Pauline Peters' Music Recommendation

Pauline Peters' Music Recommendation:
 
Secrets Make the Best Stories  
Kurt Elling 
 

Kurt Elling is an American jazz singer/songwriter. His album Secrets Make the Best Stories is a collection of songs that explores the soul of stories. The music moves back and forth between mellow and discordant. The lyrics are urgent and questioning over instrumentation that is mostly spare. You focus on the words, melody is an afterthought, but the songs don’t suffer for it. The songs are wide-ranging, forward moving, and insistently progressive. It’s music that doesn’t let you go. 

This is an album full of compassion. Elling sings with his arms wide open. Here is an artist who writes songs for slaves, for holocaust survivors and for refugees. There is a song for Toni Morrison’s Beloved and a song for Oscar and Valeria Martinez-Ramirez, who drowned while trying to cross the Rio Grande to America. The poem/song for Toni Morrison is extraordinary. Inside the song is an excerpt from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s poem Slave Mother: “…Judea’s refuge cities had power/To shelter, shield and save/E’en Rome had altars ‘neath whose shade/Might crouch the wan and weary slave…” The music underlines the suffering inherent in the story and is sometimes harsh and discordant, sometimes twisting and reaching, sometimes soft and pleading, always straining for a way to encompass its subject.  

The album also keeps company with other artists. There are references to Joni Mitchell’s Chelsea Morning and to Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. And, like Van Morrison, who references Wordsworth, Coleridge and T. S. Eliot in his songs, Elling writes music to poets. The first song on the album, “The Fanfold Hawk,” is for the poet Franz Wright and there is also a song for Robert Bly.  

The final piece on the album, “Esperanto,” is a song of questioning and praise, and though it is not overtly religious, it invokes the spiritual. The song is gentle and rhythmic. It eases the weight of anger and sorrow invoked in previous songs. Elling chants: "Holy lift / holy reading Holy gift / Holy needing / Holy sound / holy waiting Holy spark / animating / Holy food / Holy breathing Holy light interweaving/Holy night / Holy handwrite Holy flight / Holy insight…”  

I haven’t heard all of Elling’s albums.  No doubt he writes regular love songs too.  But the music on Secrets Make the Best Stories encompasses love of all kinds, as evidenced in the gentle way Elling sings the story of the old man who hides behind his door every time the narrator walks by. The old man hides behind his door and we are not ready when we find out why.   

Like water, Secrets Make the Best Stories is sometimes heavy with the full force of a river, or trickling like the purling of a brook, or smooth like the wandering run of a stream.  You are drawn into the trickling and roaring and twisting and the melancholy and if you let yourself, you can fall into deep reflection.  As Elling writes: “…the harmonies grow darker as the revelations open up to me (and up to you).”   

 
 
Pauline Peters lives in Toronto. She has been published in anthologies and in journals such as Canadian Literature and The Antigonish Review. Her poem "Hamilton, Ontario, 1975" is featured in the new Autumn issue of The Fiddlehead. She was short-listed for the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Competition and her chapbook The Salted Woman is being published by the British publisher Hedgespoken Press.