Gunfire, Goetz, Nosey Parker and Jack Ruby

Since we have been scoring poems, the idea was to alternate each year between an international poet and a poet from the U.S., with favoritism towards local poets when we go domestic, and so far we have stayed on schedule: Leo Connellan, Crossing America (U.S.); Ece Ayhan, Blind Cat Black (Turkey); Stefene Russell, Go South for Animal Index (U.S. - St. Louis); and now Les Murray, The Sydney Highrise Variations (Australia).

That means, after Les, we should turn back to the U.S. and come all the way back home if we can; and, in fact, next in our sights, hopefully for 2010, is Jack Ruby's America by the St. Louis poet David Clewell, published by the local Garlic Press.

Quite a bit of work has been done toward that score already. Years ago, Roy Kasten and I recorded Clewell reading the poem. I then had Clewell annotate a copy, suggesting places that would be rich for orchestration and even bracketing potential titles for the musical interludes. I plan to follow his suggestions unless they make no sense at all, because he took the time to make them, and because we have never done that before - never involved the poet in the process of the score, unless you count recording Les Murray's bizarre mouth music, his personal translation of his poem into sound, which we will use in the Sydney Highrise Score.

I have also searched intermittently for examples of music performed at Ruby's Carousel Club, a Dallas burlesque joint where it all came off. Kevin Belford, another St. Louis Ruby junkie, has provided me with good stuff to work from. My coproducer Lij and I once were set to go to Dallas to recruit a jazz band there, for versimilitude and fun, an idea that put us in contact with a Dallas bluesman named Joe Jonas, who actually played bongoes at Ruby's club when he was a teenager.

More recently, Eric Markowitz (who did so much good work on Crossing America) sent me a CD by his new working jazz band in San Francisco, 8 Legged Monster, which plays with the seamy intensity of a Charles Mingus workshop - and now gets my vote for the jazz portions of the score, provided they are willing to arrange some old burlesque tunes for the occasion.

I also have pored through about a dozen discs from the vast Another Umbrella archive and set aside more than enough rock improvisations that suggest the brooding headache of a stripclub owner working himself up to killing the man who killed the president, and the air of paranoia that continues to surround these distant events that went down in Dallas.

Last night, another breakthrough: one of my coproducers Robert Goetz and I did a wonderfully productive Sydney Highrise session with longterm collaborater Dave Melson, who has played bass on every poetry score thus far (and with bands that date back, with me, to the late 1980s) and who looks destined for some acoustic guitar and vocals credit on the new project as well.

During a break in the action, Goetz was razzing me, the newly hyperactive blogger, for once dismissing the fact that he has a blog (many of my blogger friends share this irritating experience) - two blogs, in fact - and he showed us his Nosey Parker blog that documents the performance art (pretentious term for a collaboration that is anything but) with Brett Williams.

He played us some audio art they made from the sounds of gunfire. The sounds of gunfire? Hello? Would there be a Jack Ruby's America had there never been gunfire in Dallas? I swooped right in, on the spot, and acquired tentative rights to provisionally retitle their piece Animal Hospital and use it on the score.

Goetz and I have now moved into copping technical ideas from each other's blogs, so note that I am linking to (something Goetz learned from me) some place where he has posted up that audio (something I will next try to learn from him). It's quite peaceful and beautiful, actually. Their processing and sculpting of the sounds of gunfire has removed all of its menace.

If Another Umbrella - a couple of guys having fun with guitars and keyboards in Los Angeles - will provide the noir elements of the score, including the crescendo to violence, I wouldn't be surprised if men actually discharging firearms doesn't provide the soundtrack for some of the good days, and there were good days for Jack Ruby, days of taking care of your dancers and taking care of the cops, making sure every last stiff on the beat has a chicken salad sandwich today.

*

The image is from Nosey Parker, reminding themselves of the importance of guns to art.

Tim Rakel and Carl Pandolfi are the bombs

I'm seldom in a position to listen to music on Monday mornings when Tim Rakel is on the air with Graveyard Shift, but this morning I had to hasten home after our editorial meeting at The St. Louis American to watch my little bitty skinny kid, who had school cancelled today due to "inclement weather" that seems to have been much nastier on the school district's radar than it was in the actual neighborhood where the school is situated.

I picked up Tim's show on an old Tom Waits favorite, "Gun Street Girl" off of Rain Dogs, which is likely to never be unseated from my 100 favorite ever records. As I was thinking kind thoughts about KDHX and Tim Rakel, what comes over the airwaves but a song I actually cowrote, coproduced and cosang: "Little Boys and Fat Men," from the Poetry Scores CD Go South for Animal Index.

No surprise: Tim has been playing our poetry scores on the air since we released Crossing America by Leo Connellan back in 2oo3. But still, it was sweet to hear that track, and that's much more than self-congratulation.

When I hear "Little Boys and Fat Men" I hear, first, Stefene Russell's striking poetry, then Adam Long's masterful mix, then Carl Pandolfi's inventive piano parts and bass line, then Heidi Dean's luminous vocal - and, far under all that, the song Matt Fuller wrote with me, and our original guitar and vocal tracks, recorded in a hotel room in San Pedro.

KDHX archives the audio of shows for two weeks, so anyone who doesn't have a copy of Go South can hear at least this one fragment of the score on the Graveyard shift archive. If you do listen in, give some thought to Carl Pandolfi's bass line.

Carl is a degreed composer and veteran local musician and songwriter, most notably and currently with The Lettuceheads. He knows more about the structure of songs than most of us do. I handed him a completely static guitar and vocal track, and he gave it every dynamic that the final track has.

I am especially amazed by the descending bass line at the end of the song. Little Boy and Fat Man, of course, are the names of the nuclear warheads that the U.S. deployed on Nagasaki and Hiroshima to end World War II. Listen to how Carl's bassline drops to the bottom of the mix at the end, coming down, note by note, descending ... like a bomb.

*

Image of Little Boy atomic bomb in the bomb pit, ready for loading into the Enola Gay, from Atomic Archive.

Spirit Richard Selman talk mbira

This photograph, taken a number of years ago by Roy Francis Kasten, provides a peek at a seldom-seen core contributor to Poetry Scores, the mbira maker and musician Richard Selman of Leeds, Alabama. Here, Richard is picking out an mbira part to one of my songs (that's me, in my life with hair), though I recall his responding with more flair and imagination to one of Roy's songs, in a moment I seem to have failed to document in any way.

I tend to copy Richard on whatever we are doing, and he always does his best to contribute from his enclave just outside Birmingham, where this picture was taken during a memorable Southern swing. Richard has two pieces on our most recent poetry score, Go South for Animal Index by Stefene Russel: "And the snake continues to bite" and "Unusually deep pits".

Richard's original mbira compositions for the score (much transformed by subsequent overdubs) were recorded by double-Grammy-nominated studio wiz Adam Long, here in St. Louis. Richard was brought to town by our mutual friend, the artist Greg Edmondson, who curated a show of Richard's mbiras (I think I am remembering this right ...) at Thomas Jefferson School.

Richard has donated one of his mbiras, fashioned from a gas can, to The Skuntry Museum. It deserves its own blog post, come to think of it, but right now you can see the mbira on the Museum's never-updated MySpace page.

I am sure there is someone, somewhere, who wouldn't like the looks or even idea of a Southern "white" man like Richard making and playing an instrument that is traditional to Zimbabwe and figures importantly in traditional spirit-possession ceremonies. Those critics would have to blame the traditionalists of Zimbabwe, who welcomed Richard with open eyes and arms and transferred their traditional techniques and concepts to him wholeheartedly. Richard, in turn, received and has preserved those techniques and ideas with utmost respect.

Indeed, were he less of a respectful traditionalist and more of an exploitative opportunist, he'd have a lucrative mbira studio in operation somewhere and enjoy the benefits of a faculty appointment. His fate has been nothing like that whatsoever.

Richard's performance credits include a lengthy stint in Spirit Talk Mbira, a band fronted by the great Chartwell Dutiro, former musical director for the legendary Thomas Mapfumo. I kicked it with Chartwell during one of my other (solo) visits to Leeds. As long as I live, I will never forget the dreadlocked Zimbabwean roots musician searching for the right term for the kind of American music he liked, then finding it, and saying - with impossible-to-replicate Shona/British inflection - "twang".

Richard also has a nonchalant comfort with the mbira's role in spirit possession ceremonies. I have been fortunate to know a number of grounded, working spiritualists, and they are always the least creepy - and the least New Agey - people. Working the spirit, for people who have that gift and have developed it, is just that: work, and hard work at that, and typically poorly paid or volunteer hard work.

When I first discussed spirit possession with Richard, I had no experience whatsoever of that sort of thing, was spooked by it and admitted as much. He told me, "What's scary is when you are not possessed. What's scary is when you are not full of spirit."

Amen.

I don't hear a part for Richard in our score to The Sydney Highrise Variations, but maybe he will adopt an exctinct species and score one of those poems. We also should see about getting him to St. Louis and into some sessions with local bands. I bet one of those Ray Kasten songs he so enjoyed playing still needs to be recorded. And don't even get me started on Richard's vast archive of field recordings sitting on the Poetry Scores hard drives, waiting for permissions and money.

And spirit.

Nashville rock scene wedding proto-blog post

Sorting the archive, I came across a dark picture of the wedding of our core recording engineer Lij to Joy, officiated by Robin Eaton, a great friend of our project and a force for good in rock music. My attempts to brighten the image only made it gauzy, but then I came across my report on the wedding, which made it worth salvaging, gauze and all.

This report from Nashville went out as a mass email to the Poetry Scores folks, but it's very much a proto-blog post. Since the message records some project history, checks a few important names and still has some bearing on the future (such is project lag, in our fragmented universe), I'll share it.

The message uses a little project slang, "core folk" (as opposed to "board member"). Core folks are those who wouldn't sit still for a board meeting or don't live in St. Louis, but who are part of everything we do, if we can help it.

**

Core guy Matt Fuller should be on a jet plane to L.A. right now, following our attendance at Lij’s wedding and various pieces of work on ongoing projects. His visit was fruitful for Poetry Scores and a hoot to boot.

First, a report on the Lij/Joy nuptials, for those unable to attend.

It was a marvelous ceremony, attended mostly by ragtag musicians with bedheads and in bad suits. Matt and I marvelled how we had never before felt so at home at a wedding or at any official ceremony of any kind. Even the wedding official was a musician (Robin Eaton, co-owner of Alex the Great, the studio where Lij got his start) – and this despite the bride’s father being a Christian missionary!

A healthy roster of poetry score contributors was in attendance. Piano music at the reception was provided by Seth Timbs, of the pop band Fluid Ounces, who plays piano all over Crossing America and on the great jazz instrumental from Blind Cat Black, “The Marching Band of His Friend and of Death.”

A highlight during a lengthy toast session at the reception was the musical skit “Schools and Rules Aren’t for Lij” by the groom’s brother, Nate Shaw, who did magnificent piano work on Crossing America.

And mowing down the Chilean cabernet with the rest of us were Dave Melson, bassist on much of Crossing America, and Warren Pash, author of the Hall & Oates hit “Private Eyes” and sonorous voice over a Tom Hall blues improvisation on Blind Cat Black.

There were also us core folks, Lij, Matt, Heidi Dean, Rick Hawkins, and myself. Folks haven’t heard too much about Rick. He is a photographer who shot the portrait of Leo Connellan on the back of Crossing America and many of the images of Rosco Gordon on the record Lij and I did for him, No Dark In America.

Not that our projects mean much compared to the birth of a family, but I will go on to add that many people approached me at some point during the festivities to say they love what we are doing, hope we do more of it, and want to stay involved. These sorts of thoughts were especially valuable coming from Robin Eaton, whose studio (where we have done much pro-bono work) remains open to us and is pivotal to the Nashville music scene. Robin never fails to tell me how much he adores Poetry Scores.

[It fascinates me that this last bit, filed under a subhead, could stand still stand as a project update today, three years later, since we are only now actually moving this project forward!]

“Sydney Highrise” under construction

Poetry Scores board member and multimedia dude Robert Goetz got a jump on the rest of us in scoring Les Murray’s The Sydney Highrise Variations. He has very satisfying sketches of two songs covering two different stretches of the poem, “The starving spirit is fed upon the heart” and “Age of piety.”

Robert inspired Matt and I to ransack old worktapes, listening for fragments that might lend themselves to Les’ edgy, angular city poem. We snapped up quite a few bits of the poem, for songs to be titled “Far above the tidal turnaround,” “Docked at apogee,” “England’s buried gulag,” and “End, and mutate, and persist.”

I can also predict that archival things from Middle Sleep and other sources will creep in. I love the idea of the poetry score taking shape at various locations and with various visions like a cityscape going up with no precise master plan.

Poetry Scores on the BBC (radio transcript)

After Lij and I produced the first poetry score, Leo Connellan's Crossing America, I spent a few weeks looking for spoken word shows on the radio and mailing out review copies. Perhaps it says something about our hometown favorite KDHX and its show "Literature for the Halibut" that the only other station that followed up with me and produced a show on our project was the BBC.

Specifically, BBC Radio 3, and more specifically even than that, its brilliant and whimsical show about the language arts, "The Verb", hosted by the Yorkshire poet Ian McMillan along with writer and rock musician Peter Blegvad, whose obscure music I have listened to since college. I took their call from the New York Bureau of the BBC, then later nagged them for a CD of the show, which Stefene Russell faithfull transcribed.

Note: At the time of this taping, we used to be called Hoobellatoo, an organization that produced poetry scores and released them on an imprint called Skuntry, which gave people three odd terms to learn. Now we are called Poetry Scores, we make poetry scores, and we release them on an imprint called Poetry Scores. So, there.

**

“The Verb” on BBC Radio 3
Interview with Chris King

Ian McMillan: "T" is for the. One of the great words. A verb, not very exciting. THE Verb, exciting. A woman walked into a room. Which woman? What room? THE woman walked into THE room. Ah, that woman, that room. The. Great word. Try living a day without it. “U” is the United States – and Leo Connellan. As you know, here at The Verb, we're always looking to discover and re-discover writers. In many ways, Connellan is perfect for The Verb. Have a listen to this:

Plays part of Crossing America.


Ian McMillan: Leo Connellan hitchhiked across America in the 1950s and wrote about his experiences in an epic poem, Crossing America. It's been written of him that “his texbook is raw life, and his words can be understood by anyone.” He writes in the tradition of Charles Bukowski, of the leather-bound A to Zed of the Academy. Chris King works for Hoobellatoo, a group of musicians and artists which specialize in poetry, music and folklore, and he joins us from The Verb's New York studio to tell us the story of Connellan.

Chris, it's an interesting story how you happened to record that Crossing America epic, isn't it?

Chris King: Yes, Ian. We were rock musicians who got tired of being rock musicians. When you're a musician, you go around the country or the world, and you ask people to pay attention to you. And that gets a little boring. So we decided to go around the country and ask people if we could pay attention to them. And we started doing a folklore project, living out of my car with a mobile studio, and that's how we stumbled across Leo. A publisher put him in front of a microphone and he read the very piece that you just played, the last piece of Crossing America, and we just hit the floor.

Ian McMillan: And that wonderful job – he worked as a typewriter ribbon salesman. It's like the perfect Beat job, isn't it?

Chris King: Yeah. He had hard years, and the poem Crossing America, it's about hard traveling. Adam Thorpe, earlier [on the program], wrote about searching for a bed, coming back from Germany, and Milosz, who was on the program, on tape, wrote about, his book, The Roadside Dog. I thought about all these things in connection to Leo, and we ourselves traveled hard recording the poem. We really did live out of a car, where we had a really poor little studio set-up, and we really traced Leo's steps in music, in our car. Of course, he hitchhiked, but we had tires under us, what in America they call “a rubber tramp,” because at least you have rubber tires on the road with you.

Ian McMillan: I'm thinking that you do get a Robert Frost influence, don't you, as well?

Chris King: Yeah. He was a Mainer – Leo was from Rockland, Maine, and Robert Frost was of course a great poet of New England. And what I loved about Leo was he didn't write about the quaint sage Robert Frost. He wrote about the hard man who could survive those brutal winters of New England.

Ian McMillan: Now we're going to hear an excerpt from a poem which isn't about Maine – it's called "Green Vermont."

Plays "Green Vermont."

Ian McMillan: Chris, the music, in all kinds of different styles, gives the whole album a different facet. Were you tempted at all to simply put out the words on their own?

Chris King: Well, not really. We were musicians who got into poetry through meeting poets, honestly, and the music was always what we could bring to it. And that was our way to really live with Leo, even after he had passed. You know, I said that Leo was gone, but he's not gone. I walked through Central Park on my way to the New York Bureau of the BBC today, and I saw, sleeping in the park, one woman on top of one man on a rock. And it was a cold night in New York last night. And that is one of the beginning images of Leo's poem. He says, "I lay on the floor and let her use me for a bed." When I saw those young lovers in the park today, I thought, well, Leo lives.

Ian McMillan: Peter Blegvad, here's someone who works with music and words. How do you feel about this marriage of Leo's voice from beyond the grave, these words?

Peter Blegvad: Well, it sounds great. I'm looking forward to hearing more of this CD. I mean, it is a dicey proposition, often, spoken word and music, although it has a long tradition, from the jazz poetry experiments made in the ‘40s and ‘50s, right up to the present day with Hal Wilner being one of the foremost producers who's explored this genre. But you have to gauge it very sensitively, because the music can overwhelm the evocation of the words.

Chris King: Yeah, we orchestrated the record so that the reading is never bedded over the music.

Peter Blegvad: Right.

Chris King: It's always separate, so that each has its own statement and comments on each other. In a way the music gives you time to refresh your mind. Poetry's so involved; I like to have the musical interlude to think about it. We're doing a record for Les Murray, the great Australian poet who I'm sure is no stranger to The Verb. Les liked the approach we did, and that's why he wanted to do it. He says yeah, you want to think about something, you want the music as a break from the words.

Ian McMillan: Thank you very much, Chris. And you can get all of “Crossing America” at www.hoobellatoo. I'll spell that, H-O-O-B-E-L-L-A-T-O-O dot org. That's hoobellatoo dot org. The website is an absolute delight, full of the most amazing, Verb-friendly things. Details on our website, which is also amazing, and full of the most Verb-friendly things. V...is for The Verb. I'll pause, while you stand.

**
mp3

"Green Vermont"
(Leo Connellan, Chris King)
Three Fried Men
From Crossing America

**

Note: the Hoobellatoo website no longer exists, just this blog. Crossing America is in print and is available by contacting us or at most independent book and record shops in St. Louis.

The extinction of species (project page)

At our board meeting this week, Poetry Scores agreed to start a new project with a somewhat new organizational model. The project is a multimedia score to a collection of shorter poems by Stefene Russell titled The Extinction of Species. It is a growing, evolving poetic sequence, each piece about a species that has gone extinct.

We typically work with long poems, that's something of our forte, but the advantage of having a batch of smaller pieces is we can part them out as individual song lyrics and commission individual art responses to them without having any unified big picture or needing to stitch together the fragments in the end.

In a sense, we'll be asking artists to adopt an extinct species. As we get finished songs, we'll post the mp3s, and as we get works of art, we'll post the images. At some point along the way we will publish a book (project manager: K. Curtis Lyle). When we have enough of all the other stuff, we can print a CD and throw an art party with a P.I.V. (poetry initiates valor) reception.

**

THE EXTINCTION OF SPECIES
Poems by Stefene Russell

**

Thylacine

Suitcase jaw, knife stripes, they eat the bones.
No bloody feathers blowing against the salty grass,
and the chimera shadow, the flip book with jowly
wolf head and hindquarters of a tiger and a middle
part that we don't know how to name.
The farmer's children slam the closet door,
pull the hems of coats and dresses over their eyes
at the thought of croupy barking
But the gait: three animals put together,
the book says "awkward, though tireless"
like the one who can't keep up, far down the path
three rhythms that trip off a little migraine of the heart.

Thylacine Tarot card by Art of Synnabar.
Poem adopted for musical score by Sabretooth Unicorn (Tim Rakel and friends).

**

Palestinian Painted Frog

There are no longer muddy bellies with white spots
moving over the dark bottom
of Huleh.
There are no longer five thousand mosquitoes
dazzling the surface of the water.
There are fields and white houses.
The water grew smaller. There are no mosquitoes.
There are no longer five thousand fish
lying on shore of the Galilee.
There are no houses painted yellow, black,
gray or red. There are five thousand ragged holes
in the walls of a white house,
and also doll head floating in a puddle
in front of the house.

**

Shoal Sprite

Sometimes water goes down the drain the wrong way
in the South, zipping dissapearance of black water
silver whorl, shape of dizziness
common name to call for nothing
just a little more than latinate or mounting pins

**

Gray Shasta Owl's Clover

The prickly-eyed crow can't find you,
he's face-down in the field
And the gray owl, your downy cousin
gave up hope months ago,
sick and drunk on water and brown mice.
The lady in the flowered bonnet,
the one with the club foot,
can't find your starry leaves,
and here, fence knothole
where her husband used place his eye
to use as a telescope
to watch the sun go down,
there's nothing but a tree.

(Poem adopted for musical score by Poison Rat R.)

**

Las Vegas Dace

It didn't glow in the dark
or eat silt, it was not pin-striped,
it didn't know any magic tricks
and its skin was the three colors of mud
and its fins were accordion fans;
its funeral music was nothing but
blood curling into the water.
A man with three cards up his sleeve
and a shiny green suit
kept a slack-jawed fish from Egypt
in a wide-mouthed glass bottle
and carried it with him as he traveled.
He thought about letting his fish go
on the strip, in the flowering spitfire waters
where the fiberglass pirate ship
rocks back and forth every hour,
shooting plaster cannonballs
suspended on wires,
then thought better of it.
Into the desert he drove,
with a malfunctioning gun
under the passenger seat
a burlap sack of kwik-crete
in the trunk, and his fish in a jar
dancing back and forth
as the car lurched.
Here's your new water, fish -
Goodbye and now for you
your own drunkenness and
all-night carousel, your
fish Paris and Rome and Memphis.
Go whirl around in the river, outlines of
Indian paintbrush wavering over you in the darkness,
and the lights of the city, far off,
promising you everything,
lights effervescing
like a pirate's flying saucer.

(Poem adopted for musical score by Mike Burgett.)

**

Red-Moustached Fruit Dove

Mercierii: and a purr that was thank you, wrapped up in yellow burry leaves.
Tristiami: mercy's yellow belly feathers,
whispery green, red-capped, Voyage of Venus -
sailors and men in shiny black top hats
came walking off ships, their pockets full
of owlets, kittens, whiskery rats.
Why didn't they notice, after their animals ran,
so many pears, pulling branches down low,
and no doves to eat them?
"Well, in those days, you saw a lot of animals
running through the green leaves, with blood ringing their mouths.
We lost track."
Te Henua Enata: Land of Men
who ate the fruit themselves, hunched over in grief.

**

Xerxes Blue

Spring of violet and brown sundown, white sun.
The little girl didn't want any postcards.
While holding her mother's hand,
she saw something small and blue
flicker through the dunes and the lupine,
then turn into the sky.
She remembers a feeling like a wince,
a bitter mouthful of grass.
Her children say of course she's still here,
Though she swears she left
chasing the king of the blue butterflies.
His white spots were her goodbye,
and she still follows, and she goes
passing through the gold needles
that hold up the big bridge,
following a blue kite with ants tied to its tail
like ribbons.

Grammy Launch Party for Adam Long on Feb. 6

Last night at the Poetry Scores board meeting we finalized one date on our 2009 calendar: Friday, Feb. 6 we will host a Grammy Launch Party for Adam Long at The Royale, 3132 S Kingshighway Blvd. We forgot to discuss the time, but let's say 9 p.m. to ?.

He'll leave the next day for Los Angeles, where that Sunday he will have two opportunities to win the big one. Unbelievably, for an independent studio engineer living in St. Louis, two records he recorded, mixed and mastered - Gypsy: The Original Broadway Cast Recording and Our World Redeemed, by local gospel hip-hopper Flame - have been nominated for a 2008 Grammy.

Adam is one of our powerhouse volunteer staff recording technicians. He mastered our 2006 poetry score to Blind Cat Black, and mixed, mastered and helped record our 2007 score, Go South for Animal Index.

At the Feb. 6 Grammy Launch Party, DJ Matt Fernandes will spin only recordings recorded, mixed or mastered by Adam Long. The complete list is nearly endless and would be impossible to provide - Adam has forgotten more sessions than most people have recorded - but here is a partial list:

Broadway original cast recordings:

Ring of Fire,

Annie (3oth anniversary edition)

Gypsy

Secular hip-hop:

St. Lunatics (Nelly's first studio recordings)

The All Stars

1 Dime

Chingy

Rock:

Conquest

The Imps

Three Fried Men

Poetry scores:

Blind Cat Black

Go South for Animal Index.

Spoken word:

K. Curtis Lyle

Stefene Russell

Harp:

Amy Camie

Sacred hip-hop:

Flame

Gospel

Solomon's Temple Church Choir

Activism

The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People

(On Radio Kudirat, Nigerian rebel radi.)

(The photo is of Adam and me with MOSOP leader Noble Obani-Nwibari.)

I'll be rounding up copies of the recordings I don't have. Please, anyone who has recorded with Adam, get me a disc! And save that date for one of the most talented and most generous people in St. Louis.