gratitude

A song made from Fenton Johnson’s “Revery”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Longtime followers of this Project will know that I’m a proponent of early 20th century Chicago Afro-American poet Fenton Johnson. The “elevator pitch” for Johnson is that he slots in between Paul Laurence Dunbar and the slightly later Harlem Renaissance. Back then, prominent contemporary Black critics such as the remarkable polymath James Weldon Johnson categorized Fenton Johnson’s work as altogether “radical” and “full of despair,” enough so that they were of mixed feelings about the value of his verse.

Fenton Johnson’s poetry does speak at times of hardship, oppression, even hopelessness, but upon further reading of his overlooked work, there’s a side of him that’s aspirational. In his short-lived attempts to establish an Afro-American focused journal he presented himself as a conventional Black Republican, perhaps hoping that the Reconstruction era of his elders could still be invoked.*  In addition, there’s another facet in his poetry: elements redolent of the modern Black Gospel music tradition which was forming up in Chicago while he was actively publishing just before WWI. The folks creating that music were attempting to fuse decidedly Black secular music like the Blues  and Jazz with the older (slavery era) strains of spirituals and preexisting hymnal songs. If the somewhat younger Langston Hughes gets due credit as a premiere Jazz poet, Fenton Johnson seems to me to have been trying to do the same thing with his poetry and Afro-American gospel.**

I could go on about Fenton Johnson, but instead I’ll try your attention by finishing up today by talking about making a musical piece out of his poem “Revery.”  Earlier this month I for some reason saw the text from which I adapted this week for my performance. Published in 1915, “Revery”  is one of the small number of Johnson’s poems available at the poets.org site. Reading those words, it struck me immediately that they could be a hymn to the Creator – or one could read it as a recounting of the “oversoul” that passes in an out of human lives. Having gone through September anniversaries for death and birth associated with Jimi Hendrix and John Coltrane, this poem attracted me. I started by thinking I’d condense Johnson’s published text to more succinctly bring out that sense of soul essence passing through our human lives. While I think I retain the “The Creator Has a Master Plan”  sense of the poem***, in a human-limited lifetime I could see the result being used at a funeral.

Revery

The link above will show you Johnson’s full poem, which I shortened in my adaptation for performance.

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Beginnings of musical pieces have quite a variety of first movers for me. This one started when I saw a new-to-me voicing for a Csus2 guitar chord. Sus is short for a suspended chord, a favorite of mine. The sus recipe is to drop the 3rd of a chord, the note that makes a chord major or minor – even in a basic simple 3-note triad – but then put something else in its place. In a Csus2, it’s the second degree of the scale, D. From what I understand in classical harmony, sus chords are considered an unstable, transitional chord, one that traditionally asks for a quickly following major or minor 3rd decision to resolve it. Me? I don’t mind sounds staying out there in an unresolved fog for a good long time. I began to write the whole song with three sus chords and one minor 9th chord. To better fit my voice, I used a capo to shift the Csus2 voicing and the rest up two semi-tones, and if the minor9th is the resolving chord and key center, the recording of the song is in Bminor.

Revery Chord Diagrams

The alt-tuning and easy to finger guitar chord forms I used for this song. That A7sus4 could be given other names, and I think it has some sort of G flavor as I sound it. The 3rd chord in the picture, the one that started off the composition, has a so much deeper sound that the common conventional tuning Dsus2 voicing.

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I’ve been doing a great deal of work in my studio space in the past month or so. Lots of multitudinous clean up and organizing work – rejiggering what goes where recording-wise and seeking a richer environment for my keyboard playing compatriot Dave to record there.**** All the bending and crawling around really challenges my elderly body – and my memory taunts me, recalling running some of the connections I was changing when I was a much younger man for whom diving under a desk or contorting myself to work in the backside of a low equipment rack was routine. I took a break, not even half-way done in this, and told myself I should allow my aching body a creative vacation day. And that was the day when I recorded this setting of Fenton Johnson’s “Reverie.”

I was feeling tremendous gratitude when playing this. I was using equipment accumulated slowly over decades arrayed in an ugly looking space that still had piles and boxes of stuff from the re-org to sell, give away, or store properly – but that ugly looking place sounds fine. In my monitoring headphones and when listening to the recording tracks later I was pleased as how well my space sounds. Some famous studios with envied sounds were not purpose-designed and architected rooms. Motown was a residential basement. Its reverb chamber was the house’s attic. Sound Techniques where Joe Boyd and John Wood produced the recordings of Nick Drake  and the cream of British folk-rock was upstairs in a former dairy with a naturally reverberant high vaulted ceiling and slate-lined walls. Stax in Memphis was a neighborhood movie house, the floor still slanted to accommodate the now absent movie chairs. Bert Jansch and John Renbourn’s first significant LPs were recorded in an ordinary London flat, the sound treatment: whatever the odd furniture was in it.

My space? Low ceiling, and noise from those in the floor above can easily be an issue, but it’s irregular in floor plan without any complete parallel walls. Sound treatment? It’s frankly clutter and happenstance. Today’s piece is a simple, unadorned recording. The recorded solo acoustic guitar has no reverb or delay, what you hear is just it and the microphones in this odd shaped room where I’ve recorded since the 1990s. You can hear me rebroadcast the soul of Fenton Johnson from there with the audio player gadget below. No player to be seen? Has it passed over the horizon in the meat-wheel of rebirth? No, it’s just not displayed within some ways of reading this blog, and so I supply this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

 

 

 

*It may be confusing to 21st century readers, but before the New Deal era, the businessman oriented Republican party that was already associated with some conservative cultural stances was in the matter of Black Civil Rights still the Party of Lincoln, however weak that association had become.

**This working theory of mine is not (AFAIK) supported by any deep scholarship – it’s just a reasonable supposition by someone like myself with wide interests in music, poetry, and history. Remarkably little seems to be extant regarding Fenton Johnson’s privately expressed thoughts over his lifetime, and even those who knew him later in his life are now likely dead. A younger scholar interested in Afro-American culture could well take up investigating him.

***If you click on the link you’ll get a 34 minute Pharaoh Sanders spiritual Jazz piece that eventually meets up with an unforgettable vocal by Leon Thomas. Do your ears feel like praying for half-an-hour? I’m listening to it now as I finish formatting this for the blog.

****His keyboards can now be more often recorded in stereo. I now have a different vocal mic that may better suit his voice. When we record “live in the studio” we use loops I create with sequenced drums and bass, and these are now going to be separated tracks in my new plan and routing. We’re not going to start sounding like a Steely Dan record or anything, but the plan has promise.

God Made Mud

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Let’s complete our series honoring American writer Kurt Vonnegut on the 99th anniversary of his birth with another piece taken from his novel Cat’s Cradle.  In the world of this novel there’s an imaginary religion created called Bokononism whose elusive founder writes psalms and prayers that reference Caribbean musical styles. Even though Vonnegut never set music to them, he seemed happy that others did during his lifetime.*

Cat’s Cradle is still in print, so why not buy or read it? Also for the curious, here’s a nice “behind the making of the book” listicle

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The LYL Band, the loose organization of herded cats that Dave Moore and I have played under for about 40 years, performed several pieces using Bokonon’s psalms and other short passages we’d read in Vonnegut’s novels three days after his death was announced back in 2007. I wrote the music for these in that interim and did the vocals when they were performed “live in the studio” within two one-hour sets. As I mentioned in other episodes of this series, the performances aren’t perfect. For one thing, Dave is creating his keyboard parts on the fly after maybe hearing a quick run down and with nothing more than a chord chart. Given that I’m not a very good chord/rhythm player that’s a testament to him and what decades of playing together will do for a band. Another problem was that I was suffering from cold/allergies that day and my vocals had issues with congestion and phlegm.

I recorded those two sets, though I thought it a shame that my phlegm issues reduced the quality of the performances. Over the years since 2007 I’ve listened to those performances, and I found that I either had become inured to their sound or that the emotional moment of us honoring Vonnegut overcomes that.

“God Made Mud”  was the next to last song we did that day.** It’s probably the best of our Vonnegut Memorial stuff in terms of my vocals. “God Made Mud”  appears in Vonnegut’s novel as the text of “The Last Rites of the Bokononist Faith.”   The Bokononism that Vonnegut invented is used in the novel in various ways to satirize human nature and our search for meaning. For some readers — oddly enough, atheists and secure believers both — those insights into belief are the emotional core of the book. For those in non-Abrahamic religions, there are echoes of Buddhist teachings, intentional or otherwise, mixed in there too.

But by the time Vonnegut gets to “God Made Mud”  the sincerity of the final human situation, the miracle and the limits of our lives, completely overcomes the satire, and removed from the novel’s plot it moves me. It moved me then as we were performing it in the week of its author’s death, moved me later in consideration of other deaths and thoughts of gratitude for lives, and moves me again this autumn as I consider death and the approach of death by folks in my circle.

Click this highlighted hyperlink to hear the LYL Band’s performance of “God Made Mud”  —  or some of you may see a horizontal player gadget below this paragraph to play it. One last thing before I go: if you appreciate what this Project does and you think you know someone or some audience who might also appreciate these varied combinations of words and original music, help it continue by sharing links to the audio pieces or posts on social media or elsewhere. I almost never have the time to do that, and I’m bad at it anyway, so a good deal of this effort’s audience comes to it this way. Thanks!

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* Oddly, most of those settings that I’ve heard make no reference to Caribbean musical styles implied in Vonnegut’s imaginary Bokonon texts. One of those styles, calypso, has lost most of its currency in North America, but in today’s piece I used a reggae feel as a reasonable substitute.

**The last song back in 2007? Dave Moore’s own meditation on last things “The Final Minute,”  which we presented here this summer.

Bokonon’s 53rd Calypso (Nice, Nice, Very Nice)

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

On to Kurt Vonnegut novels I have read and admired, as we continue this week’s Vonnegut series. In 1963’s Cat’s Cradle Vonnegut created one of the most elaborate satires I have ever read or heard of. What’s the target of the satire? I’d start to list them, but how much time do you have? What’s that you say?

“Busy, busy, busy…”

Well, let me talk a bit about Bokononism, a fictional religion created by Vonnegut as a Dadaist philosophical framework for this novel. I thought it a clever satire as a young man, but now as an old man I admire the richness of its contradictions and insights. Bokononism (named for its living, but elusive founder, Bokonon) is rich in meaningful/absurd contrasts. It’s said to have been invented by the West Indian sidekick of an accidental American imperialist* as an opiate of the masses for an impoverished Caribbean island nation. But not far under the cover of its optimistic and panegyric lies are sharp observations of life and how we think we make sense of it.

Instead of the Psalms of David, Bokonon wrote calypso songs. To many readers now calypso is but an obscure genre of Caribbean Afro-American music, but in the years immediately prior to Cat’s Cradle  it had had a fairly significant US commercial visibility. Here’s a complexity in this calypso moment: to the typical US listener at the end of the 50s the music was “read” as carefree and only moderately exotic and absurdist.** But to calypso’s originators on their colonial islands, it was a sly comment on oppressions and troubles.

Creating such a song-writing character was an excuse for Vonnegut to do what many novelists stuck on silent pages would love to do: dress up and pretend to be pop music performers, even if only in a novelist’s imagination. Cut Kurt some slack: that pretending allows us to use Vonnegut’s sensibilities in the short formats the Parlando Project prefers.

Over a decade later, this lyric escaped from the novel, and what was presented as the trickster guru Bokonon’s scriptural “53rd Calypso”  in the book had a  second life as a song lyric under the title “Nice, Nice, Very Nice.”  It made the American hit parade charts with this song by Ambrosia in 1975. Taken that way, it either can seem a simple, pleasing song; or a good reason in 1975 to form a punk band, without delay.


These guys wrote additional lyrics, sing better than I do, and were more concise in explaining Bokonon’s motivation for his religion “I wanted all things to make sense/So we’d be happy instead of tense” Still, I formed a punk band.

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Simple isn’t without complexities. All we have is one quatrain and a short refrain — “Be Bop A Lula”  is epic poetry compared to this. That one verse is a diverse catalog of the lowly and the high, the brave and the mundane, and the refrain wishes to claim they are part of the same “device” which rhymes with a repeated judgement that this is “nice.”

On one level this is a statement of shared humanity, and our connection. As complicated as the character of Bokonon is, I don’t think his creator Vonnegut would doubt the truth of that sharedness — but the “nice” and then too, the “device” part? There is the complex part of Vonnegut’s world-view.

Vonnegut portrays a world where kindness, love, and altruism are possibilities – no, necessities. Everything that is not those things exists too. We are all in a net of “butterfly effects” — even then in the novel’s 1963, even more so now in 2021. Is the world “nice?” In moments and pin-points it is. Let’s acknowledge that. In totality? “Busy, busy, busy” is said to be what a Bokononist says whenever they try to consider the complexity, the world’s intended and unintended awe of incomprehensibility. The implication: too complex to understand, to control.

At this point, in an earlier draft of this post I then tried to synthesize these things in my conclusion, but I don’t believe the book ever does, and certainly this little song that I present today doesn’t.  So, let’s move on. Busy, busy, busy.

This song, performed in the same live set, back in the week of Vonnegut’s death in 2007 by the LYL Band, is unusual among the several musical settings I’ve since heard for it — I actually aimed for a calypso feel for the melody and groove, while others don’t. These 2007 performances I’ll use this week are each imperfect in some way, but as we approach the 99th anniversary of Vonnegut’s birth, it’s my hope that they still express some of his spirit.

There’s a player gadget for some to hear “Bokonon’s 53rd Calypso”,  but if you don’t see it, tap this highlighted hyperlink.

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*The very idea of accidental or coincidental imperialism is rich in itself. Even the minor threads in Cat’s Cradle  are often like that.

**Just as I’m not much of an expert on the novel and its expressions, I can’t allow anyone to think of me as some expert on West Indian musical genres and political movements. But I am old enough to recall a bit about how the music was used and understood by white-Eurocentric-American culture circa 1960 — roughly, a darker-skinned Jimmy Buffett kind of thing. Some may recall a signal use in the goth-comedy Beetlejuice  where the uptight urban sophisticates in a New England farmhouse were possessed and cursed to sing “Day-O (the Banana Boat Song),”  which had been a big US hit in the late 50s. It’s an extraordinarily silly scene. I laugh at it. Vonnegut could (should) draw laughs too, but he is using a deeper, darker, slyer take on calypso.

Calypso’s use first by the American pop music industry, and then by white US filmmakers, as well as Vonnegut’s use of it in Cats Cradle  could be viewed as cultural appropriation — I’d guess because it is. How would actual people of Trinidad/Tobago view Vonnegut’s reflection of their adaptation of African songcraft in a new colonialist world? I’d expect the opinions would vary, but I haven’t found anything on a simple web search.

I’ll let them judge Vonnegut in that regard. I’m an American musician, so I will not throw the first Rolling Stone from a country whose music is unique significantly because of kidnapped Afro-Americans. I feel that restricting art and tactics that oppose oppression only to each group who could claim ownership and a first, best understanding of them reduces the powers of resistance.