Our fearless leader Dr. Guy is set to return to the stage at the legendary Greenwich Village institution the Blue Note on May 16. The evening will cut across genres and methods of performance in a new program titled “The Poets and A Song,” which brings together lyric poets and spoken-word performers backed by Dr. Guy’s MusiQology band. Poetry and jazz have a long kinship, and the evening’s performance reinforces that connection with contemporary poets and compositions.
We chatted with Dr. Guy about the ongoing plans for the event. Here’s what he had to say.
Getting poets to collaborate with you is like an almost better way of asking someone different to play the melodies on a standard. Instead, you’re asking another artist with a different perspective to re-conceive of your work and bring their own thing to the table. I like that combination, and I love combining my arrangements and my originals with other art forms.
I think my music is supportive, rather than obtrusive. I think it has intrinsic interests of its own, but it can also be a canvas, laying the foundation for my collaborators. I think poets appreciate someone saying, “I’m going to support what you’re doing” in this way, and I always use the program to make the parts of the whole at their strongest together. Every sound on there is something I’ve thought about and tried to make work, and my music is suited to multimedia collaborations of this this type.
People really like it; audiences respond to it. I also think that hip-hop has conditioned modern audiences to be able to perceive music and hear it as a narrative, then also hear the spoken-word as part of that narrative. They’re able to keep it altogether when they’re listening as rappers lay down rhythms of their own on top of the music. I don’t think that contemporary audiences are challenged by that, and that may be why they respond so positively to collaborations of this type. Hip-hop has been around for forty years now, so it certainly has conditioned the listening habits of modern audiences. This is a modern program with a contemporary sound, so come on out and experience The Poets & A Song.
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