyric ''Where do I take my broken heart if I can't bring it home to you/Where did you find it in your heart to be so untrue."  Grievances of a more  political nature and topical resonance get aired on 'Crimes in the Garden(for {antiwar mother}Cindy Sheehan)' as Morley admonishes  'Who is the weapon we use against each other?/Our children are our flowers/  We take them/ Use them/ For our gunpowder/To shoot.'

The music on “Seen” will likely serve as many people's introduction to Morley though she is actually on her third album now (albeit how her debut Sun Machine was never released due to a label that folded upon its completion). Her background in the arts did not begin with music but in dance. She has impressed those who one would like to impress since she was a teenager and no less an eminence than Max Roach asked her to choreograph movement to his liberation suite 'We Insist'.

Morley grew up in Jamaica, Queens, attended the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington DC and later became a scholarship student at the Alvin Ailey Dance School. Those bases of training led her to form her own company Undercurrents which occasioned  her meeting the late Mr Roach. Once singing, later near surprising calling entered her life as a vocation, she found herself frequently sharing stages with contemporary pioneer African American artists such as Sweet Honey in the Rock, Toshi Reagon, Carl Hancock Rux, Brandon Ross and Imani Uzuri - all artists whom like Morley can find no good reason that a singer of songs shouldn't privilege music's capacity to heal personal wounds and protest worldly wrongs. Morley's “Seen” lets you know both strains can be delivered with intimacy, economy, passion and a lack of rhetorical overbite, sung to you (and right through you) and not at you. Her integrity as activist and artist has brought her to audiences that have included Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama.

 The production team and musicians she assembled for Seen brought estimable resumes of their own to the table. Co-Producer Jay Newland has worked with Norah Jones; arranger Gil Goldstein with Gil Evans and Pat Metheny; bassist Fred Cash with Alicia Keys; Richard Bona with Salif Keita and Pat Metheny. The musicians gathered around Morley like a prayer circle and gave rise to vocal performances that are full of immediacy, clarity, lustre and confidence. Seen is Morley's most fully realized testament yet to how a devotion to song  as a force for good and a devotion to progressive ideals can fruitfully and artfully coexist in life, sensibility and sound.