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Rating: If we live in gray times, without fire and without poetry, an album like this is a gift for our downcast souls. Here, beyond making great music, it pays tribute to Bob Kaufman, the great black poet of the Beat era.
To set his verses to music there’s a lot of beautiful people: four alchemists of sound including two former Notwist members and high-level guests such as Moor Mother, Patti Smith, DoseOne from Clouddead, and, above all, the extraordinary singer and clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid.
Kaufman, nicknamed the black Rimbaud, was a constellation of utopias: the scream of poetry on the stage of the street. The impermanence of the moment that burns and calls for another moment, and, ultimately, the scandalous mystery of silence amid the babble of the world.
Inflamed by Charlie Parker, he dreamed of poetry that somehow replicated the mad flight of his. And, if Charlie's breath was one with the rhythm, Kaufman's verses sparkled in the air like a be-bop solo.
He had a cult for orality, because he believed that only the sound of the living voice could return poetry to its primitive strength, and he loved to improvise in the most unthinkable places so that his words would crash against the world.
If it had been up to him, he wouldn't have published a single verse, and if today we can read his books, it’s because his wife and Saint Ferlinghetti used to take notes during those crazy love rants.
His is one of those lives that should be told, starting from an already bizarre cocktail of ancestries: a German Jewish father, a Creole mother, and a grandmother who was a voodoo lady.
And then the escape at thirteen to become a sailor, the union struggles, the arrival in Frisco, the meeting with Ginsberg and the other beat poets, Buddhism, the vow of silence against the horrors of the world, the brief return to poetry, the definitive choice to be forgotten, dying in solitude.
To all this, you must add being a constant victim of policemen and psychiatrists with arrests, hospitalizations, and several electroshocks endured. His being black with a beautiful white wife, his restlessness, the turmoil of his street poetry, the dream of a different life, and his irreducible otherness were too much for that America written back then with a K. How did that one say: “I saw the best minds of my generation...”
But now maybe I should talk a bit about the album...
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It doesn’t take much, a moment of mournful jazz, a hallucinatory march, a voice where you can almost hear Nina Simone, and then those verses, “the sun is black, the sun’s mother too,” and so yes, it doesn’t take much, the taste is strong, the flavor vivid.
The beauty then is that it goes on like this, with the guys in the engine room keeping in check a border music made of sad fanfares, free madness, and spicy harmonies of the world.
A sound science made of electronics, modernity, and whatever else to embrace the explosion of sentiment, the urgency of voices, and all that bubbling that we could call poetry.
Something like taking Jazz in black and white and filling it with colors, the infinite solitude of the “crackling blue,” the fabulous “green trains from red Mars,” those where one day blacks will board to go to a place better than this.
And in the end, again that voice, again the sun and the sun’s mother, this time no march though, just mournful jazz... and, while pride rises, the heart breaks in a sort of farewell.
And then we must thank everyone, without exception, although maybe Angel Bat Dawid a little bit more, because if Moor Mother has taken us somewhere between the Middle East and Africa, if Patti has done Patti and the alchemists have done the alchemists, Angel, singing rough and harsh and playing hard and strong, has put in her soul and blood.
And then Kaufman, of course, his sampled voice in several tracks is a real piercing tenderness. Not to mention the beauty of his poetry, a surrealist probe into life, our damnation, and our only gift.
Trallallà...
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