Report #11 - 20 APRIL 2009

A special edition of the Report this week in honor of National Poetry Month.

The great bass player and instrumentalist Mike Johnston recently send me a CD of his compositions partly inspired by my poetry and this program. He and I both find inspiration in crows. In my poem "Linguistics (Corvus Brachyrhychos)" I write:

"... all I want
in this life
of sand and glass
and thorns and bread
is to understand the language of the crows."

When I listened to Mike's musical conversations with these birds, I realized that he has come a long way in doing just that. This episode blends his music with a couple of my crow poems, "Grandpa Scarecrow" which is from the chapbook The Lost Writings of Miscellaneous Jones, and "Linguistics" from the book The Moon Cracks Open: A Field Guide to the Birds.

The music compositions used in this episode are "Malika," a McCoy Tyner bass riff combined with crows in Mike's yard; "Pre-Text I," performed on Inanga -- a zither-like instrument from Burundi; and "Crow Line," performed on Native American flute.

Incidentally, for those of you in Michigan, Mike's band Faruq Z. Bey & The Northwoods Improvisers will be performing April 23 at the Central Michigan University Library Auditorium in Mt. Pleasant. If you are a fan (and you should be) of experimental, improvisational jazz and world music, you must not miss catching these guys live.

This week's episode closes with "Green Star," a Mike Gilmore composition from The Northwoods Improvisers' release Constellations. This album features Gilmore on guitar, saz, kalimba and shakers; Johnston on bass, inanga, wood flutes, shakers and bone guitar; Kirk Lucas on guitar, tamboura and percussion; Mike List on tabla and percussion; Mike Khoury on violin; Nick Ashton on drums; and Don Barber on frame drum and bells.

For another taste of the great music of this band, the video trailer for The Moon Cracks Open features their song "Rwanda":



Listen to "Report from the Mountains" Episode #11 here:
reportfromthemountains11.mp3