Ishmael Reed is a writer, poet, and speaker adept at the vernacular of black America, its sources, influences, imitators and condemners. He’s a historian of sorts, and like the itinerant blues musician or the Wet African griot, he’s a collector and cultural icons that were stolen, spirited and transplanted from Africa to the Carib and the U.S.

Like all effective history, Reed’s is more than a mere presentation of sequential events. It’s a selective offering of significant relationships for black America and, by miscegenation and assimilation, all of America. Reed’s history is unabashedly mythical, strikingly imagistic and disarmingly humorous while transferring the lyrical immediacy of oral literature to the written page.

It’s been over five years since Kip Hanrahan initiated a project to put Reed’s words to film and music. The film project is still an idea, but in your hands is one of the best collaboration s of music and poetry I’ve ever heard. Hanrahan has accumulated some of this generation’s most resourceful musicians from the Carib, from new-gutbucket, from free-bop and from innovative elasto-funk to produce an aural backdrop as perspicacious and lyrical as the poems are musical. Each player is skilled in a particular vernacular American form and several are strong, evocative soloists. Hanrahan ably facilitated the recording by requesting that David Murray, Carla Bley, Steve Swallow, Lester Bowie, Carman Moore, Taj Mahal and Allen Toussaint provide compositions to poems or texts of their choice, which resulted in a melange of songs.

For Hanrahan’s daring conception, the collective efforts of the musicians and the words of Ishmael Reed, I’d like to move that the church say amen.

Don Palmer, 1984