Benjamin Boone - Confluence: The Ireland Sessions - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Without knowing or planning it, saxophonist/composer Benjamin Boone has spent his life preparing for a collaboration with Philip Levine. Long fascinated by the inherent musicality of the spoken word, Boone crossed paths with the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet as fellow professors at California State University, Fresno, and they ended up working closely together in the three years before Levine's death in 2015. Boone and Levine's InchThe Poetry of JazzInch captures a genre-expanding partnership unlike anything else in the jazz canon. Produced by piano great Donald Brown, the 14-track project features the compositions of Boone, the poetry of Levine, and a stellar band with special guest appearances by Tom Harrell, Greg Osby, Branford Marsalis and Chris Potter.InchBenjamin Boone knows how to get inside the poem, Phil Levine's inscrutable and imploding loops of poetics, his observations of the seen and unseen. Boone knows where the thing called poetry lives, an ocelot among the waters, a sky-shaped Rain God that flares down upon us. He does this with a myriad of instruments, with human breath chiseling and burning through brass and string, reeds and skin and hands and resin. He is one of the very few that can lure Phil's poetry-magic and call it out and show it to the world, Beyond words, up there with the muses.Inch - U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera Album Tracks 1. Gin 2. Making Light of It 3. The Unknowable 4. Yakov 5. They Feed They Lion 6. I Remember Clifford 7. The Music of Time 8. Soloing 9. Arrival 10. A Dozen Dawn Songs, Plus One 11. Our Valley 12. Call It Music 13. By the Waters of the Llobregat 14. What Work Is

There are incantations and supplications to be found here. Also elegies and headlines, howls and mantras, reveries and outbursts. They instruct and affirm. They urge you to dance while offering road maps to reflection. They rouse you from deep slumber and offer solace for your worst nightmares. - GENE SEYMOUR. InchThe Poets Are GatheringInch is the third in a series of acclaimed recordings from saxophonist/composer Benjamin Boone that integrate the music & poems from some of America's leading jazz musicians and Poet Laureates, Guggenheim fellows and Pulitzer Prize winners. Where InchThe Poetry of JazzInch volumes offered the voice of the late U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine, here, notable contributors include Tyehimba Jess, Juan Felipe Herrera, Patricia Smith, T.R. Hummer, and Edward Hirsch, along with pianist Kenny Werner, guitarist Ben Monder and drummer Ari Hoenig, among many others. This recording possesses a visceral, in-the-moment force as the poetry responds to the roiling, insurgent energies against racism and other societal ills. The themes of immigration, racism, homelessness, poverty, abuse, protests, and war can overwhelm and distress, but through the voices of some of the world's great literary minds there are clues to be found to absorb the blows, summon the spirits, engage the moment and as Tyehimba Jess suggests, Inchmurder the silenceInch that threatens to immobile us, to keep us away from the reasons to commit, to deal, to hope – and, above all, to imagine. InchBoone knows where the thing called poetry lives, an ocelot among the waters, a sky-shaped Rain God that flares down upon us. He does this with a myriad of instruments, with human breath chiseling and burning through brass and string, reeds and skin and hands and resin.Inch U.S. POET LAUREATE JUAN FELIPE HERRERA.

For a decade now, saxophonist, composer, and Fulbright scholar Benjamin Boone has artfully merged the works of vital, contemporary poets with the in-the-moment creations of astute, innovative jazz musicians, first through his two critically acclaimed recordings with U.S. poet laureate Philip Levine, and most recently with 2020's The Poets Are Gathering, providing a striking for the spoken word. The dance of imagery and rumination set in motion by Patrick Sylvain's InchCaught in the Rhythm,Inch supplies a running theme for this exploding kaleidoscope of diverse voices, with Ambrose Akinmusire, Greg Osby, Kenny Werner and Ben Monder being a few of the interacting musical voices. Together, they offer an aural front page of dispatches, reveries, declamations, and narratives from past and present. Leave it to music, melding with shadow and light, to make the case for poetry. Album Tracks 1. Mississippi Confessional 1955 2. Hoodwitches [Redux] 3. Caught in the Rhythm 4. Art Pepper 5. We Bring the Soul to It 6. Poem 836 7. The Diviner 8. The Case Against Poetry 9. Anger Management 10. Asmr Sleepcast The Night After Being Released from the Rural County Jail 11. Olivia Suggests All the Women in Class Imagine Male Sexuality 12. Mercy 13. Dawg, What the F**k Ima Do with a $20? 14. You'll Be Sorry