Cellist Seth Parker Woods, Artist-in-Residence at the University of Chicago, presents a new album exploring identity, intimacy, and human connection with music by André Previn, George Walker, Tania León, and Sergei Rachmaninoff. The album’s title is drawn from Toni Morrison’s poetry – setting the tone for a program that elevates the everyday into something resonant and revelatory. “I’m still on that quest of understanding myself through different lenses,” Woods notes – those inherited, encountered, and continuously evolving. The album opens with Previn’s “Shelter” from Four Songs on Poems of Toni Morrison, performed with soprano Julia Bullock and pianist Conor Hanick. George Walker’s Sonata for Cello and Piano is a meditation on relationship and communication. Woods emphasizes the composer’s synthesis of jazz-inflected rhythms, lyric warmth, and modernist edge, immersing the listener in a soliloquy of unrequited love and self-witness. Lyric devotion takes on a spiritual dimension in León’s “Oh Yemanja” from Scourge of the Hyacinths, and the album concludes with Rachmaninoff’s Sonata for Piano and Cello, performed with longtime collaborator Andrew Rosenblum. Woods describes the work as “a link to the memoir of my life”. Woods asserts that From Ordinary Things is an album shaped by friendship and by the belief that meaning is forged through connection.