MP3 Kirpal Gordon with the Claire Daly Band - Speak-Spake-Spoke

Kirpal Gordon playfully unites the prose poem to the swinging rhythms of jazz and the montage technique of modern fiction. The CD Speak-Spake-Spoke, delivers eleven of these lyrical gems wed to the American songbook.

11 MP3 Songs
JAZZ: Bebop, SPOKEN WORD: With Music

Show all album songs: Speak-Spake-Spoke Songs


Details:
This breakthrough ensemble of jazz and spoken word is led by Kirpal Gordon and baritone sax goddess Claire Daly, and includes the Claire Daly Band (Claire Daly: baritone saxophone, flute; Dave Hofstra: bass, tuba; Warren I. Smith: drums; and Eli Yamin: piano) as well as Arthur Baron: trombone, didgeridoo; Jordan Jones: spoken word, chorus; Tim Price: tenor sax; Leslie Stahlhut: chorus; and James Zollar: trumpet.

Kirpal Gordon and the Claire Daly Band have been performing some of these songs in NYC and on the road across the US since 2003, building a rapport between the poet and the band that honors the work of both and elevates the spoken word to the level of another musical voice or instrument.

The CD is being simultaneously released with a companion book, Eros in Sanskrit, by Kirpal Gordon.




Reviews of Speak-Spake-Spoke


âOn the compact disc, Kirpal teams up with top jazz musicians, including musical director Claire Daly on baritone sax and flute, James Zollar on trumpet, Dave Hofstra on bass and tuba, Arthur Baron on trombone and didjeridoo, Tim Price on tenor sax, Eli Yamin on piano and Warren Smith on drums. But the real interest in this book/CD package is the intertwining of Kirpal Gordonâs spoken word with the incredible jazz of these great musicians.â

â Gale Swiontkowski, âA Dual Review:
Speak-Spake-Spoke (CD) and Eros in Sanskrit (Book)â


âThe eleven tracks on this CD are created from a magical cloth woven from threads of Kirpalâs psyche and those of his musical alter egos. Listeners will be pleased. There is much variety, wit, and soul searching, much of it immediately accessible to even the most inexperienced listener of jazz and/or spoken word art.â

â Steve Elmer, âSpeak-Spake-Spoke: A CD Reviewâ


âSpeak-Spake-Spoke, Gordonâs first recording as a leader, offers the listener an opportunity to stretch out with the band, as Gordon and the musicians reinterpret the musical material in the context that the poems, by their presence, re-cast them in. Gordon matches poems with tunes that complement and enhance each other. âIf Bird Livesâ blends with Gershwinâs âI Got Rhythmâ in a high-flying bop tribute in which Gordon and trumpeter James Zollar intertwine their compelling lines. Gordonâs voice wails in a baritone register, his words soaring over the restraints of the tuneâs AABA structure, while his sharp phrasing marks his location within the tune. Drummer Warren Smith masterfully fills in all the right places before trading eights with Zollar.

âIn this display of poetic and music range Gordon uses extra vocalists to add punch, much the way that a Jon Hendrix vocal group might interpret the spoken word. Background voices Jordan Jones and Leslie Stahlhut synchronize their vocal accompaniments so that their unison accents propel Gordonâs recitation to greater heights much the way a big bandâs horn section boosts a soloist into a higher gear. In
âAntidote to Armageddon,â Jones and Stahlhutâs recitations serve as a downbeat for the reflective lines Gordon phrases over the drone of Art Baronâs didjeridoo.

âThroughout the recording, the ensemble weaves deftly around and through Gordonâs syncopated phrases, matching sound with sense. In Speak-Spake-Spoke Gordon, who always has an eye on
the cutting edge, turns his gaze toward the roots and history of jazz as he creates a fusion unique in the barely-charted terrain of jazz poetry.â

â Vernon Frazer, Soundzine




Reviews of Kirpal Gordon's Jazz Poetry


âKirpal Gordon is our poet laureate here at Dizzyâs Club Coca-Cola in Jazz at Lincoln Center.â

â Todd Barkin, proprietor


âKirpal Gordon is one of my very favorite poet/performers not just in New York City but anywhere. His work is wise and jazzy and poised and fun, and whether alone or accompanied,
he never fails to bring it on stage in a manner that few can even approach.â

â George Wallace, poet laureate, Suffolk County, NY


âIn translating Kirpal Gordonâs poetry into Chinese, especially âHow Paint Peels: Petals on a Wet, White Wallâ with its echoes of Ezra Pound, he creates for us an imperfectly perfect persona of modern society. I regard it as one of the great poems in contemporary American poetry.â

â Zhang Ziqing, Post-Beat American Poets, Hebei Education Press


âNot since Amiri Baraka is there a writer who speaks the streets in a combination black, white and Span-glish dialect, defying all category. Heâs singing us into what Lawrence Ferlinghetti called 'a re-birth of wonder.'â

â Harold Johnson, critic, Café Noir Editions


âKirpal Gordon writes like a fireworks display: color, beauty, surprise, heart, heat and a big big bang!â

â Peter Gorman


âWritten in paragraph form, musical when read aloud, akin to jazz, especially be-bop, Gordonâs
rhythms and rhymes lead us, yet leave us to figure things out in our own hearts.â

â Joy Leftow




Reviews of Eros in Sanskrit, Kirpal Gordon's Companion Book to Speak-Spake-Spoke


âEros in Sanskrit brings to us a riveting selection of Gordon's work over the past thirty years. I am struck again by their freshness, the breadth (and breath) of the poetry, the incantatory sweep of the hard truths these lines bear witness to.â

â Cynthia Hogue, author of The Incognito Body


âHip, savvy, and inventive, Kirpal Gordonâs prose joins a poetry of the street to the music of the spheres. In subjects ranging from pure jazz lyrics, to philosophical and mythic speculations and revisions, to condemnations of social injustice, to meditations on love, Gordon writes with all five senses awake and in play. When you read him youâll recognize whatâs missing in everything else.â

â Greg Boyd, author of The Nambuli Papers


âOn first reading these poems, you wonder if you havenât entered a very private world with its own private language. But the further you go into this world the more you realize that you are experiencing a very public place of desire and love, of the search for the meaning of the smallest things in life, and the quest to understand and experience the biggest.â

â Darrah Cloud, author of The Stick Wife


âKirpal Gordon is the Huck Finn of New York City. The kid with the goods, heâll show you how stories are really made and how each one will remind you of someplace where you have been, or wish to be. Language driven writing that makes music of those molecules, and for once and for all, has you dancing in an empty, quiet room with a book in your hand. The one youâre holding.â

â Bob Arnold, author of Once in Vermont


âKirpal Gordonâs lines are locomotion and lullaby. In conversation with Kabir and Kerouac, Rilke, Billie Holiday and Kali Ma, they sing âthe uncontainable yahoo of lightning.â Whether travelling roads named Paradise Square or the Inca Trail or walking the length of our sorrow, Gordon gives us work that pays our back rent. He teaches us that tenderness is an inside job.â

â Jeanne Clark, author of Ohio Blue Tips


âA poet with unstoppable chops, Kirpal Gordon is a spewer of jewels with the baddest ear in the hemisphere & an unbelievably well-hung mother tongue. Heâs not just whistlinâ or kindlinâ Dixie: Gordonâs got a reach equal to his grasp, & both exceed the legal limit. He knows language, in the Biblical sense, but heâs also slept with jazz & death & self-deception & the bone-deep desolation created by such euphemistic entities as the âcriminal justice system.â Whirling precise tenderness & eloquent messiness in his devotional blender, he never forgets that âthe whole world is feminine,â that âthe naked god lives.â His gaze may waver; his words never blink. His singing is lucid & essential. He sings what the rest of us merely think.â

â Mikhail Horowitz, word jazz artist, The Blues of the Birth