“I can taste tear gas. I hear a blur
of billy clubs when I hit the drums.
I haven’t witnessed this mug shot
in decades, but I’m facing the mirror.
I’m still the same man. Almost.
Led Zeppelin is still in my nogginbox”
Nogginbox?
Yusef Komunyakaa began his career as a War Correspondent in Vietnam until the war ended and he returned to the States and began writing poetry in 1973. Today Komunyakaa is a renowned Pulitzer Prize winning composer of poetic collections, fourteen of them, and the quote above comes from his 2011 collection”The Chameleon Couch”. While men of good faith might wonder if being a poet in the 21st century is the moral equivalent of being a blacksmith in the 20th century, Yusef is born for the age of google; you can’t pick your way through his allusions to everything from the great painter Francis Bacon to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial without a crib sheet. To simplify to the point of silliness: Yusef uses his vast knowledge of history and art to word paint a dystopian vision of the heart of darkness.
Yusef’s words build into a vision of humanity so bleak, his writing, his words, seem strung out together, they feel like they shouldn’t be such a deep pleasure but they are: living a life of so much horror it is almost unspeakable let alone unwritable, salvation comes in the sounds. They are musical. Yusef’s ear is musical (he uses onomatopoeia almost by reflex), a jazz fan who recorded a 2009 pop album with guitarist Tomas Doncker as The Shapeshifter Ensemble, The Mercy Suite. A fine album but it isn’t his current collaboration with Doncker, Big Apple Blues. For one thing, writing lyric isn’t writing poetry and the lyric as lyric is superior now and for another, Doncker and his band are at the height of their craft on this album. It feels as though Doncker’s Howling Wolf tribute album, the much lauded Moanin’ At Midnight, was an exercise to ready himself for Big Apple Blues, a vocal tour de force of blues and poetry from Ground Zero to Coney Island with a side trip to the Deep South.
Doncker is a music machine, this is his third album this year alone, not including the ones he himself produced. He is always in the studio, always rehearsing for concerts, always musical, when I see him it is between him waking up and going to a rehearsal and his conversation is at its best when he is discussing modern music. The man lives and breathes music and when you do something that long you either break through or break down. Moanin’ At Midnight sounded like it was the musical breakthrough to the place where only the greats exist, so did Power Of The Trinity, where Doncker added soul and blues to Ethiopian pop, but Big Apple Blues is such a powerful set, such a self contained album album, maybe this is the one where there is nothing much to add that isn’t better learnt by listening.
Performed by the same band that gave us the Howling wolf project, and co-produced by guitarist James Dellatacoma, it opens on its way to the belly of the beast and Doncker’s deep singing sounds like the beckoning downwards for Yusef’s words. “Big Apple Blues” sounds like Komunyakaa, sounds like a man who has written so extensively about the Lower East Side, From the drum roll opening that invites you in, Tomas looks forward and backwards, “I’ve got those big apple blues, staring at the stars, howling at the moon” he sings at the get go, looking backwards to Wolf, and forward to the trip downwards. David Barnes harp takes you where it is all going.
The next song, “Can’t Say No” sounds like an exile from Exile On Mainstreet, where the Louisiana born FKA James William Brown (before he took his Grandfather’s name changed by slave owners) with the band chugging like a train and Tomas howling and spitting and growling through to the end.
Best of all is one of the great blues tracks of our time, “The New Day”, another Yusef vision of slavery and salvation, with the black folks brought home to the Church. It works on so many levels, it is so scary in its intensity, and in its hopes for a future, for a next day. The best lyric on the album connects everything back to the Church, and makes you worried and wonder what the future, what the sin is, and when and where and how is redemption. “Sinner come home to Jesus” is more than a catechism, it is a sort of refraction of evil.
These three songs stand atop of the album, sin and redemption and the blues.
From there the album steadies itself into greatness. “Hellfighters Of Harlem” includes a spoken word section from Yusef, where he connects civil rights to Vietnam and Tomas becomes a soldier, “sound off, marching…” with the hook, “study war no more” a doubtful dream. “Coney Island” is a beautiful blues ballad, “Fun City” a Latin American meets Motown to take you out and some funny gasp lines, “Some say 42nd street died of a heart transplant” taking you back to the Big Apple Bluesiness.
None of which explains “Ground Zero” tagline “There are no heroes at Ground Zero”, a song so powerful it shakes on this image, “Last night in my dreams the Towers rose up from smoking ash”. Still, it is a hard comment, and it really doesn’t depend upon your definition of heroism to say men running upstairs in a high rise to save people running down, isn’t heroic. But Yusef’s idea, “This is what we must do for one another” is honest enough to make up for it… to a degree. In what might well be the album’s best moment every cliche surrounding 9-11 is turned on its head, a story often told is made freshly horrifying. Essentially, Yusef believes the firemen were doing “human things”. Go back to that image: “last night in my dreams the Towers rose up from smoking ash” -what a dream of resurrection, what an overwhelming vision.It is so Big Apple, it is so central to the Big Apple myth in 2014. Tomas and Yusef have taken you from Harlem to Coney Island to 42nd street (the album cover picture was taken at Time’s Square)to Ground Zero and kick started it all again. It is a New York state of being.
Tomas Doncker is a close friend of mine, I heard some of these songs in the demo stage and I am thanked on the back of the album, but friendship doesn’t really matter here. I have been listening to everything Doncker has released for years now and this is his best work to date. With a magnificent blues band behind him, including the great bassist Josh David, and a lyricist of intense personal and political vision, a singing voice that improves with every song and the ability to write songs the way other people breath, this is an electrified tour de force, a statement on the art of the art of music and an important addition to the myth that is New York City. It has been called a journey through black America but that is to damn it with faint praise. This isn’t about black people, it is about what human people should and do and don’t do for each other.
Big Apple Blues is released October 21st, 2014
Grade: A
