INSIDE SONGS OF CURTIS MAYFIELD

Among the highlights of my international music trading in recent years has been a set of concerts from Europe in which William Parker and company performed the bassist/composer's stunning work "The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield."

In my D.C. days, Jerry Washington, host of WPFW'S THE BAMA HOUR, used to have a recurring segment of his show called the "inner message in the music," a segment in which

listeners were challenged to identify the links joining the several, some times disparate, selections Jerry played.Parker has been up to something a bit different.

Musicians often talk about trying to get inside a piece, and it has long been clear to me that musicians who played outside were often those best suited to find that interiority. William Parker writes that "every song written or improvised has an inside song which lives in the shadows, in-between the sounds and silences and behind the words, pulsating, waiting to be reborn as a new song."

That's an apt description for what we hear in these concerts exploring the music of Curtis Mayfield. It reminds me of Aretha's brilliant reworkings of the songs Mayfield contributed to the sound track of the movie Sparkle. Vocalist Leena Conquest does much the same within Parker's recompositions of the Mayfield catalogue.

Further, Amiri Baraka (who previously released a collection of recordings titled New Song) finds new words in the corners of the lyrics Mayfield wrote and Conquest sings.

Until recently, few in the U.S. had heard any of this. Now, though, a two disk compilation of the concerts has been released on the AUM FIDELITY label. Individual tracks are drawn from concerts in Italy, France and the United States, and joining Parker's group (which includes Hamid Drake and Dave Burrell ) is the New Life Tabernacle Generation of Praise Choir. Curtis Mayfield, author of "We the People Who Are Darker than Blue," was always a poet, as much on the guitar as in his lyrics, and the mashup between him and Baraka is not to be missed.

Now that these concerts are available to the general public, I can only hope that they will find the audience they so deserve. This is one of the finest workings of jazz and poetry you will hear.

Go straight to Aum Fidelity for more information and to purchase.

"I Plan to Stay a Believer." A good resolve for 2011.

CROSS CULTURAL POETICS No. 23

Just in time for the holidays, here comes a stocking stuffer from Cross Cultural Poetics, XCP No. 23.

Here you'll find a new essay by Tyrone Williams on New Criticism and the Civil Rights Movement, poems by Adrienne Rich and Mahmoud Darwish, more work on war resistance poetry by Phil Metres, Timothy Yu writing on John Yau and Bill Barrette, a great poetry review from Maria Damon wherein the review is as compelling as the poetry she's reading.

My own contributions are "Sit-in at Bulworth's," a short meditation on racial definition and power, and a book review of A New Notion: Two Works by C.L.R. James.

You can find subscription information for XCP here, and check out the XCP blog site over here.

click to hear CHARLES BERNSTEIN @ PENN STATE

and here is one of the reasons I work at a place like Penn State -- just a half hour after that reading, and a short walk away, there was another reading by Charles Bernstein. The photo here at the top is not from the reading, but from Bernstein's segment of the Sean Connery film Finding Forrester, in which Charles plays the role of a school principal. He looks in this photo very much to be playing the same role he brought off to great effect in his Yellow Pages commercial, which he replayed for us the next day at the beginning of his talk.

The talk drew primarily from Bernstein's forthcoming book, Attack of the Difficult Poems, available for preorder from University of Chicago Press here.

Thanks again to Jeff Nealon for organizing Bernstein's visit. I've been reading the poems and essays of Charles Bernstein for more than three decades now, and wrote an early review of Controlling Interests for the D.C. mag Gargoyle during my student days. "So really not visit a remember to strange" he wrote in that book, no doubt foreseeing his 2010 touchdown in Happy Valley.

TOI DERRICOTTE AT PENN STATE

Poet Toi Derricotte was on campus last week for a day of workshops and a reading, organized by several of my dear colleagues. The reading kicked off with introductions by Shirley Moody-Turner (who had driven over from her postdoc at Rutgers just for the occasion) and Robin Becker.

One of the poems Toi read was this piece about the El Mina slave fortress, which I had visited on my trip to Ghana:

The Tour

The castle, always on an
outcrop of indifference;

human shells,
the discards on the way.

Where our mothers were held, we walk now
as tourists, looking for cokes, film, the bathroom.
A few steps beyond the brutalization, we
stand in the sun:

This area for tourists only.

Our very presence an ironic
point of interest to our guide.

[This is the "gate of no return" at El Mina.]

THE RETIRING OF SONNY ROLLINS

[A POEM I WROTE IN THE ANCIENT OF DAYS BUT HAVE NEVER INCLUDED IN A BOOK]

Sonny mounts the bridge and drives

The suicides beneath his keys to blow

The one sympathetic note that strikes the span senseless

Not retired but assumed into

The cable stitched heavens above

Neither sky nor sea

Flung out between radio snatching rails

To share that same ethereal gleam

Its antennaed supports plucking

Ambient overcast below

Prince over the powers of the air

Sonny sends

His winded tune skipping along arcs

Massively repeating the belled curve to

Towering horns seizing ships

Sonny sounds the altitudes

Where breath upholds the bridge

There he is tempted there reconciled

Concentrating within the exhaled pause sighs

Lapping darkly at piles recalling

Sonny to his drifting continent

Pads beneath his fingers fall

Upon that instrument that points to both

Here and there grounded waves

Roll in as Rollins

Descends Rollins

Resumes