Wynton’s Blog

He and She was a return to the endlessly rich subject of relations and relationships

We recorded He and She in 2007. It was a return to the endlessly rich subject of relations and relationships which was the topic of Blue Interlude, my first extended composition. The music was written to an original poem about a man who is taught the basic arithmetic of life, love, and loss by the woman of his desires. They both ride that untamable wave of confusion and coherence that drives us mad with boundless joy and delirious with untold suffering.

Both poem and music are about being alone versus being together, and also about the back and forth dance of loneliness and togetherness, and then about perceiving the “all of it” in the ever changing but constant flow of time (as it affects the ‘what is’ and the ‘what we remember’ based on the ‘what became’).

The poem has a few basic recurring themes as does the music:
1) elementary school addition and the shifting relationship of each number to the next in accordance to function;
2) the fixed and variable positions of the sun and the moon in the sky alone and in relation to each other;
3) a narrative about falling in and out of love;
4) everything and nothing at all;
5) the running commentary of mythic country bluesmen.

The blues idiom makes the invisible visible. It is a highly metaphoric lyrical language full of musical symbolism and mysticism. It IS the seamless surfer of irreconcilable opposites and it lives in the major/minor, happy/sad, Janus headed proposition of life, AND it is also the Holy Ghost essence that exist above, below and around, before, during, and after (and in the always ever-after) whatever is taken place.

And then there is the inevitable “ashes to ashes” of all love affairs and of all life as we know it. The great everything to nothing. The lyric refrain in one of Buddy Bolden’s most famous songs, Funky Butt, says, “I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say,” meaning that when all is said and done, MAYBE he didn’t say anything at all.

This piece is entitled a Train, a Banjo and a Chicken Wing. The last track on the CD, it represents all you need to survive: a train- a concept of freedom; a banjo- a vehicle to sing, dance and play for the expression, cultivation and elevation of your spirit and consciousness; and a chicken wing-something to eat that may also have some type of voodoo magic dust in it to change your fate to positive.

Wynton

Posted on December 30th, 2015