performance

Shine Perishing Republic: Meteors Not Less than Mountains

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

This post continues with the LYL Band’s noontime performance recorded on American Election Day, parts of which I’m sharing here this month. So far, I’d opened the live-in-the-studio session with a selection from a Stephen Vincent Benét poem “Litany for Dictatorships.”   Keyboardist/vocalist Dave Moore followed performing a poem, “Their Beauty Has More Meaning.”   Dave handed it to me after we performed it. “It’s by Robinson Jeffers” he told me.

“I’ve got a surprise for you” I replied, “because this is the next one I have from my stack.” Slouching toward Bethlehem, I handed him this rough chord sheet.

Shine Perishing Republic

The above is my song-adaptation. To see the full text of Jeffers’ poem as he wrote and published it, see this link.

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This wasn’t the first time I thought about performing this Robinson Jeffers poem. When I went looking for stuff to perform on Election Day, I revisited it again. I already had a couple of pieces I thought I’d do as spoken word combined with music, and so I was now looking for something singable – and for all of its applicable prophetic attitude, this poem of Jeffers just didn’t “sing” off the page for me.

The thought struck me: well then, translate it into a song.*  I took the text of the poem and started to extract the images from the somewhat Latinate rhetoric of the original. One thing that songs like and page-poems often eschew is a chorus, and so moving from poem to song I extracted a line from the middle of the poem, an image reflecting Jeffers’ characteristic focus on geological time compared to the brevity of humanity and its efforts and actions.

Did I help or hurt Jeffers poem with my version? I do think I modified the exact meaning that Jeffers intended his poem to have. His prophetic text (I mean that largely in the Biblical sense) reads as more despairing than what I performed. I flatter myself to think that I fractured but sharpened some of his images. For my purposes it succeeded because I’d much rather sing my version.

I find it interesting to read his poem as Jeffers wrote it and note that it was published just over 100-years-ago. The American Republic’s turn to empire then was largely North and South continental, and its position among the world’s nations, important but not so preeminent and essential. My current nation’s deluded emperor seems prone to all of the bully-boy actions of imperialism – while utterly lacking the skills of alliances, strategy, tactics, and logistics that empires require. Heartened as I am today by the results of the election that was ongoing while we performed this, I remain fearful for the world and my country – and ours is not the only unbalanced and lethal war-lord on this globe. I didn’t gloss over Jeffers troubling concluding image, that humanity, the people whose power we must rely on against kings and oligarchs, are not infallible either. The Bible has its tyrants Herod and Pilate, but Barabbas won a popular election.

My version with this chorus brings forward a thought I think was in Jeffers’ message. The lifetimes of all nations (measured against the entire sweep of history and of the earth nations draw lines upon) are like the bright but short augury of a meteor compared to the long geologic truth of a mountain. Our lives, our citizen lives, are shorter yet – but can our imperfect – though capable of acts of humane worth – republic shine yet as it flies?**

You can hear the LYL Band performance of my version of Robinson Jeffers’ “Shine Perishing Republic”  with the audio player below. Has any such audio player burned out across the sky and struck itself invisible into some earth-bound rocks?  This highlighted link will unearth a new tab with its own audio player then.

Odd isn’t it, that without coordination on our part, both Dave and I had thought of Robinson Jeffers poetry as we considered Election Day. After quickly finding his place in this musical adaptation he’d never heard, I’m grateful that Dave’s organ part helped ground its performance last week. To further bring forward that chorus I promoted from Jeffers’ text, I did the make-yourself-a-multitrack-group-of-backing-singers thing last weekend and mixed that with the live performance.

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*Longtime readers here will know this is what I do when translating work from other languages into English for performance here. I generally don’t try to convey the original syntax or characteristic word order of other languages, and I don’t try to follow some one-for-one recreation of their word-music either. I ask myself, what are the images the poet is evoking, and how can I evoke them in vivid contemporary English? This isn’t necessarily the best way for all poems and purposes, but it’s the default way I go about that task.

**Is it possible this “meteors not less than mountains” was informed some way in Jeffers’ mind from scientific cosmology’s theory that our planet was formed by the accretion of smaller rocks in space colliding and forming our globe? Per this mechanism, there’d be no ancient mountains on our planet’s surface without the preceding mandate of those cosmic ballots being cast! Might this metaphor have occurred to Jeffers as he built his Tor House and Hawk Tower on the coast of California from rocks he hauled and set together “making stone love stone?”

If Jeffers knew of the early versions of the more current accretion theory of planet formation, it might have to have been through Chamberlin and Moulton’s pioneering planetesimal hypothesis.

That’s a bit of wild speculation on my part, but Jeffers’ younger brother Hamilton had achieved a doctorate in astronomy at the time Jeffers was writing his poem.

Their Beauty Has More Meaning, or parachuting from a trainwreck

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

So, a momentous American Election Day, and the LYL Band reconvened during the noon-hour while voters were still casting their ballots. If you recall, I – acting as recording engineer, musician, and half-time vocalist – played the first few notes on electric guitar, went to sit on the stool beside my microphone position, and…

…I’d moved the stool that morning to check some audio wiring patch points. My blind ass couldn’t see that, and I plopped butt-first on the floor.

No matter how ominous great human events are, there’s room for a pratfall.

When the LYL Band plays – and we’ve done that for over 45 years – we’ve followed a practice of alternating between song leaders. Recovering my dignity (such as it is) I’d done my Stephen Vincent Benét selection. It was Dave’s turn, and in the Parlando Project spirit he had a poem by Robinson Jeffers. Just as Dave didn’t know what I would play or what I’d be singing or speaking, I didn’t know what Dave was starting to perform. I had a recording software screen in front of me, keying drum sequences and occasionally checking levels while trying to inventory and retrieve my limited stock of musical skills within myself – but no lyrics or music, not even a scribbled chord sheet. My posterior may have been sightless when we were thrown down from heaven, but in this musical situation, I have the decades that Dave and I have played together to guide me. I’m not sure what I’m thinking when I spontaneously play with him, and that’s a strange, yet somehow pleasant feeling. On one level my mind fears and braces for what bands call “a trainwreck,” where timing and pitches collide, and as I begin to play my ears will sometimes hear that collision emerging. I must try to repair the parts of the train as they are exploding! Other times, when it starts to work, I feel like a cartoon character rebuilding the train-track while sitting on the front of the moving locomotive: how fast can the rails and crossties be laid-down? When playing, I’m hastily searching for the “good notes,” the safe ones that won’t conflict with what Dave is playing while trying to allow the ones that rub and stretch with the other parts in urgent ways.*

I happen to like loosey-goosey music that finds itself in the playing, though not all musicians and listeners do. Without brag or pride I say: when mixing the recordings later, I’m often surprised at what makes enjoyable sense to my ex-post-facto composer’s judgement from what I remembered as a frantic grab for the emergency parachute rip chord.

In the midst of all that, I’m hearing and trying to react to the words Dave is spinning out. This time, they seem slightly familiar, but I can’t be bothered to wonder much about that. We finish the single take, the one you can hear below, and Dave says it was a poem by Robinson Jeffers. Here’s a link to the text of that poem.

Robinson Jeffers on the rocks

Robinson Jeffers, rock star, which is to say he built his own home out of rough-hewn stones.

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I’ve always found Jeffers an odd case, and he interests me even if I suspect the two of us wouldn’t agree much. He’s a pioneer in the 20th century intensification of the 19th century American Transcendentalist theological examination of nature as the revealed truth – something I see in some contemporary poetry – but even if that approach retains currency, Jeffers take on these matters remains unusually strong and strange. He called a core tenet of his animating thought “inhumanism.” Today’s poem, chosen by Dave for performance, “Their Beauty Has More Meaning,”  examines the experience when the poem’s speaker (presumably Jeffers himself) examines a morning in its one-in-an-ages-long sequence of dawning and knows that he is as brief or briefer than a single day in the face of astronomical and geologic time. Even the birds and their birdsong, (always a handy metaphor for the musician’s or poet’s art) issues from any creature’s short life, though generations will perhaps repeat this utterance.

When Jeffers expresses his beliefs, one could find this outlook too fatalistic, even despairing – but in this example that Dave selected, Jeffers is, I think, at his most comforting. We, the ordinary people of this world (or the artists in it) are making our morning songs as best we can or must – beautiful to some ears at some moments, though we still have so little power to move the universe. Our “I Voted” stickers of last Tuesday are – at least at the individual level – tiny, constrained circles. Where I live, we’ve been through a year where the birdsong of whistles and car horns were arrayed against masked and armed troops, and two who did such were shot and killed. Is it comforting to know that we are small, temporary, things, doing the small, temporary things that are what we can do? In contrast, the self-styled great men who rule us think (as the previous piece in this series put it) that because they have great power, they must have great wisdom.

Jeffers wanted his message of human inadequacy to judge, and find lacking, the deadly engines of warfare – a human imitation of the great destructive acts of natural disasters. So strongly did he feel the human vanity in war that he steadfastly opposed WWII, the mighty violence that we often judge as on-the-whole necessary to oppose great human evils.

We finished playing Dave’s presentation of Jeffers’ poem. It was my turn at the mic. I had a chord sheet page for Dave, and a surprise. The nature of that surprise is part of the next post, coming up soon.

To hear the LYL Band perform Robinson Jeffers’ “Their Beauty Has More Meaning”  live in the studio on Election Day, you can pull the lever** for the audio player below. No player visible? You can request a provisional ballot – well, another way to get an audio player: this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*We do use rough chord sheets for some pieces, we usually try to guess and announce the key center for a piece; but we don’t work out an arrangement between players, and the sheets are sketchy and undetailed. Is this the best way to do what we intend? I’m not sure, but it’s the way Dave and I have done this. With the rest of the Parlando Project pieces I’m increasingly working in the one-man-band scheme, playing and then rejecting or excepting the tracks I lay down or compose.

There are folks who intentionally skill themselves in free music improvisation, who come at the situation with more musical chops and theoretical knowledge. I admire, and praise that commitment, but I don’t believe art is essentially a hierarchy. I act instead on what I feel was the core belief of the 20th century folk revival and the later (but highly similar) punk-rock movement that saw music and art as the sharing of necessary expression.

**Old person reference. Voting machines used to be these 8-foot-high booth-sized contraptions where you flicked little levers like a pinball machine racking up points and then registered your choices with a bigger lever that felt like you were shifting a truck into gear when you yanked it over with a satisfying clunk. Filling little exam ovals with black ink lacks the tactile and auditory richness of the old ways. I could even say the modern silent ink seems like composition abstracted in musical notation while the old voting machines felt like grabbing a Bigsby whammy bar while slamming out a chord on a guitar.

The Vampire (Part 4)

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

This is the final section in our Halloween series this year, a setting of Conrad Aiken’s narrative poem “The Vampire.”  It’s the longest section of the four parts as I’ve divided it, and I find it by far the most disturbing. As I have done when releasing these movements in the musical piece, I urge you to listen to them in order, starting with Part 1.

I had this post all written and ready go before I finished mixing my recording of the last part late this afternoon. Before hitting publish, I decided to check to see if Aiken himself may have suggested some context when he published it. I had found Internet statements that the poem was first published in 1914, which I assumed was a simple uncontroversial fact. I even jumped to the conclusion that this publication must have been in Aiken’s first book-length poetry collection published that year. I got a copy of that book, Earth Triumphant  and – it was not in it!*  Another web search gave a variant publication date: 1916. I downloaded copies of all public domain Aiken poetry collections before 1931. Searched each one of them. No “The Vampire”  in any.**   I even searched for distinctive words to see if the poem the Internet calls “The Vampire”   had another title or was only a portion of a longer poem. No winners. By this point I could even wonder, did Aiken even write this poem?

After supper I did more searching and found this tiny listing on The Internet Speculative Fiction Database that led me to the archives of The New Republic  for April of 1924 where Aiken’s poem appears as “The Vampire (subtitle line) 1914.”   In context that subtitle is almost certainly a reference to the beginning of WWI, that first great war of mechanized and chemical slaughter, not the Internet-mistaken date of the poem’s publication. It turns out that Aiken’s “The Vampire”  is yet another poem where 1914’s world-wide war inspired eerie and apocalyptic poetry, some of which escaped their specific inspiration to become more generalized poems brought out on Halloween.

Vampire Part 4

That plowman that ends Aiken’s poem made me think of William Blake’s “Drive your plow over the bones of the dead.”

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So it’s apparently a 1924 poem from the time when Modernism was fully in ascendence, which makes its archaic (if effective) prosody and its unusual narrative style more anachronistic. Aiken knows this. He edited the Harvard literary magazine with T. S. Eliot for example and was an active critic and anthologist promoting current American poets – but he expressly admired a lot of French symbolist poetry. Perhaps he was thinking too of that American antecedent to those 19th century French poets he admired, Edgar Allan Poe? In my childhood, some Halloween costumes were made from old clothes, and if this poem’s storytelling is old-style, its terror might still come through, particularly in today’s section. Further violating Modernist rules, Aiken is mostly telling here, not showing what exactly occurs when the mysterious creature arrives and reveals that the world’s populace will either love and worship her or suffer ignominious death. Throughout the poem, he mostly treats this situation with eldritch Lovecraftian rhetoric reflecting how strange and horrific the apocalypse strikes those experiencing it – but as today’s section gets underway, he adds the most horrific detail of all: many (most?) of the world’s people not only accept this deadly tyrant, they find her erotically attractive. In my last post I wrote that Aikin’s choice of a female gendered villain here is problematic. Thinking again this morning, and considering the erotic charge in the words of the subject populace’s reaction to the tyrannical “love me or die” vampire he portrays, and assuming Aiken assumes hetero-normative readers, then it’s possible (though unstated) that the hetero-normative women in the poem’s world are seeing a male identified vampire simultaneously with the female villain he’s describing.

Beyond the costume it wears, how old-fashioned and fantastic is this poem?

At the beginning of this series I wrote that when searching for a text to use for a Halloween piece this year I wanted to find something playful, because I have an overstock of disgust and fear for my country and the world right now. I did find pieces that might have fit the bill: benign ghosts, saucy witches, mischievous spirits. And then I read Aiken’s poem. I read a poem of the arrival of a deadly and narcissistic tyrant proclaiming that those in thrall to them must love them amid widespread devastation. This is what is most horrible – as savage as extra-judicial killings, dire mocking leadership, needless and cruel wars and callous destructions are, that express expectation that we love and bow down to its bringer disgusts me more. Or maybe the supreme horror is this: the sight of some of my fellows accepting – nay, even cheering such a creature on. And that’s what I ended up portraying today as I completed presenting Conrad Aikens poetic tale.

Happy Halloween. Enjoy your costumes, your microscopic candy-bars, and the twilight will-o-the-wisp fancies of wonderous spirits. Celebrate the treasures that are the memories of the ancestors. The grown men with masks and guns citing unilateral laws, such as they are, that apply to you but not them, expect at least your grudging acceptance, if not your loving worship of their faultless goals and grandeur. Set your Halloween joy in the first against the dire schemes of the latter.

Oh, and you can listen to my musical performance of the final section of Aiken’s poem with the audio player below. Out of candy-bars? No player?  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player then.

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Given that the Earth of this poem is utterly devastated, it would have made an ironic inclusion though.

**This included his Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winning Selected Poems  of 1929. I checked out a copy of the later 1961 edition too. No “The Vampire”  there either. I also quickly checked a 1961 book length consideration of Aiken’s life and work written by Frederick Hoffman. “The Vampire”  didn’t appear in the index. Checking out Reuel Denney’s 1964 Aiken book, no mention, though it does note the vampire that appears in Aiken’s 1916 “Jig of Forslin.”   What remains a mystery? There’s no indication I’ve seen that Aiken was especially fond of the poem. No sense that it once stood out in regard from within the large corpus of work that the long-lived and prolific Aiken wrote and published. Someone is responsible for the many modern Internet occurrences and performances of this more than 100-year-old poem. My working theory there: someone in fantasy and horror fandom put it forward before literary scholars caught on to it.

The Vampire (Part 3)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

This is turning out to be an interesting Halloween experiment: announcing here that I’m going to present a suite of songs (or a multi-movement musical setting, whatever I’ll end up calling it) using Conrad Aiken’s narrative poem “The Vampire”  – before I had conceived, composed, performed, or mixed them. And I did it quite late, with less than week before Halloween.

Scary? No, I’ve been too busy trying to complete this. I hope you’re enjoying the story unfolding with “new episodes” being released nearly every day – but if you’re coming to this post just now, I do suggest this way of hearing the pieces, in the proper order.

In Part 1 the world of the poem encounters a mysterious and distressed creature. In Part 2, this creature brings with it a frenzy of sorrow and deadly intimations, transmitted with disturbing dreams and visions. At the ending of that section, we’re told the creature has started to speak directly to the world of the poem. Today’s song tells us what the creature says.

The Vampire Part 3

Aiken’s poem gathers power from the incantatory power of its rhymes, so I’ll forgive him using the archaic version of “blended” in line 2

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In short, the creature announces that the citizens of the poem’s world have a choice: they will choose to worship and love her, or they will be slaughtered. This situation is so fantastic that the world seems in shock. Is this real? Is each citizen who has seen the portents in the earlier parts, and now has heard the creature’s dire pronouncement, insane or in trapped in some as yet unawakened nightmare?

Since this is a poem, we might see this is the dichotomy in most any fantastic poem: if it is proximally a poet’s imagined reality – how are we meant to take it? Yes, the poet could end the poem with an envoi “it was all a dream” or some other explicit framing device. Spoiler alert: Aiken will not do this. The world in this poem is doomed. In the midst of this horror is another horror: many (most) of the world’s people are enthralled by the creature, even after its tyrannical statement, most are following her around in some kind of adoring daze.

You may note that I’ve constantly used “the creature” and “it” to refer to the sinister eminence of Aiken’s poem until a couple of paragraphs ago. He never calls it a vampire outright, and his depiction so far has only had two elements in common with the vampire trope: it’s deadly, and it enchants its victims. The final section will include more depiction, including that that attraction has erotic dimensions. If I’ve avoided gendering the creature in my writing so far, Aiken doesn’t: his creature is a “she.”

Yes, I’m bothered by that, perhaps as much as I’m bothered by the rest of what is going to be described in the poem. I don’t know enough about Aiken to say if he consciously or subconsciously desires that choice’s resonance with misogyny, or the fear of female sexuality that can often underpin it.*  I think I’ll probably say more after I’ve completed presenting the poem, but one thing that allowed me to engage with the poem when I could have cast it aside: it’s plausible that Aiken, its author, is a young heterosexual man who seeks to confront two things in his mind (or the minds of others like himself): that beauty and charisma is not a reliable sign of virtue, and that desire is a strong force with strong dangers surrounding it.**

The musical mode shifts again for Part 3. If last time I wanted a little fuzz-tone frenzy as the ominous visions and dreams are unleashed, today’s music returns to a quieter sort of weird folk with the cello, violin, guitar and now bass clarinet ensemble. The world’s populace is in enthralled shock, caught between disbelief and horror, with a third element (even more disturbing) to be introduced in the next part. I hope to complete that final section within the next two days, so check back for it. Oddly, for the first time in the suite of songs, today’s gentler music uses something like conventional harmonic cadences. “Well, I guess we’ve got a murderous tyrant ruling the world, but at least we’ve got a more conventional and attractive song structure.”

You are listening in order, right? If it’s the proper time to hear part 3 of “The Vampire,”  there’s an audio player below for most of you. No player for you? I’m more accommodating than our story’s vampire, I offer this second way: a highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

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*Of course, women can do evil things, and some have evidenced overripe amounts of human villainy. If they’ve lacked a consistent power base in a largely patriarchal history, they’ve had their innings. Given such a history though – one that largely assumes male gender when creating a powerful character – Aiken’s choice is worthy of examination.

There’s an opportunity to write more about the male lothario vampire or the darkly attractive bad-boy-with-a-habit vampire tropes, and what they say to heterosexual women about their desires and attendant dangers, but in the interests of length and needs to complete the music, I’ll pass tonight.

**I think of the Shakespeare song from The Merchant of Venice  recently presented here, which occurs within a play with a stock ethnic stereotype villain (though made a bit more humanized and complex by the Bard) where the little song is a parable about the deceptions of surface “fancy,” a polite word for desire.

The Vampire (Part 2)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Did I set any expectations (musical or poetic) with the first part of my planned multi-movement Halloween presentation of Conrad Aiken’s “The Vampire?”  Well, this first: if you’re just coming onto this post someway, you’ll want to hear how Aiken and I tell this frightening tale in the proper order, so go ahead and leave this post and listen to the parts in order.

The opening had a small ensemble of mostly orchestral instruments, playing the simple parts in a mode that I sometimes use and call “punk orchestral.” In Aiken’s opening words we met a mysterious creature that interrupted the normal life of the poem’s world. We learned that the creature seems distressed. In the second movement today that distress is more widespread, as those in the poem’s world come under the thrall of the creature. Inescapable dark visions are rife. The creature is starting to speak, and what it says is the matter to be covered in the next section which I plan to release soon.

Vampire Part 2

Text of the second section of Conrad Aiken’s The Vampire, performed today.

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With the poem’s now revealed dread, the sweet violin from last time starts keening, and my black Telecaster electric guitar rasps chords thru a fuzz-box distortion. There are broad statements reporting cries and anguished words in Aiken’s text, and so a second electric guitar enters halfway in – an instrument which I aimed toward amp speakers for feedback in its part.* The cello has nothing to play in this section, but my most “rawk” electric bass takes over the low end.*

The gentle vocals in that first part might have benefited if I had a trained and sweet voiced singer instead of myself. Today’s vocals? Well, I like shouting and ranting, but I’m no Ozzy Osbourne either. I did my best. Only after I completed the mix for today’s section did I think that that fuzzy Telecaster part I played was more akin to Norman Greenbaum’s immortal “Spirit in the Sky”  than sinister dark metal.

OK, if you’ve done your part and listened to Part 1 first, you can now listen to Part 2 with the audio player gadget below. Do your “Fixed and burning eyes” not see any such player? It’s not the end of the world, you can use this highlighted link which will open a new browser tab with just an audio player.

 

 

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*It’s a recent Squier Rascal short-scale solid-body electric bass with pair of thick voiced humbucker pickups. I bought it earlier this year to replace a similar sized and equipped bass that I traded Dean Seal for decades ago. The pickup switches and finally the volume pot on the older instrument used since the early days of the LYL Band 40 some years ago have given up the ghost.

**I’ve sought a somewhat controllable version of that sound from the first time I plugged a cheap, used, thin brown hollow-body guitar into my phonograph amplifier and received an unholy wail of distortion sliced open by the squeal of feedback. Maybe part of the fascination is that “somewhat controllable” aspect of using such sounds in a musical piece, that mixture of challenge and chance. The sound also annoys people, which can be good or bad, depending on my mood.

The Vampire (Part 1)

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

  I’m going to be out on a limb in this Project’s treehouse of horror this Halloween. How so? With today’s post I’m starting to present what at completion will be a larger musical piece than this Project usually presents, and I’ve decided then to publish this poem setting in sections over a week, as movements or a kind of suite. That in itself is a bit ambitious. Among the hundreds of pieces the Parlando Project has issued, only two strike me as similar. The most ambitious of those two? I set with music all of T. S. Eliot’s Modernist landmark “The Waste Land”  – and that piece too was presented here in sections, but it was composed and performed over a period of years. The other similar suite of songs goes back to the formative times of this Project: a series of songs largely written by long-time Parlando collaborator and keyboardist Dave Moore about the pioneering early 1950s late-night horror movie host Vampira – but as I recall, all those Vampira songs were written and recorded before the first one was published here. I knew what I had before I made them public.

Not so with this planned Halloween 2026 piece, which is Conrad Aiken’s narrative poem “The Vampire.”  As I woke up this morning, I had a rough idea for the final section, and some music for that section recorded, but no vocals for that. But if I’m going to present this longer poem serially this week, I would need to start with the first section. I had Aiken’s words, and nothing else.

Conrad Aiken sharpens a scythe

Conrad Aiken: harvest time or sundering time?

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So after a quick breakfast and glass of iced tea, I was onto composing the music for what will be the first, and shortest, section of Aiken’s “The Vampire.”   Working quickly, I started with modifying a drum sequence to use as a guide track for the rest. I next laid down two cello parts, a track using a pair of tape banks from the computer-emulated version of a 1960s’ tape storage “virtual instrument” the Mellotron,* and a clean electric guitar part. Despite the different instruments being sounded, and playing them one at a time, those three tracks were all played on an electric guitar, the non-guitar parts being played thru a MIDI pickup. I finished with an arco string-bass part – that one played on a little plastic keyboard MIDI controller because I want to use its volume wheel to articulate the bowed bass notes. “Real Musicians” and trained composers will recognize the simplicity of these parts. To explain myself, I’ve taken to calling compositions like this “Punk Orchestral.” This is shorthand to explain that just as a melodically simple 2-3 chord rock song played in an entirely non-virtuosic manner can still arguably be an effective piece, so too one might attempt the same thing with instruments we associate with “classical music.”  The vocals here are both spoken and sung. I have a limited skill set for this sort of singing, but I’m the one handy to realize this composition.

As we start then with my series of “The Vampire”  I feel called to do the Andrew Hickey** thing and warn listeners that this Aiken poem I’m presenting is a dark and distressing fantasy.  I had considered a more playful Halloween piece this year, partially because my country and the world has generated non-imagined horrors a plenty. Perversely, Aiken’s poem may have captured my attention because it approaches those current practical levels of fear, terror, and pity – and it has (I believe) a message about the dangers of human fancies. Today’s section of the poem isn’t telling us yet what will occur before we reach the poem’s end, for Aiken opens his story quietly with the world of his poem meeting a distressed and mysterious creature. You can hear it with the audio player below. Has the world darkened, and you can find no such player?  This highlighted link is your only hope (and fear) – it will open a new browser tab with its own audio player for the piece.

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*One tape bank is a Mellotron string section, the other male choir voices. The voices are mixed very low today, for they are off in the distance in this part of the poem’s story.

**Hickey’s long-term project, A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs is amazing and goes further into detail and research on its subjects than even I do on mine. I think Hickey’s project’s title is less attractive than the series is – for yes, music nerds might be up for it, but it’s much more than that: it’s a still unspinning story about history, culture, capitalism, the large caldron of creativity, and racism, and sexism. Hickey is meticulous about warning listeners that they’re going to be hearing more than a treatise on what color a record’s original pressing label is or the most effective settings for a Fender Deluxe guitar amp.

Toward the Exit (Dem Ausgang zu)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Hans Arp was born split in two. His mother was French. His father was German. I just called him Hans, the name he was given at birth, but he used a French version of his first name as well, Jean.* He was born in Alsace–Lorraine, a set of disputed provinces that were alternatively French and German as wars whipsawed borders. During Arp’s lifetime, those two countries, those two languages, would be fighting as principals in two World Wars. Just by existing Hans Arp could be an enemy alien simultaneously in two ways.

Until this month I knew Arp vaguely as a 20th century modern artist, but while scrolling on Bluesky I saw four lines of an Arp poem that had been translated by Herbert Read as “The Exit To” posted. That immediately intrigued me.

These were eerie, surprising, wild lines – a kind of poetry that has long attracted me.** Was this all of the poem? Could I find it in its original language and work out my own translation for performance? What else could I find out about Arp and his art, visual and literary?

Luckily, I was able to quickly find Read’s 1968 book Arp, which covers Arp’s life and work. The book provides a good number of examples of that work, including not only the entire poem I was seeking in Read’s English translation, but the full text of two versions in the original German (as “Dem Ausgang zu”)  and in Arp’s own French translation. Read spends most of the pages on the visual art, but tells us that Arp was a life-long poet that considered his literary work an integral part of his expression.

Arp’s lifetime reflects his dual nature. Born in a then German territory, and soon connected with the early 20th century avant garde in France and Germany, he fled to neutral Zurich Switzerland at the outbreak of WWI. Significantly for the fleeing Arp, Zurich was the birthplace of the nonsense-word-named art movement called Dada.

Dada was formed by young people from all the sides in the First World War, who didn’t want to be on any of the sides offered. As France and the various monarchies ground themselves into doit and wurst on the battlefield, the Dada folks were pretty sure that exuberant non-sense was the best rebuttal. Arp himself dispatched his German draft status by going to the German consulate in Zurich, genuflecting and making the Sign of the Cross at every picture of the German minister Hindenburg there, and making non-sense patterns on the forms. He did not seem to the German recruiters there to have a keen tactical mind, nor the possessor of the cool sanity required to make sacrificial charges and retreats through no-mans-land.

You, valued reader and possible listener, may counter that patriotism and bravery, like poetry and art of wisdom and clarity, are not valueless. I myself am a confused soul. I like to fancy that I, gratefully, can engage with either outlook – a variety. I do weigh and consider that this is a luxury. Earnest warriors and confounding satirists have each expended their lives in dialectic for that luxury in art.

A man such as the great French Surrealist poet Éluard I recently featured here can fight on what I think of as the good side of the two World Wars, and still write Dada and then Surrealist poetry. I know much more about Arp now due to the English poet and critic Herbert Read’s book about him – Read who was a decorated and profoundly discouraged vet of the WWI trenches who became committed to art, pacifism, and anarchism as a result, yet then felt compelled to serve his native country when the armies of fascism were arrayed against his nation in the second World War.

To the best of my initial knowledge, Arp seems like a fine person. Modest, unpretentious though a persistent artist, with a sense of humor and somewhat rare ability among his peers to see value and collaboration with women artists in his circle and romantic life. Spontaneously he took to abstraction in his visual artwork quite early in the 20th century, independently of, and often ahead of other Modernists. He explained this by saying that he felt humans are pretentious when they try to depict nature, and that instead they should create things like nature does – not reflected depictions, but abstract though attractive, palpable things like a stone or leaf.***

So where does that leave him with poetry? Dada enjoyed nonsense of course. Surrealism brought forth odd and even random combinations. We may be more accepting of these tactics in visual object than a poem, but in today’s poem the young Arp is using those Dada and Surrealist tactics in this 1912 poem before either movement had been declared. What are we to make of poetry such as this that seeks to surprise us without the comfort of giving a clear path to a denotative meaning?

We might be attracted to its novelty. We might take comfort in our surprise rather than displeasure in our confusion. We might choose to delight in our sense of disorientation. In the same way that we might enjoy the texture and shape of an abstract sculpture, we can enjoy the words as sounds and texture. But I suspect all these are fleeting things to most of us much of the time. So, let’s look at such Dada verse as Arp’s poem another way, the way I had to in order to make my translation. The world of generative AI could easily produce endless combinations of nonsense, but it’s trained to go the other way, to give us the very thing we’ll think is expected of it.   Arp chose his words in German, and then went at it again and chose his words in French. A particular human made a particular set of choices. In Read’s account Arp did intend beauty in his art along with the humor, and he seems absent of any haughty sense of the hermetic artist who means to be misunderstood. He also had a sense of humor. My working understanding of the poem I perform today is that its mood is darkly humorous.

Dem Ausgang zu in three languages

I’ve changed, and think I’ve improved, my last line since I recorded my musical performance earlier this week.

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Long time readers here will recall my primary goal in translation: find the images and convey them vividly in contemporary English. I’ll continue to do this, even as Arp’s images wish to burlesque and fracture reality. When an AI LLM hallucinates (and we use that very term) we are disappointed in it. When another human wishes to speak of an altered reality we wonder at the purpose, the intent, even unexpressed or accepted-accidental intent. This isn’t stone or wood that’s being shaped abstractly, this isn’t a dollop of paint, these are words we must array to make our human sounds, and we will find it hard to avoid making shards of meaning out of them. Arp may be laughing as he wrote down these words in one language, and then another – two languages that would be fighting and killing each other multiple times in his era – but he’s also delighting in the sound and stretch of his words, and I tried to convey that in English too. In the first two lines I see reflective eyes and mysterious night. In the next three lines, a litany of time and movement constrained by something as old and massive as the mountain.**** I see a tree’s lifetime subject to a timber harvest, long ago logs, then cut down and floating away. The poem concludes with night birds in barn lantern light gobbling a season’s harvest that must then have needed the labor of a manual threshing floor to gather, while the divine (angels) are effervescently seen condensing in clouds (baskets of air). And the final line: (as “when pigs fly” in another idiom) fish are holding their hiking sticks walking through the stars, a rising litany of impossibility leading to a certainty, that the poem and all our human effort will end.

If Arp was to perform this poem at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, would some patrons be availing themselves of the exit? For that matter, how many are still reading this far down in this post of mine, how many will want to hear this poem?

Did Arp intend for that to be in a cryptic poem about the absurdity of life’s effort? I can’t tell, but that’s what I found there, and he surely didn’t intend hard enough to prevent me from finding this.

You won’t have to work hard to hear my musical performance of Arp’s poem. I composed the guitar part in my head, silently, while doing other things this week, visualizing exactly the fingering I would use to play it. That’s something I used to do in my youth, but I can’t recall the last time I did it as an old man. I derived a chord structure from the guitar line for a piano part, laid down a bass line, and worked out a drum pattern, and there you go: angels in a basket of air. The audio player should be luxuriously there for you, brave listener. No player? No, Elon hasn’t muted Starlink, but you can also use this highlighted link which will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*I’m using Hans Arp as I relied here much on Herbert Read’s book, and Read uses Hans. Wikipedia lists him as Jean, says than name is preferred in English, but there’s a German language page under Hans. Arp seems to have continued to use Hans when speaking German, and Jean when speaking French throughout his life.

** Yes, I enjoy Dada, oftentimes more than I think I would, and I take pride that I work to make fresh English translations of Dada poems publicly available for poetic work that is hard to find online in English, but I have noticed that even my hardy audience, whose attention I’m grateful for, has little interest in this. I cut my recent early Paul Éluard Dada-style poem series short due to lack of interest.

***To give some flavor to Arp sense of unpretentious, humorous absurdity, here’s his 1921 account of Dada first being uttered as a name:

I hereby declare that on February 8th, 1916, Tristan Tzara discovered the word DADA. I was present with my twelve children when Tzara pronounced for the first time this word which has aroused in us such legitimate enthusiasm. This took place at the Café Terrasse in Zurich, and I wore a brioche in my left nostril. I am convinced that this word has no importance and that only imbeciles and Spanish professors can be interested in dates. What interests us is the Dada spirit and we were all Dada before the existence of Dada….The morality of idiots and their belief in geniuses makes me shit.’”

Arp’s last sentence there sums up a lot of my current newsfeed and the pronouncements of our honored and self-sacrificing leader and his cadre of acolytes.

****In the black horse hitched to the mountain litany I thought of an element of Arp’s biography summarized in Herbert Read’s book. Arp joined in and exhibited with The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) group of artists around the time he wrote this poem, and that brought to mind Franz Marc’s 1911 painting that I visit at one of my local art museums.

Millay’s Tavern

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

In my Human Seasons, I awoke to the first cold morning of fall, and I thought that this just completed Edna St. Vincent Millay musical piece would be just the thing to release and write about today. Oddly, I had started working on the music for this in the midst of summer. Millay’s poem is one of those that sits up on the page asking to be sung, and from such temptation I’d worked up the basic musical idea back in a time when I could hop on a bicycle just wearing the clothes I was wearing around the house. This morning I needed a wind-proof beanie, three layers across my torso, and I had to wiggle into tights. An old man getting into tights is a rickety procedure, a vignette unfitting association with carefree bike rides.

I asked myself yesterday “What did this song need?” How dressed? How many layers? I have been presenting a lot of songs recently featuring acoustic guitar, and the tracks I had from summer were just my voice and guitar – acoustic, yes, but at least there was some variety in that it was my large-bodied 12-string. I pick the 12-string harder than most, hitting the strings with more of the flat-pick surface. This produces a bell-like clang, and I thought I’d underpin that sound with some gamelan gongs. I then added a bass line and thought about a top-line riff. For some reason – woodwinds,* and I played the left-channel part using one of my sampled “Virtual Instrument” libraries with my MIDI pickup guitar. I tried to mix this oboe part to a realistic level as it would be if this was an actual acoustic ensemble playing this live instead of myself playing track by track in a “one-man-band” format. The gamelan gongs? I wanted them distant, as if they were outside the tavern window in the scene of Millay’s poem. The final mix of the song works best on headphones or modern ear-buds, so go ahead and put those in your ears if you have a set handy when you listen.**

If you’d like to read the full text of Millay’s poem, here’s a link to that.

In these musical choices I was trying to bring out the mystery I sensed in Millay’s words. “Tavern”  could be read superficially as a desire to run a bread-and-breakfast or the like, perhaps somewhere in the Maine of Millay’s childhood. A nice enough way to understand the poem, but Millay put in something that undercuts reading it as a New York Times style section feature on charming getaways: a repeated reference to this inn she envisions being specifically for “grey-eyed people.”

If one searches for what “grey-eyed” might signify, you’ll get the usual cold under-contextualized information that search engines offer up. Grey is a very rare eye color. OK, is Millay saying she’s going to market her inn with some “Think Different” focus on gathering unusual people, perhaps the artists, writers, and bohemian figures of her youthful 1917 Greenwich Village times? Not impossible, but why then does she write about learning from the grey-eyed “long ago.” Is there something else about having grey eyes? There are results that say that eye color is supposed to be a sign of wisdom, including some that report it as an epithet applied to the famously wise Greek goddess Athena. OK, she learned something from the grey-eyed, but that seems an obscure way to say that, though evoking an air of generalized mystery with this grey-eyed matter seems to be part of her intent. The whole casting of her tavern in the poem doesn’t seem selective. It’s near the top of some mountain, but it would seem to be a welcoming place for all who come upon it. Is the voice in her poem going to ask everyone to take off their sunglasses or tinted contacts to see if they’re allowed in “Tavern.”  I don’t hear those that arrive pleading at the door: “Look, my fake ID says my eye color right here!”

Another sense I got from this poem is that it was possibly in conversation with another poem, one by Christina Rossetti, her poem called “Up-Hill.***”   I don’t know if Millay knew this poem, but it’s not so unlikely. In this case then the grey-eyed are the souls ascending up some mystic mountain toward a heaven or afterlife. They are grey-eyed because their eyes are clouded in the moments after death. One other, allied, possibility for why grey-eyed: her mid-19th century ancestors might have been pictured as early photographs, faces whose colorful eyes would all be rendered in shades of grey. Our poems, our songs, our memorialization, our celebrations around a table – these are to bring colors back to the grey eyed.

Grey-eyed in Carl Van Vechten’s photo, Edna St. Vincent Millay.

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You can hear my performance of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Tavern”  with the audio player below. No player on your mountain? Damn your eyes, or rather the way you’re reading this blog which might suppress showing a reader – but this highlighted link will open the door, or new browser tab, with its own audio player.

 

 

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*It would have been subconsciously, but perhaps the mixture of oboe, 12-string guitar, acoustic bass, and unusual percussion may have been a ghostly presence in my mind from the times I saw an admired the musical ensemble named Oregon that used that mix of instruments.

Which reminds me of a tavern joke: An ego and a super-ego walk into a Freudian bar. The bartender says, “I’ll need to see an ID with that.”

**I used to have time and opportunity to check my mixes on various ways to listen to them. I particularly miss my old car for this, as it had a great stereo for revealing aspects of a recording mix. In my current living situation I often have no opportunity to mix my recordings on external speakers, much less give them a quality check with these extraverted noisemakers. A check I still do before release: listen to a new song on at least one pair of mobile-device ear-buds, which I assume are the most typical “hi-fi” system for modern listeners.

***If you have the time, the song version I made of Rossetti’s poem is a favorite recontextualization of mine. You can see and hear that at this older post from the Parlando Project at this link.

The Human Seasons

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I was reading a social media thread this week and John Keats name came up as a youthful gateway into poetry. Being a long-obsolete child, I don’t know if 21st century young people, and particularly young Americans, are introduced to Keats and the British Romantic poets in high school as I was, and as I suspect many of my ancestors were. It would be good to establish that the time of my youth was another era. Poetry was probably a bigger part of the arts, the arts an obligatory part of education, and we were only about a generation past the late 1920’s American poetry anthologies for young people that were oversubscribed with UK authors. We got Shakespeare and Milton and a smattering of 17th century poets from before the Americans even got up to bat, and we moved on to the principle British Romantic poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelly, and Keats.* The last three easily attractive to the adolescent mind and emotions.

That trio’s language was close enough to modern while far enough removed to seem a little exotic. The emotions in the poems, anger, desire, dread, disdain, close to the skin.

Did it help that all three could be fitted into foundational “live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse” models? Why is that stance catnip to so many young people? Is it a force multiplier for their considerations and thoughts to add as context that they are distressed, senses intent or bent, experienced in risk taken and disregarded, living or not caring about mortal danger?**  Does that sound harsh to say? Well then, I sometimes see myself reaching for the same imminent mortality filter in my old age. Poets don’t necessarily outgrow this reflex.

It probably helped these poets that back in my youth we barely had our Buddy Holly and James Dean, and as yet no full constellation of dead young music and movie stars to compete with poets.

John Keats Drawing 700

John Keats writes today about old age, which he didn’t get

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Of the three young romantic poets, all doomed to die young,*** I was team Keats all the way. He seemed the wisest of them, and I could identify with his unprivileged background, and his earnestness about writing. I still remember telling myself that Keats died at 25 back in my twenties, and so I had better get on with my writing. Now past three-times that I don’t allow myself the luxury of worrying what years I squandered in incomplete, mistaken, or mediocre work, or of insufficient promotion of my best stuff, taking comfort that it will all be forgotten, even the best of it. In many cases, we old folks no longer play the immortality lottery, and so forego the costs and damaging mitigations of a busted ticket.

The romantic young Keats writes often of dun mortality while propounding the ardent song of beauty. Let me be clear: in Keats’ case, this dichotomy is more than a stance. Sometimes a young poète maudit risks finding themselves, embarrassingly, surviving – but this wasn’t Keats’ fate. With his medical training and caretaking through to the death of his brother he knew his own tuberculosis prognosis for a full year before he died. He wrote “The Human Seasons”   in between that brotherly caretaking and his own onset, and in this poem he presumes a full lifetime, the titular seasons being perhaps a couple of decades each, while he’d be dead in three years. The dying was indeed young, but in consideration there’s these dancing words that still may ask for a tune. Here’s a link to Keats’ words.

You can hear my performance of John Keats’ “The Human Seasons”   with the audio player you should see below. Audio player called home? No, likely just a side-effect of the way you view this blog, but I can prescribe that you take this highlighted link that’s been shown effective in opening a new browser tab with a working audio player of its own. Side effects include hearing my voice “of subjective quality,” acoustic guitar, cello, and contrabass.

 

 

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*What about Blake? Nope, not in my schoolbooks, I had to seek him out on my own. Did my textbooks move on to Americans Whitman, Dickinson, and Poe? Yes. From my recall the American Fireside poets may have been already largely relegated out for high school readers, though I knew Longfellow from illustrated children’s books. Then there was some Browning, Tennyson, and “Dover Beach” and finally Frost, Eliot, and Sandburg – those final three still living, literally and in practice treated as contemporary poets.

**Beyond the self-imposed dangers some young people choose or are led into, I don’t want to minimize the real dangers externally inflicted on them: war and oppression exist, and such titanic Cronuses devour children. I’m speaking here of the young who generate or amplify mortal risks because it makes them seem louder.

***Shelley 29, Keats 25, and Methuselah Lord Byron at 36.

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.