Asymptotes, Voicings: Amirtha Kidambi, Julia Úlehla, and Darius Jones
at Ironworks, 3 July 2022
For there is a musicke where-ever there is a harmony, order or proportion; and thus farre we may maintain the musick of the spheares; for those well ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the eare, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony. Whatsoever is harmonically composed, delights in harmony.
—Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1643) The second part, Sect. 9
Give or take a weekend ago,
the five available planets
looked to align like lit crotchets
along the predawn ecliptic’s
oblique stave: zircon studs glinting
in that sky’s freshly pierced left ear.
Jump to last night’s one-off trio—
voice, voice, and alto saxophone;
the local cosmos witnessed you
concoct an ad hoc almagest,
extemporaneous ravel
threading a three-body problem,
weaving nascent swathes of wordless
repair across the world’s ripe wounds:
vibrant fray, orbitals, vectors
of what songs justice wants to make.
You urge us to attune, to hear:
Pure music is what you must face.
There is a tide in time, of sound.
This text is an experiment around responding to improvised music in lyric form. It was written during the morning of Monday, July 4, 2022 as a reaction to a profoundly engaging performance the night before—the closing night of the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival—at Ironworks, a venue just outside of Gastown near the entrance to the Port of Vancouver on the Downtown East Side, which annually hosts a series of experimental and innovative musicking. The festival, now returned to in-person performances in the attenuated wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, has a long history of setting up one-time improvisational meetings of Vancouver-based performers with musicians who have come to town as part of the festival programme—many of which have gestated international collaborations. The evening of July 3 featured one such meeting, of Darius Jones, Amirtha Kidambi, and Julia Úlehla. New York-based saxophonist Darius Jones held a composer’s residency at Western Front in June-July 2019, commissioned by Coastal Jazz (under Artistic Director Rainbow Robert) and partially supported by the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (for which I am the UBC site coordinator) to create a composition that engaged with some of Vancouver’s improvisers; he premiered his “Vancouver Suite” for strings at Ironworks—after a three-year pandemic delay—employing Jesse and Joshua Zubot on violins, Peggy Lee on cello and James Meger on bass, with San Francisco-based percussionist Gerald Cleaver on drumkit and himself on alto saxophone, on Friday, June 24. (I’ll say more about this piece in a forthcoming post.) Darius Jones has currently taken up another residency at Western Front, this time to develop a duo with vocalist and composer Amirtha Kidambi around the poetry and thought of Sun Ra; later this week, they will be performing and discussing some of their emerging co-creative work. Vancouver-based vocalist Julia Úlehla has collaborated with both Darius Jones and Amirtha Kidambi almost a decade ago when she lived in the New York area, so their trio meeting—while in some sense a first—also emerges from a shared history. (Please follow the embedded links for more information on their music-making.)
The poem responds to an extended (around 55 minute) free improvisation that these three offered that night. It’s a little hard to describe—hence, perhaps, my response in lyric form rather than denotative prose—but essentially consisted of layers of nascent texture and vestigial melodic lines. Darius Jones began by blowing breathy, whistling overtones through his saxophone, to which the two singers responded in kind, with murmurs and whispery phonemes that very gradually gained voice and thickness; collectively, they seemed to feel their way into various surges and ebbs of sound, layering lines that looped back on, crossed over, and raveled each other. At times, ghost tones and other phasing vibrations lifted up into the room, generating a resonances palpable on a listener’s skin and ears. The sound-space took on a profundity, manifesting not so much as volume but as deepening quiet, an increasing sense of presence to the music and to each other. There were no solos, but each made space for the others, attending to shifting interactions and mutually responsive discoveries. Both Amirtha Kidambi and Julia Úlehla bring sensibilities to their performances that are vibrantly rooted—at least in part—in folk traditions, and there was for me a keen sense of connection to the human planet in the ballad-like shared melody that appeared at the close of the piece, as if all three had arrived at temporary common ground. It was a deeply moving, spiritually engaging music; it was a tremendous privilege for me to have been there in those moments.
A few explanatory notes on the poem I hope might help. The prosody is not free, despite it being correlated to a free improvisation; the stanzas and metre are built mathematically around 3! and 4!—six- and twenty-four syllable groupings, cut across by an eight-syllable line, clustered in three (for the trio of voices) 48-syllable choruses—though the last stanza adds an irruptive extra eight. Tetrameter lines like these are often found in folk ballads. This pattern emerges retroactively from the last two (italicized, eight-syllable) lines, which are quotations from the writing of Sun Ra—in this instance lifted from a 2019 essay on his poetics by Harmony Holiday. The quick drafting of this poem lends itself, for me, to a kind of free forming that the final pre-set lines lock back into compositional place/space. The quotation from the seventeenth-century Englishman Sir Thomas Browne’s autobiographicalReligio Medici coordinates the revisionist cosomology of Johannes Kepler with the Ptolemaic music of the spheres to describe a spiritual listening beyond listening. See also earlier medieval versions of Ptolemy’s Almagest. Kepler’s harmonic attunement is also the source for the Urania-inspired astronomical word-music of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The three-body problem is a mathematical quandary around chaotic motion caused by the shared gravities of three celestial bodies; apparently, Kepler fudged his calculus around such quandaries in order to make the idea of harmonic planetary motion work. An alignment of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn (Sun Ra’s planet of origin) took place on Friday, June 24, 2022, the date of the premiere of Darius Jones’s Vancouver Suite, and enacted a kind of orbital harmonics of that cosmic music. The reference to justice is an oblique gesture at the U.S. Supreme Court striking down the human rights precedents set by Roe v. Wade, which has been in the air these recent weeks, among other things. I’ve been reading Nathaniel Mackey’s Double Trio lately, too. For me, the poem counterposes Afrological and Eurological cosmologies, and wants productively, somehow, to negotiate with their cross-talk. At least, that’s the idea.
[This is the draft text of a paper I am set to present at the 2015 Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium, on Wednesday, September 16.] The collective
trajectory of this year’s colloquium links practicing various forms of improvisation
to nurturing various forms of intersubjective well-being. By
attending—carefully, critically and briefly—to solo and to collaborative
electro-acoustic performances by the British saxophonist Evan Parker, I want to
gesture at the nascent work of remediation that Lisbeth Lipari has recently
called “an ethics of attunement,” a close listening that cultivates
compassionate alterity within an attentive body: an akroasis—an audition, an audience—that provides a resonant and
differential basis for the possibility of what Jean-Luc Nancy has provocatively
named an “inoperative community,” a version for me of what Alphonso Lingis calls
The Community of Those Who Have Nothing
in Common, of our conflicted and diverse human species. Nancy’s
philosophical interrogation of listening to music (as “the art of the hope for
resonance”) offers contingent conceptual support with which it’s possible to
assess the sensibly vibrant sounding of interstices, both between and within
each human frame, that constitutes Evan Parker’s improvising.
Claims about well-being and health tend
to presuppose an uninterrogated sense of what constitutes a proper,
well-ordered body. Rather than extend a critique of what Michel Foucault might
have called the “care of self” and its biopolitics, I am going to premise my remarks
on improvisation and well-being by assuming that corporeality may also be understood
as porous and conflicted instead of individuated, discrete or holistic, and
that this porosity is a founding condition both of co-creativity and of lived
community. Reworking a Deleuzean pluralism, Annemarie Mol writes of a medical
practice that addresses and heals the “body multiple,” which she presents as an
“intricately coordinated crowd” that “hangs together” through “various forms of
coordination” (55). Following on Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, David Abram describes “the boundaries of a living body” as “open
and indeterminate; more like membranes than barriers, they define a surface of
metamorphosis and exchange” (42). I’m interested in pursuing with some rigour
those “forms of coordination”—or the textures of that porosity—at the level of
acoustic experience, as a humane and ethically preferable set of cultural
interactions.
Lisbeth Lipari proposes
“interlistening” as a term for “the multiple dimensions of embodied
consciousness that vibrate in the dance of conversation between [among?] people
talking” (161). Her aim is to delineate discursive practices that listen
otherwise, that attend to the presence of others, even as they enable speech.
“Listening otherwise,” she writes,
challenges
the ego and the illusion of control and sees how the distortions that arise
from our insistence on innocence, certainty, and understanding damage our
capacity for compassion. . . . [L]istening
otherwise . . . suspends the willfulness of self- and foreknowledge in
order to receive the singularities of the alterity of the other” (Lipari 185,
186).
Heavily influenced by
Emmanuel Levinas, Lipari also models her auditory ethics on the music theory of
Hans Kayser, whose concept of akroasis
(the Ancient Greek word for “hearing”) articulates a “theory of world
harmonics” as a holistic gestalt-series rooted in Pythagorean acoustics (Lipari
27). Kayser appears to mitigate dissonances in attunement, and prefiguresby several decades R. Murray
Schafer’s disciplined “ear-cleaning” of European music . I’m
less sanguine about what I know of Kayser, however; without refusing the
hopeful tenor of his thinking, I worry that he only re-instates a cult of primeval
innocence, a re-tooled Ptolemaic naïveté. It helps me, instead, partially to
recover the etymology of akroasis,
which occurs in Aristotle as a term for audience and hearing: notably, not in The Poetics nor in the sections of his Politics focused on music, but in his Rhetoric. The ἀκροατής (akroates), frequently
translated as “hearer,” is actively implicated in discursive exchange: “Now
the hearer (akroatēn) must
necessarily be either a mere spectator or a judge (kritēs), and a judge either of things past or of things to come.”
That is, listening—at least, to speech—is inherently active and deliberative,
and those deliberations, within a polytemporal reciprocity, include critical
intellection. Akroatic listening, close listening as thinking, becomes more
agonistic than syncretic, more unsettling than epideictic. (Compare George
Lewis: “In its marginalization, its often-unseen, intangible presence, which
generates new discourses, in its mobility and facility with hybridization, and
in its locus, the contestatory space where difference can [be] and is enacted,
improvisation’s general importance to the underlying health of the musical
ecosphere and the public commons must be recognized, valued and protected
[138].”)
In a 2014 interview, Sonny
Rollins repudiates any sort of reflexive intellection as disruptive to
improvising, invoking the demanding temporality of playing: “I
don't want to overtly think about anything, because you can't think and play at
the same time — believe me, I've tried it (laughs). It goes by too fast.”
Rollins appears to be suggesting that, when you listen to yourself as you play,
you lose your through-line, lose the formal sense of your music. But his point,
I think, isn’t to romanticize or mystify his artistry—he focuses on his lapses,
not his genius—but to assess the cognitive velocity at which that agon, that
deliberation, can even occur. What Lipari calls compassionate openness wants to
happen not as immediacy but on the fleeting lip of the present, closer to
reflex than reflexive. Jean-Luc Nancy refers to “sonorous time” as “a present
in waves on a swell, not in a point on a line; it is a time that opens up, that
is hollowed out, that is enlarged or ramified, that envelops or separates, that
becomes or is turned into a loop, that stretches out or contracts, and so on”
(13). The challenge, the risk posed by such a hysteresis, is not merely the
neglect of what is other—and this is perhaps why thinking about solo music,
about the improvised solo, helps us to re-conceptualize otherness as such, not
as a condition of the co-presence of individuals but even as a porosity of self,
of voice—but also an issue of technique, of the virtuosic coordination of
enharmonic singularities as they pass in and out of our membranous bodies.
Listening, writes Nancy, “—the opening stretched toward the register of the
sonorous, then to its musical amplification and composition—can and must appear
to us not as a metaphor for access to self, but as the reality of this access,
a reality consequently indissociably ‘mine’ and ‘other’ . . .” (12).
I want to read Evan Parker’s solo
saxophone technique as a crucial instance of this intensely vacillating
subjectivity (if that’s the right term for a solo voice), of the surging
disavowal of self sounding itself. Here is an excerpt of the solo music, recorded
without overdubbing, from his 1989 album Conic Sections:
Writing in the early 1990s, John Corbett describes Evan Parker’s
seemingly linear, monophonic instrument as more of an “assemblage” of
body—“[f]ingers, mouth, tongue, teeth, lungs”—and horn—reed, ligature, keys,
pads, bell—“constellated in such a way as to break the seeming unity of melodic
expression” (82). But in Evan Parker’s solo playing, both live and on
recordings, those fractures are not ends in themselves, and rather initiate—as
what Lipari describes as “challenges” to passive listening—the possibility of
tonal and linear multiplication, of what the reedist calls, with measured
self-deprecation, a form of “polyphony”: “There’s a more complex sense of
linearity,” he says, “to the point where the line folds back on itself and
assumes some of the proportions of vertical music, and some of the
characteristics of polyphonic music” (qtd. In Corbett 83). Combining circular breathing,
cross-fingering, tonguing and biting the reed, Evan Parker is able to generate
layers of overtones and nearly-simultaneous contrapuntal arpeggios at high
velocity, effectively producing a continuum of cascading choruses from a single
breath. But while Corbett is keen to endorse Evan Parker’s virtuosity and
instrumental mastery, he also notes, as the saxophonist himself does, how
accident and uncertainty find their way inevitably into any performance,
subverting claims to absolute technique or intention and undermining the
“notion of the unitary, intending subject”—that is, of self-expression—in
improvisation. As Evan Parker puts it succinctly in a 1997 interview with
Martin Davidson,“It's to do with
layering stuff that I don't know on top of stuff that I do know.” Here, I
think, is exactly the looping of self and other, of expressive intention and
unruly, noisy sound, that Jean-Luc Nancy describes as listening. Evan Parker’s
descriptions of his improvisatory practice align remarkably closely with Nancy’s
philosophical investigations of listening:
It's
clear to me that if you can imagine something, you can find a technical way to
do it, but if you can't imagine it, whether or not there is a technical
solution never occurs to you because there's no need to. So it's very necessary
to listen closely to what happens when you try to do things, because usually at
the fringes of what you're producing is something that you're not really in
control of - that there is a central thing that you are fully in control of,
and then a kind of halo of suggested other possibilities which have to come
with the central thing that you're in control of, whether it's a wisp of breath
escaping from the side of the embouchure, or an overtone that you could push
harder, or some key noise which you can't escape. There's always something
there, and if you're listening at the fringes of the sound as well as at the
centre of the sound, then you can be led to other things and other
possibilities.
The collision of
self-possessed declamation and open-eared deliberation in what he calls
“trying”—and what I’d suggest in fact takes the form of a musical essay—points
up the irresolute multiplicity at the edges of extemporaneous sound, its
tensile present tense.
Gently pushing back at Sonny Rollins, I
hear Evan Parker—playing at velocity, going by too fast—as negotiating between
an organic immediacy and an akroatic self-scrutiny, as both listening to
himself and not in the same breath. Corbett calls this tensioning a form of
“research” (85), a science or an intellection, and I’m inclined to agree: this
music is, it’s my contention, one instance of practice-based research into the
possibility of inoperative community. So, to think about community, and to
close my remarks today, I want to listen to a recording of a recent performance
of Evan Parker’s electro-acoustic septet at the Festival International de Musique Actuelle in Victoriaville in May,
2014. Evan Parker supplies a typically ironic sleeve note: “My art of
composition consists in choosing the right people and asking them to
improvise.” He playfully refuses the “rampant egomania” both of the improvising
soloist and of the composer, preferring an unregimented collectivity. At the
same time, the consistent spatial arrangement of the septet onstage—which can
be seen both in the inner sleeve of the VICTO cd and in the video taken of a
performance at Roulette in New York City, positions Evan Parker at the centre
and apex of the group, facing out like the others but occupying the
conductor-leader’s chair. There’s much to note about this music, but I want to
make just a few points. The three laptops to Evan Parker’s left are able both to
sample and re-figure the live improvisations and to contribute other electronic
sound textures—this is the key concept of most of Parker’s electro-acoustic
groups—which means that the instrumentalist is displaced across the ensemble.
On the Victoriaville recording, Evan Parker doesn’t initiate the performance,
and—if my ears are right—doesn’t even enter as an contributing voice until the
six-minute mark: not through diffidence or even deferral, necessarily, but as
an audible disavowal—silence amid sound—of egocentric voicing: he starts by
listening rather than playing. A version of his own solo practice emerges into
the swirling sonic layers of the ensemble around eighteen minutes into the
performance, combining both self-parody—inserting his long-established
unaccompanied voice into the group dynamic, which both pushes the tutti back, but also opens up a series
of interstices into which other voices might enter. As a model of community,
what the group manages around this moment of solo horn is what Jean-Luc Nancy
calls “a mutual interpellation od singularities prior to any address in
language,” a corporeally-based multiplicitous nudging that, despite the
reflective stillness of many of the players onstage – particularly the three at
their laptops, who enact the reflexive, deliberative aspect of the music, as
opposed to the apparent organicism of the improvisers to his right: the point,
for me, is the co-creation of a virtual in-coherence, a playing apart together
that inheres in the shared differences among the ensemble members, the byplay
between egocentric voice and a yielding to the voices of others. Community,
Nancy writes, is not the panacea of delusive“communion . . . nor even a communication as this is understood to exist
between subjects. But these singular beings are themselves constituted by
sharing, they are distributed and placed, or rather spaced, by the sharing that makes them others” (IC 25). Well-being, as listening otherwise, means neither
self-satisfied holism nor ludic conflict, but a sharing that nurtures our mutual
unknowing.
Works
Cited
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and
Language in a More-Than-Human
World. New York:
Vintage,
1997.
Corbett, John. Extended Play: Sounding Off from John
Cage to Dr. Funkenstein.
Durham: Duke UP, 1994.
Lipari, Lisbeth. Listening, Thinking, Being: Toward an
Ethics of Attunement.
University Park: Pennsylvania
State
UP, 2014.
Mol, Annemarie. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical
Practice.
Durham: Duke UP, 2002.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Listening. 2002. Tr. Charlotte Mandel.
Dave Douglas’s electro-acoustic quartet
HIGH RISK offered a dynamic, edgy and intense set at Performance Works (in Vancouver)
yesterday evening. Fusing layered, pulse-driven techno with Douglas’s Freddie-Keppard-meets-Freddie-Hubbard, fiercely clarion trumpet lines, HIGH RISK collectively muster an infectiously
celebratory and powerful improvised music that’s as danceable as it is
creatively provocative. While Douglas has composed a seven-tune repertoire for
this new band – which recorded together for the first time on October 10, 2014,
in Brooklyn, a session that resulted in their just-released CD on Douglas’s Greenleaf label – and while each
member of the ensemble (Douglas on trumpet, Jonathan Maron on electric bass, Mark Guiliana on drums and Shigeto on electronics)
contributes heavily to the collaboration, for me the group concept seems to
rest on the innovative, wonderfully fractured loops, samples and laptop
conjurations of Shigeto, who bopped, leapt and shimmied with joyful abandon
behind a tabletop covered in rheostat boxes and circuitry. The sound palette
and rhythmic patter he managed to conjure never obscured its synthetic origins
but managed amid the electronica to engender a vibrantly zoetic feel: amazing,
richly affective sonorities. At one point, he played in duo with Douglas and
the intricate immediacy of his approach became apparent, as he built vibrant
whorls and cascades of joyful noise. Mark Guiliana’s drumming is brilliantly
propulsive, deep in the pocket yet consistently pushing forward; his
multidirectional, quickly syncopated incisions through a four-on-the-floor
backbeat were nothing short of genius. Jonathan Maron seemed to remain calm and
steady throughout the concert, but his bass-lines – by turns warmly lyrical and
darkly palpitating – kept the band centred and present. Early in their set, I
thought I heard echoes of the bluesy melody of Miles Davis’s “Jean Pierre,” and
Douglas definitely quoted the four-note tag from the Miles Davis-John Scofield
line “That’s What Happened”: in some ways, HIGH RISK makes a music that might
have emerged from Davis’s more progressive or edgy moments in his later years.
But this is a music that’s of its own present tense. Some of the most powerful
and moving moments came during the last tune, “Cardinals,” an elegiac homage
Douglas dedicated to the memory of Michael Brown. “This is a music that’s about
love,” he told the audience. Love names the high risk this music wants to take.
In the brief liner notes to the CD, Douglas writes that “improvisation
transcends barriers between people and genres. Improvisation models the way the
world can work.” My colleagues and I in ICASP
and IICSI have been thinking, and trying to produce various forms of
practice-based research, along these exact lines. The improvised music of HIGH
RISK offers one instance of a hugely successful, motivated and engaged
co-creativity, laying the contingent and extemporaneous groundwork for a viable
human community yet to come.
Still a jazz child
at eighty-six, Sheila Jordan –
who performed in her duo with bassist Cameron Brown
last night at Ironworks in Vancouver – has a vitality and playful joy that show
no signs of abating. Her two sets consisted of well-developed material –
medleys of standards and classic bebop, peppered with a few originals – that
she’s been performing for decades, emerging primarily out of her work with
Harvie Swartz. That said, every song sounds thoroughly fresh, immediate and
compelling. Her lower register has taken on a little grain, but her lilting
scat lines, the chirrup and purl that are hallmarks of her vocals, are
undiminished: the lightly off-kilter cadences of her improvisations are as
intimately compelling and as warmly engaging as they have been since her
stunning 1962 debut record, Portrait of
Sheila (where she defines close relationship to the bass – in this case, Steve Swallow – that comes
to shape her music for the subsequent half-century).
We all have our favourite
Sheila Jordan records; aside from Portrait
of Sheila, which is an indisputably essential album for any collection, I
love The Crossing (1984,
on Blackhawk) and her performance on Steve Swallow’s
settings of Robert
Creeley poems, Home (1980, ECM):
I often find myself unexpectedly humming “Sure, Herbert . . . ” out of the
blue. Despite what can sometimes feel like a timbre of quiet restraint, Sheila
Jordan’s voice attains a peculiar resonance; it stays with you, softly plangent
and quickly sonorous. The performances last night closely matched the
material onCelebration (2005,
High Note), which is I think the first live recording of her work with Cameron
Brown, but you could never tell that this music was over a decade old. This is
late work, for Jordan, certainly, but it’s also vivacious and exuberant; aside
from some street noise coming through the club walls, the audience was so quiet
and intensely focused on the music you could hear Cameron Brown’s fingers brush
along the strings of his instrument.
A
Sheila Jordan gig offers enraptured attentiveness, a focused close listening,
but she’s also just so infectiously happy, laughing and larking through each
song. Commenting on the flubs she sometimes makes in her “old age,” she said
there was no need “to get uptight about it. As long as your heart and soul are
in it, it doesn’t matter.” She and Cameron Brown started off with an
introductory blues – “And so I’ll sing of joy and pain for you / With all the
happiness this melody brings” – followed by a standard, “Better Than Anything.”
A version of “It’s You or No One” came next, which Brown had also recomposed by
adding a new, boppish melody to the changes, and re-naming it “Sheila, It’s
You.” Cameron Brown is an extraordinary bassist, his fleet and virtuosic lines
emerging from a depth that recalled Charles Mingus. (Shelia Jordan opened the
second set with an anecdote about singing in duo with a bassist for the first
time when she was sixteen and Charles Mingus called her onto the stage to do a version
of “Yesterdays”; they also offered a take, amid a tribute to Billie Holiday, on
Mingus’s “Goodbye Porkpie Hat.”) There was a medley of dance-themed tunes
dedicated to Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire (“I loved this cat, I’d walk two
miles to see him dance . . .”), and another medley of songs associated with
Oscar Brown Jr. that included her wonderful version of Bobby Timmons’s “Dat
Dere” (which also appears, in tribute to Sheila Jordan, on Rickie Lee Jones’s Pop Pop). To set up her “Blues Medley
for Miles” (“Blue Skies,” “All Blues” and Jon Hendricks’s transcription of the
trumpet solo from “Freddie Freeloader”), she told a story of Billie Holiday
sitting in a dark corner of a club warbling out “Miiiiiiiiles, Miiiiiles” while
Davis soundchecked in a basement club in New York: he apparently asked if a stray
cat had got into the room, which she thought was hilarious. Sheila Jordan – her
music and her persona – is all about jazz history, recounting stories of her
encounters with musicians in the 1950s, especially Charlie Parker. She did
versions of what might have been “Yardbird Suite” – I’m a little slow on the
uptake sometimes – and what was definitely “Scrapple from the Apple”; Bird,
sixty years after his death, was still a keen and powerful presence. She also
gestured at her own Seneca heritage, vocalizing in an American Indian style to
frame a version of the Jimmy Webb country ballad “The Moon’s a Harsh Mistress.”
She acknowledged that the Seneca Queen Alliquippa was
her great-great-great grandmother, – and so, she said, if it hadn’t been for Columbus she might have been royalty. The second set closed with an invitation
to guitarist Bill Coon to join Jordan and Brown for a trio version of her anecdotal
“Sheila’s Blues.” She offered her healing, restorative song of recovery, “The
Crossing,” as an encore. As she left the stage, she laughed and called out to
everyone: “Have a beautiful life, and if I don’t see you again, I’ll meet you
in heaven.” Her music and her voice offered us all a gift of affirmation and of
colloquial joy.
