Ted Burke, an American poet, critic, and bookseller, runs an infamous used bookstore, D.G. Wills Books, in La Jolla, CA. The shop is known for its cozy interior, scholarly collections, and high-profile visitors, including the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Christopher Hitchens, Billy Collins, Gary Snyder, Irish Chang, Oliver Stone, Sean Penn, and Jim Belushi, to name a few. In many ways, to know Ted Burke is to know his bookstore and its many guests, in that his writing style is one that infuses the intelligence, artistry, and wit of each person who walks through his door. Given the particular nuance towards rhythm and jazz in his poetry (Burke is also a highly accomplished harmonica player), it is no wonder that composer Libby Larsen leaned into his works when commissioned to write a song cycle for this album. When she first conceived the work, she wrote, “For this piece I want to be inspired by our own language, our own rhythms and the way we (our culture) use ordinary, every-person objects (like a cigarette, a radio, a cardboard box you find in your garage…) to transport us into our interior selves where we articulate emotions that are universal.” The result is indeed transporting, each song revealing a unique corner of Burke’s writing and the world he inhabits.

REXALL

Larsen’s first song opens with an infectious, smokey blues riff that grooves throughout most of the movement. Just five measures in, we also begin to hear a faint but distinct quote of the Tennessee Waltz, a popular tune by Redd Stewart and Pee Wee King that reached the height of its fame in 1950 with a recording by Patti Page. Tie into this mix the name of the poem, Rexall, a popular, mid-20th century American drugstore chain, and it is unmistakable, even before the singer introduces any text, that we are in the 1950s American deep south. The poem frames a moment in time where a father and son are waiting, one more patiently than the other, for a mother to return to the car from her shopping. The son wants a comic book and is on the verge of a meltdown, humorously portrayed by abrupt, dissonant major seconds in the piano’s treble register. Larsen’s unending blues riff in the left hand serves as a demarcation of time, like the second hand of a clock ticking, amidst the “crying jag” and “sniffles” of the son’s tantrum. Time is suspended only when the father lights his Old Gold cigarette (another mid-century nod) and turns up the car radio to listen to Patti Page sing her famous tune. Here, Larsen’s bass groove 14 halts and we enter a surreal sound-world in G major with another unmistakable quote of the Tennessee Waltz, perhaps a musical representation of the father’s internal escape from his crying son and the waiting game he is playing with his wife. He imagines her browsing up and down the aisles, which brings him out of his fantasy waltz and back into the gnawing blues groove. “Not everything is funny or for fun,” he tells his son. “Sometimes you just have to wait.” The singer sings a blues note on the word “wait,” obscuring the key from a minor mode to a major one, while the bass groove gets the final word, slowing to a quiet end.

MY FATHER INTERCEPTS MY TRIP TO ANOTHER PLANET

In every way that Larsen’s previous song setting portrays the passing of time, her second song does the opposite. Here, Burke writes an autobiographical vignette of his childhood as he plays with an old cardboard refrigerator box in his garage. Larsen’s opening, marked “unbound from gravity or progression,” is mesmerizing as the pitches seem pulled out of thin air in a slow, floating fashion. Eventually, we are pulled into a D pedal tone, contrasted by a repeating diminished-seventh interval in the right hand, providing an impressionistic ground for the singer to tread on. Burke’s text is full of boyhood wonder, describing the holes he has cut with his pocketknife and the ankles and outfits he can observe from his fort. Soon, the fort becomes an “ever evolving ship,” and Larsen’s “unbound” sound palate with fast moving 16ths at the fourth. Sextuplet repeated note figures in the right hand paint a peculiar picture of the ship’s controls before a written-out doppler effect in the piano depicts the race car that the spaceship has suddenly morphed into. Whole tone patterns are heard throughout the movement, most notably when the race car suddenly changes into an airplane. Next it is a “fast train,” then a “jet,” or “rocket to the stars,” each shift met with clever musical inventions to depict the next traveling machine. The 16ths begin to mellow as Burke writes, “back in time for Flintstones…” and soon we return to our unbound existence, as the boy opens his eyes to discover his father carrying him off to bed. Larsen quotes the Cole Porter song, I Love Paris as Burke describes his father singing the song’s words as he drifts off to sleep. The piano cadences on what feels very much like a dominant chord as Larsen re-employs her D pedal tones, while the Cole Porter melody seems to find its tonal center in G major.

MACHINE HEAD

Larsen begins her set of songs with a blues and ends with a “hard driving boogie” — the perfect musical companion to a barrage of fast-moving text: Burke’s 15 Machine Head seems to find its root in beat poetry as it describes, or perhaps laments, an ever-changing world of machines. Larsen employs a chromatic 16th-note motive that rarely stops; instead, it evolves with the text by way of changing articulation, octave displacements, modulations, and other creative devices. As with a well-crafted jazz improvisation, there are moments where the text seems suddenly to adjust rhythm and even stop, just momentarily. Larsen meets these moments with a musical halt, most notably over an F-sharp-seven sonority at the grand declamation of “machines of gratuitous good looks.” These pauses are never long, however, and the incessant 16ths grow increasingly emphatic, while always remaining mechanical in nature. Spastic rhythms in the right hand begin to surface, as though the poem’s machines are beginning to short circuit. But it is the singer who is eventually overcome, exclaiming, “My machines know all my sounds, the rhythm of bad habits they are powerless to match.” Larsen saves the highest sung note — a sustained high A-flat — for the last word of the entire cycle. The machines barrel onward and only stop when the poet runs out of text. The marriage of this boogie rhythm to Burke’s descriptive and rhythmic words creates a perfect ending to this inventive and eclectic set of songs.

Program notes by Johnathan King, from the album "Show Me the Way"

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