San Francisco-based Agave’s third album with countertenor Reginald L Mobley pays tribute to Florence Price with eight tracks, none more than three minutes long, that provide a compelling thread of legacy through a time warp of composers related by history and hemisphere.

Price’s Resignation is the most moving, a modern spiritual – ‘My life is a pathway of sorrow’ – in which a haunting sound world introduces Mobley’s wonderfully rich voice, with its seamless high end and irresistible sense of narrative flow. Song to the Dark Virgin is an enigmatic response to an erotic Langston Hughes poem. Out of the south blew a wind and Sympathy recall English pastoral lights. Price’s catchy arrangement of Shortnin’ Bread, recalling American fiddle dances and film music, is oblivious to racial overtones; her Oh my darlin’ Clementine suggests Ives.

Just as Mobley and the six musicians of Agave inhabit Price’s music with skill and intensity, they give brilliant and knowing performances of a joyous, early classical motet by José Maurício Nunes Garcia and a spectacular anonymous Baroque set piece from an archive in Cusco. They give their all to a concert waltz by Scott Joplin that could have served for a Masterpiece Theatre theme, Kevin Cooper excels in a Fernando Sor-ish set of variations by the 19th-century American guitarist Justin Holland, and William Marshall Hutchison’s sentimental Dream Faces, which Mobley enchants with sad, sweet ardour, features an interlude of innocent Schubertian ambition.

As the six musicians of Agave do, the recording surrounds Mobley’s voice with a strong sense of love and presence.