Speak-Spake-Spoke: A CD Review
by Steve Elmer for Big Bridge

Speak-Spake-Spoke presents Kirpal Gordon in a wonderful series of collaborative adventures that challenge listeners to absorb an unending flow of inventive spoken words and sophisticated references shared by a group of improvising jazz musicians led by the warm and sincere playing of Claire Daly on baritone sax and flute.

The eleven tracks on this CD are created from a magical cloth woven from threads of Kirpal’s 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.

There is also a deep underlying series of philosophical statements and visions that require listeners to spend additional time exploring the meaning of Gordon’s spiritual messages. There is much satisfaction to be gained by listening to this CD but there is more than meets the eye and ear after just one hearing.

The opening track highlights Kirpal Gordon’s original rhyming scheme and inventive referential freedom. With a funk feel musical background, KP offers a prelude of potential discoveries in “dream time,” a phrase spoken by a two-person chorus, punctuating the surroundings of what’s to come in this homage to the Cisco Kid. With a quote from poet Jordan Jones’s “Cycle,” Kirpal then leaps into the main tale of our hero.

After a fine flute solo by Claire Daly, KP tells us: “The Cisco Kid we find him in the woodwinds. His medicine’s an antidote to Armageddon. He urges a shaman’s stamina for all skins. That’s why he sends heart mends to love’s shut-ins.” The Cisco Kid was one of my personal favorite characters of my childhood, along with the Lone Ranger, Superman, and the Green Hornet. Antidotes to Armageddon indeed.

“Eros in Sanskrit” hit my musical funny bone and reinforced my feeling that Kirpal steps outside the carton on more than on occasion in this album. Over the original Tommy Dorsey opening of “Song of India,” complete with tom tom solo and unison instrumental section playing, KP recites an excerpt from the “Iso Upanishad.” I’m assuming the spoken words are in Sanskrit but I couldn’t swear to it. In any event, the juxtaposition of cultures seemed hilarious to me. Then KP unravels his spoken English meditation while Warren Smith whips his high-hat cymbals and the “band” plays the famous 1940s melody and swing arrangement in the background. After a wonderful trombone solo by the rambunctious Art Baron and a raunchy tenor sax solo by Tim Price, KP returns to remind us that whatever is hidden in our own divine natures, it is “yearning to sing & get sung over & over & over again.” Amen.

There are many more tracks that listeners will find appealing, including Mongo Santamaria’s “Afro Blue,” a duet with KP and Dave Hofstra on bass, or the New Orleans funeral dirge called “Out There Prayer” featuring the band with Dave Hofstra on tuba, playing a mournful rendition of “The House of the Rising Sun,” or “Blue Rilke” and “Equinox,” one paying homage to the poet and the other to legendary John Coltrane. But I have two personal favorites that I recommend most highly to others.

The jazz ballad often gives performers an opportunity to express feelings less accessible at faster tempos. “Origins in the Key of Sea” is no exception. After a brief Eli Yamin piano solo introduction, Gordon takes us on a water-based exploration visiting various tributaries along the way and their classically recognizable inhabitants. The story is not a simple one and highlights for me how a jazz improviser can create a series of connections related to an original melody. The underlying “theme” of this track is the song “Spring Can Really Hang You up the Most,” played in the background while KP blows the first chorus of his solo. He then takes a rest and Eli Yamin gives us a lovely romantic piano solo for the first part of the song followed by Claire Daily’s luscious baritone sax creation, reminding me once again why she is one of my favorite players on that instrument. Kirpal returns to help us finish the trip and reveal to us what he believes “can really hang you up the most.”

“If Bird Lives” is a hard core bebop swinger. Based on George Gershwin’s 32-bar standard “I Got Rhythm,” Warren Smith gives us an eight-bar drum solo prelude to James Zollar’s statement of the famous theme in the background while Kirpal and his chorus take us through a classic jazz history lesson in a fast and furious development of ideas and referential humor that pays the highest tribute to the jazz process. The uninitiated might not catch all the tidbits KP offers up on his platter of verbal goodies but will have no problem relating to the essential elements of energy and joy in this performance. Zollar continues the feast of tasty morsels with a fine trumpet solo and exchange of four-bar ideas with Smith’s inventive solo drumming followed by KP and the gang bringing some just deserts to the table in a flavorful finale accompanied by a soufflé of Zollar’s trumpet quotes of classic bebop melodies and a final restatement of Gershwin’s compositional contribution to this pot boiling collaboration. Speak, Spake, Spoke. Game, set, and match.

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Speak-Spake-Spoke: A Review
by Vernon Frazer for Soundzine

Kirpal Gordon’s jazz-poetry fusion differs from most jazz poetry in two basic ways: his ear to the jazz vocal tradition and his use of musicians with cutting-edge credentials to interpret a repertoire that incorporates bop, swing, standards, pop and classical compositions with a musical freshness that corresponds to the vigor of his language. Gordon’s uncanny ability to recite his first-rate poetry with a bopper’s succinct phrasing and supple rhythm combines with an empathetic ensemble and several back-up readers to create a recording that lands in the lap of the jazz continuum where Eddie Jefferson and Jon Hendricks held sway. Whereas most jazz poets fall flat when trying to fuse the apple of their poetry with the orange of a standard tune, Kirpal thrives by making a fruit salad from seemingly incongruous elements. He does so in much the same assimilative way that jazz musicians have updated the music and refreshed its tradition: by incorporating elements from other styles, idioms and cultures into the spicy gumbo mix that originated in New Orleans and spread throughout the world.

Speak-Spake-Spoke, Gordon’s 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. “If Bird Lives” blends with Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” in a high-flying bop tribute in which Gordon and trumpeter James Zollar intertwine their compelling lines. Gordon’s voice wails in a baritone register, his words soaring over the restraints of the tune’s 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.

In 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 Gordon’s recitation to greater heights much the way a big band’s horn section boosts a soloist into a higher gear. In “Antidote to Armageddon,” Jones and Stalhut’s recitations serve as a downbeat for the reflective lines Gordon phrases over the drone of Art Baron’s didjeridoo.

Whereas many poets prefer to utilize the liberation a free jazz accompaniment affords them, Gordon seems most at home with older, more structured material. His musician’s ear and timing enable him to fit his verse into the established forms and update them in the process. “Eros in Sanskrit” aptly fuses a poem rooted in the Upanishads with “Song of India,” a Rimsky-Korsakov composition transformed into a pop tune during the Big Band era, fusing the ancient with the present through a vehicle from the historically recent past. The group employs the sharp ensemble interjections of swing bands before trombonist Art Baron leaps in with a punchy solo followed by tenor saxophonist Tim Price, whose warm tone and rasping effects conjure images of a post-millennial Ben Webster. “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most” fuses with the text of “Origins in the Key of Sea,” tying together ”sea” and “spring” as common sources of renewal. Musical director Claire Daly’s rich baritone sax plays an obligato sensitive to Gordon’s phrasing and a fluid, evocative solo by pianist Eli Yamin bridges Gordon’s reflective stanzas. “Appearances” fits skin-tight over Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s tricky “Serenade to a Cuckoo,” on which Daly’s full yet breathy tone on flute interprets text and melody with a breezy swing. Santana’s “Evil Ways” loses none of its period appeal as Gordon launches a rhythmic paean to the Afro-Cuban jazz idiom before Daly’s bari sax plays the original Willie Bobo melody, then launches into exchanging several gritty trade-off choruses with Zollar’s growling trumpet.

Digging back to the roots of New Orleans jazz, Gordon recites “Out There Without a Prayer” over a 21st century gutbucket, brass-featured rendition of “The House of the Rising Sun.” Bassist Dave Hofstra plays tuba while Baron’s trombone and Zollar’s trumpet flow through the ensemble’s interplay, which starts at a dirgelike tempo en route to the cemetery, jumps to an up tempo for the joyous return to life for the next chorus of Gordon’s recitation, then slides back to a slow, but spirited close.

Throughout the recording, the ensemble weaves deftly around and through Gordon’s 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.

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Poetry Jazz: N-Side, Barry Wallenstein & Kirpal Gordon (excerpted)
by Fred Bouchard for All About Jazz (allaboutjazz.com)

...Conversely, on Speak-Spake-Spoke, Kirpal Gordon excels at evoking place and personality: precise of word and rhyme and ready of wit, his spinning continuum suggests jazz' immediacy (timewarp quips, era flips) and transcendency (conjuring Mecca and Maya, simmering the gods' jambalaya). Gordon's pairing poems with pearls of jazz—swing (Dorsey's “Song Of India”), bop (”I Got Rhythm” zested by James Zollar's trumpet fours with Warren Smith's drums), trad, Rahsaan—makes savvy listeners work twice as hard to catch the double-intensity drift, but it's so much fun and speedy a ride, nobody minds. Gordon's erudition in world lit (licks from Eliot, Yeats and The Upanishads flit by like Dexter Gordon's quotes) add further dimensions to his verbal inventions. “In The Key of Sea” Gordon's gently susurrant voice sails in counterpoint with Claire Daly's coolly adenoidal bari on “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most”—punchline at the end. In “All Related” (backed with “Afro-Blue”) free- associative hip-hoppy internal rhymes scheme to bewitch us listeners with electric eclecticism potshotting at man's universality and eternity: clave, Kalahari, we're all compadres—tambien tu madre. Gordon's poetry aligns closely to jazz music: ready on the changes but very much in the moment, improvising—at poetic peak he's internally rhyming, eternally scheming, keeping this hot band dancing on the point of Cleopatra's needle.

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