It's All Good: A John Sinclair Reader reviewed by Kirpal Gordon

 

It’s All Good: A John Sinclair Reader by John Sinclair, published by Headpress, www.headpress.com, 298 pages / ISBN: 9781900486682; with free music-spoken word CD download 

 

Don’t sweat the tautology in the title---It’s All Good: A John Sinclair Reader is a transcendent, philosophically tough-minded journey forged from one writer’s mating the New American Poetics with America’s blues-jazz tradition and its rock-soul-funk-punk permutations. Published by Headpress (their motto: the gospel according to unpopular culture) the collection celebrates Sinclair’s 44 years on the culture scene with 22 of his poems, 22 of his essays and the ultimate lagniappe: thirteen works in performance with a variety of bands and great musicians from a free CD download. 

 

For those disheartened by the plethora of Sixties-inspired memoirs that are but advertisements for oneself, It’s All Good is powerful medicine. Sinclair (born 1941) is a force of nature, a high-minded, principled Midwestern with the hipster code of a viper like Mezz Mezzrow in one brain’s hemisphere and the political agenda of a leftie like Saul Alinsky in the other. How’s this for chutzpah: while locked up for handing a couple of joints to a narc who infiltrated his poetry class, Sinclair does a lot of his time in the hole for his efforts in organizing black prisoners to advocate for better education programs. Such racial solidarity may seem inconceivable in the slammers of the twenty-first century, but check Sinclair’s roots in “I Wanna Testify”: “I came to Detroit in 1964 as a refugee from white American society attracted to this teeming center of African American culture … the birthplace of the Nation of Islam and the hotbed of bebop, the place where you could hear jazz all night long and cop weed or pills whenever you wanted to. The plight of black Americans was known to me from the street level, as I had the honor of spending a number of my formative years in Flint, Michigan, under the direct tutelage of some of the fastest young hipsters on the set, intense young men and women who held Malcolm X and Miles Davis in equal esteem and who introduced me to the wonders of daily marijuana use as a means for dealing more creatively with the terrors of white America” (p 42).

 

A tale of such enthusiasms needs historical context, and Headpress has wisely arranged the material chronologically which allows Sinclair’s various responses to unfold their own logic. The first essay opens with John Lennon’s 1971 lyrics---“It ain’t fair, John Sinclair / In the stir for breathing air” (p 12) and Sinclair’s release from prison after serving twenty-eight months on a ten year sentence, thanks to the Michigan state legislature re-classifying pot possession as a misdemeanor only days before Lennon’s sold-out concert brought attention to his cause. While keeping eye and ear on the Big(ger) Picture, Sinclair candidly reports, looks back, updates and muses upon his various tenures as a community organizer, arts advocate, cofounder of the White Panther (later Rainbow People’s) Party, manager of the rock band MC5, director of the Detroit Jazz Center, producer of the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Fest, editor of altie newspapers, reviewer of music, well loved disc jockey at WWOZ in New Orleans and presently an ex-pat in Amsterdam. 

 

That’s a lot of hats to wear to a revolution, and Sinclair has equal but separate gifts in prose as well as in verse. So kudos to Headpress for wisely taking a triple-headed approach: the matching poems enrich the essays and vice versa, and the spoken-word-with-music selections are so real-deal-alive as oral expression that they add another meaning to the written verse. For example, these lines in “everything happens to me” may read maudlin on the page---“race traitor & renegade, / beatnik, / dope fiend, / poet provocateur, / living from hand to mouth / & euro to euro / sleeping on the couches / & extra beds of my friends, / a man without a country”(p 105)---but with Jeff Grand and the Motor City Blues Scholars hunkered into a groove underneath him, Sinclair’s gravel voice bends those vowels so ironically, one can’t tell if, like double-masked Papa Legba greeting you at the crossroads, he’s laughing or crying. That’s Sinclair’s true identity: he’s a signifyin’ bluesman, not a village explainer.    

 

Unmetered, mostly unrhymed (free) verse does not lend itself easily to the American songbook, but Sinclair, with his mind on Monk and Muddy---half in bop and its touch of Sunday, half in the Delta and its electric children---has timing to spare. On “Monk’s Dream,” he emits such joy, wit and wisdom in a manner all-of-a-piece with his accompanists Luis Resto, piano, and Paul Nowitzki, bass. On the upbeat blues, “Fattening Frogs for Snakes,” his variable American foot fits like an old brown shoe as he references Sonny Boy Williamson’s lyric to tell the story of the music coming up from out of the Mississippi fields and juke joints traveling north upriver from spooky acoustic to an even spookier electric sound.  With Rockin’ Jake’s encyclopedic harmonica work shading the same unfolding and Kirk Joseph’s sousaphone playing the bass line, the band underscores Sinclair’s lament: “nothing would be returned / to the people of the Delta / … this is what the blues is all about--- / ‘fattening frogs for snakes’ / & watching the mother fucking snakes / slither off with the very thing you have made.” 

 

He produces such oracular momentum and incantatory brilliance---he “sounds” like William Blake draws or the Book of Jeremiah reads---that on “brilliant corners,” with just a single repeating guitar phrase from Mark Ritsema, he held this listener in rapt attention through six pages of verse celebrating the bebop experiments in Harlem meeting the writers around Columbia, especially a “hip football player / & would-be sportswriter / from Lowell … so well known at minton’s / … that the musicians on the set / named a song after him, ‘keruoac.’”  Weaving in the lives and works of Ginsberg, Cassady and Burroughs, Sinclair concludes, “& a road out of the stasis / began to open up / & out / in front us--- / & we followed it,” repeating the last line in a haunting shout. Nothing against the cottage industry that has grown up around these writers, but their actual story is rooted in the music and no one swings that tale harder than Sinclair. Ditto “We Just Change the Beat.” Hearing the song as it changes tempo (genre) is worth a thousand pages of musical essay.

 

As for Sinclair’s essays on music, they are documents of respectful brevity, especially his eye to Iggy Pop, his “audience” with Irma Thomas, his love of the MC5 and his manifesto in “Getting out from Under.” Moreover, the range of the musical material the essays cover in It’s All Good, the quality of his poetry and his remarkable gifts as a performer reveal his immense value to us. This griot is a national treasure, a vital link in a literary-musical lineage from Walt Whitman, through the Harlem Renaissance, into Bebop and the Beat Generation, deep in the Black Arts movement and beyond as our jazz trad weds World Music. If this isn't America's greatest cultural export, then what is?  

 

 

 

An earlier version of this appreciation appeard in print at American Book Review.

Tony Adamo & the New York Crew: Makin' It New, a CD Review

 

 

Reviewed by Kirpal Gordon

 

reprinted from Jazz Times

 

            The killin’ist thing about Tony Adamo & the New York Crew is that everybody in the band, especially the dope rhyme sayer, has got big ears all the way back to New Orleans and ancient-forward into the ever-evolving Multi-New Thing. It’s big ears working together that’s keeping this CD in Jazzweeks Chart Top 200 List since its release, a totally unheard of phenomenon for jazz-spoken word collaborations.

Although singing the talents and wonders of the giants who make this music immortal is nothing new, Adamo and the New York Crew pour out on these eleven tracks joyous lagniappes of praise, the song-cup running over with each additional solo. It’s one thing to express an artful appreciation of the Jazz Messengers, for example, in a song, but it’s a whole other monster of tribute when the band rocks Blakey’s sound so righteously. Former Headhunter Mike Clark (drummer, co-writer and producer) swings beyond emulation into stratospheric celebration and the whole band follows as Adamo catalogues the great players who have graced the bandstand with Bu. Tony lays out, the alto sax and trumpet blend beautifully and piano, trumpet, sax all solo before he reappears and everyone trades eights.

Like Sun Ra said, “Space is the place,” and Tim Ouimette, musical arranger, co-writer and trumpeter, masterfully spaces things so that each praise song layers in many textures and qualities. Bassist Richie Goods, pianist Michael Wolff and percussionist Bill Summers round out the rhythm section, all of whom have worked with the songwriting team of Adamo and Clark previously. The ease, grace and Old School range of the band is further enriched by Donald Harrison on alto saxophone, who brings his own Big Easy roots perspective to this praise-the-trad project. Indeed, the players deliver context, fusing the lyrical phrases of Adamo with the living musical tradition.

But the big ears thing with these first-call musicians really begins with the spoken word. Adamo, a Bronx paison, has fused many elements into his style beyond the obvious Gotham props to Gil-Scott Heron in the Seventies and the Beat and Black Art Movements of the Sixties. As for his inventiveness in the formation of phrases, there’s more than just a taste of Lester Young and Mezz Mezzrow musically and linguistically (the groove be the place) as well as philosophically, that is, it may now be considered hip to be hedonistic or narcissistic, but the code as manifested by Mezz and Prez spoke of the wheel of compassion, understanding, at-one-ment as well as the hard road of injustice. Adamo is walking this I’m You/You’re Me, Have Mercy talk. It’s a New York lineage that began with Walt Whitman and there’s no better company to keep.

In terms of how his tongue works, Adamo’s got the golden-pear-toned, shucks-by-golly, just-gimme-the-high-life-and-leave-out-the-rest, spooky disc jockey voiceover, a shock-mock-crock of total incredulity, a rumbling-crumb-bum-stumbling cross between Chuck D and Murray the K with his swingin’ soiree. His poetic line is free-versed bebop Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut, cousin to Eddie Jefferson’s weird word elasticity and kin to Babs Gonzalez’s mad hatter, flipped wig chatter with a chauffeured Moor to the Other Shore, but balanced by his deep baritone hugging a Jack Kerouac tenderness basted in bourbon, Buddha and the blues, delivered in a “hey man, this really happened” sincerity reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg. Ah, but Adamo can do more than recite rhymes or pull your coat to what’s really up and this is where shit gets scary: he whoops, swoops, croons and hollers! He second-line shouts! He bursts into song! Like Nuyorican Miguel Algarin, his sung words dance in the air with his spoken words. Like Newark griot Amiri Baraka raising up Coltrane, like Old Man Yeats writing of the dancer and the dance, like Ramakrishna singing of the Divine Mother, Adamo becomes the song he’s praising!

That’s why Bright Moments abound throughout. First tune out of the gate, it’s Lenny White (for real) kickin’ ferocious ass on the drum kit as Adamo bends vowels with his bare hands, bleeds through consonant clusters and rides the tributaries of sound current tributes for trumpeter Eddie Gale over Wolff’s Afro-Cuban-ish ostinato. When his river of acclaim runs over, Harrison jumps in and takes it further; nothing stays put except that repeating piano! Everything’s swinging, shifting, and getting four-dimensional. Six minutes in, this listener knows something’s cookin’ and can taste it.

Regarding the rhythm section, check how they drive each other in the next tune, “City Swings,” another Big Apple tribute: Goods walks that full bodied bass as Wolff’s piano becomes the sound of cobblestones while Clark turns cymbals into street lamps and tom toms into footsteps and it draws the best out of Adamo. For straight-up soul jazz salutations, check his “dope-a-licious” shout out to Eddie Harris and his “Listen Here Listen Up” as Adamo speaks, sings, shouts and shapes sounds into a verbal free-form improv on the power of the pianist’s funk, proof that one can dance to spoken word when this band’s bringin’ it  on the sanctified strength. “General T” is another I’ll-Take-Manhattan tone poem homage, an accolade to a Village Vanguard word slinger who “was talkin’ smooth and preachin’ fire” as the New York Crew cooks a melody in Miles mid-Sixties Quintet eerieness with a strong resemblance to Wayne Shorter’s “Iris.” Sax and trumpet get gorgeous via long-tone blending with the word play, and when Harrison and Ouimette drop out, the rhythm section kicks in underneath Adamo, feeding him and he responds with “funk-spastic” story telling and Harlem history connecting: “Like an ace to a flush, I was in no rush.” The collection’s swingin’est surprise is “You Gotta B Fly,” a Killer Joe-ish uptempo vehicle with a vocal that Adamo totally nails. His singing is so bopright delicious it leaves the spoken word chorus he takes in the dust. The guitar solo by Jean Santalis is another unexpected pleasure. Like the CD itself.

The whole she-bang is for real. Only one question remains: when is Tony Adamo and the New York Crew playing the Big Apple?

For purchase & more info: www.Urbanzonerecords.com