Thomas Hampson, America’s leading baritone and a champion of the art of classic song — poetry set to music — makes his Cedille Records debut with a programme of songs by five composers of the early 20th century associated with the city of Chicago: Ernst Bacon, Florence Price, John Alden Carpenter, Margaret Bonds, and Louis Campbell-Tipton. All of them, Hampson says, 'have distinguished themselves in history as great voices of the artistic American narrative'. Hailed as 'an outstanding recitalist' by Grove Music Online, the much-honored international opera star, recording artist, and 'ambassador of song' performs compositions based on poems by Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet who became the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.