Eclectic Company: An Agglomeration Of Thoughts

He rapped his tone-poem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” on his debut, live album, Small Talk At 125th and Lenox, in 1970, and from that first breathtaking project, released during the era of Black Power after the assassinations of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, Gil Scott-Heron inspired generations of black artists from rap, hip-hop, and various African and African-American musical and cultural backgrounds to recognize the politics of race in America, and the effect of politics on the black American experience. He lived hard and fast, dying before his work was finished, but having touched hundreds of artists and tens of thousands of fans, he’s assured a meaningful place in American history. You can hear “The Revolution” spoken by Scott-Heron, along with some of his less famous but no less enduring works on youtube. Try “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and “Pieces Of A Man,” from his 1971 album of the same name. Here’s hoping he’s rapping and singing poems in the afterlife, and being channeled by future arts-mongers for generations to come.

One contemporary musician currently from Lake Charles, whose work witting or unwittingly is made possible by Gil Scott-Heron’s is Amahl Abdul-Khaliq, a/k/a AF the Naysayer. Amahl will be releasing An Agglomeration of Thoughts on his Self-Educated Vinyl label, available from www.self-educatedvinyl.com this summer. Amahl tells me he recorded the electronic tracks in his McNeese dorm room, using “a little cheap mp3 player that had a recording function, mixed through Cool Edit Pro which is a discontinued version of Adobe Audition and [I used] FL Studios 6 as a sequencer.” All of which is computer program speak far beyond my pay grade, so if you’re my age, better ask a 10-year old to explain this stuff to you, if you want to know what it really means. Amahl’s music is pop-ethnic, jazzy and classical by turns, with pseudo-vibraphone skirls on “Imagerial Denouement,” and whispered phrases in “Palace Pier” reminding me of emo vocalist Sade. Most of the work is instrumental, and trance-inducing. In a really effervescent way. I was totally jazzed, Amahl. Thanks for the tracks.

I forgot a few issues back to tell you how taken I was with the “premier American indie” contemporary string quartet, Carpe Diem, who played for Banners on a weekday evening. The hype had me expecting nothing less than the new vaudeville act of The Flying Karamazovs crossed with rock arrangements of classical tunes (Queen?), or maybe something so far out there that only dogs would be able to hear it, and only those relaxed on herb or two-hour massages would be able to appreciate it. Which I have to admit did not endear the quartet to me.

So it was with a skeptical heart that I found a seat in Bulber auditorium, surrounded by picky friends. “If I don’t like it I’m leaving,” one said, just as the lights dimmed. And then four perfectly nicely dressed people strolled onstage, stood or sat down with their familiar acoustic instruments without dayglo graffiti tags sprayed on them, and played, beautifully, brilliantly, string music ranging from familiar classical (Mendelssohn’s F minor string quartet, Monti’s “Czardas”), through Argentinian tango (Piazzolla), to modern compositions (Sowash’s “Septendecim,” Carpe Diem violist Korine Fujiwara’s magnificent “Montana” fiddle suite, that’s revolving in my van’s CD player as I write this). Okay, not your grandmother’s string quartet repertoire. But what, I wondered, makes this indie? — which is a term I associate with home-made, off-the-mainstream taste, something it takes a hipster to appreciate.

Indie, in that sense, is the opposite of what this fabulous performing group does: They take what is usually considered to be a stuffy artform for an audience of mostly antiquated, exceedingly refined, conservative people who don’t appreciate any music written later than the middle ages, and make it accessible, in fact, vibrantly exciting, for audiences not trained to enjoy classical instrumentation and classical music. They are not trying to be a little cult engine that can. They are trying to reach out and touch EVERY kid, every teen, every adult, every senior, with a mash-up of ear-catching tunes that fall both in and outside the chamber music repertoire, that are so charged with energy and recognizable passion even first-time listeners can understand and feel it. Their show has the effect of a rock concert of jangling guitars and squealing keyboards and cranking drums, even though they’re playing unamplified violins, viola, and cello, and even though plenty of the songs are, for rockers ears, pretty damned quiet.

Quite a few years ago, I hosted a radio show on a quirky station out of East Orange, New Jersey, that pitches its eclectic mix to a funky subterranean fandom of downtown New Yorkers and suburban New Yorker wannabes who like to let their geek flag fly. Listening regularly to WFMU not only makes you an insider and shows that you are quite a clever puss, because appreciating the musical and conceptual slant the station’s dozens of wildly diverse DJs purvey takes truly active gray matter, but it is also guaranteed to raise your IQ ten points and to improve your, ahem, social life exponentially. One of the station’s DJs was a sharp-tongued matter of fact-voiced woman who intoned the “News of the Dead,” and dated a young comic book artist whose work she persisted in calling “straight edge” and some other terms I’ve long forgotten, meaning, admirably individual, without benefit of drugs. She’d borrowed the terms from musician-speak, and after a while the young artist got annoyed because the terms were just plain wrong. Were, in fact, the kind of thing someone too far outside the group to understand the insider’s lingo would use trying to sound like an insider. Which is the same reason why I think the term “indie” should not be applied to the youthful members of the Carpe Diem String Quartet. They are in many ways like other chamber music groups. They just know when it’s time to jump the repertoire track. Independent? Sure. Indie? Never.