A Life Supreme Show Review [ARTICLE]

Poetry Show Review
By Janice Mather, The Tribune (Nassau, Bahamas)

For lovers of lyrics and fans of thoughtful rhythms, A Life Supreme proved to be the most satisfying poetry event of the season. Visiting artist Larry Knight, and his smooth spoken word works, many of which came from his CD, also entitled A Life Supreme, lived up to every bit of promise the album had suggested.

Knight’s delivery – confident, impassioned, and powerful – was flawless, from the first note of The Myth of Tomorrow to the final poem, which evoked an encouraging message of spreading wings preparing to take powerful flight. Mirrors Beauty Therapy and Spa, where the show was held Sunday night, may seem like an unlikely venue for the summer’s first solid show. But, with a commanding voice that needed no microphone, and words that demanded – and received – complete silence from listeners, Knight transformed an ordinary room into the wide crossroads of an old Southern road, painting word-pictures of a piano-playing, soul-singing queen – and of hose and dog-controlled civil rights uprisings, and lynched black boys “slung from southern trees/rhythmically swinging/like macabre metronomes.”

Before Knight took to the stage on Sunday evening, home-grown poets set the pace in an open-mic segment with a level of quality that would have suggested that performers had been scheduled. Bodine Johnson, a comedian-style poet, got the audience grinning with rhymes about a hypocritical church deacon whose sins find him out, while Nadine Thomas-Brown bent genre boundaries, straddling poetry and reggae with rhythmic chat. Carlton Watson mused on the shoddy state of “black love”, then spanned the globe with world-commentary poetry that questioned why Rwanda’s genocide has been largely forgotten while 9/11 remains pre-eminent in many minds.

Then the lights dipped, and, from the back of the room, a sonorous song reminiscent of old spirituals began the performance. Taking listeners whirling through the American South, Knight used words to pay homage to musical greats Nina Simone and Miles Davis and to evoke painful pictures of activism and Civil Rights struggles. Interspersing spoken lyrics with bouts of song, he tackled the haunting lines of Strange Fruit, which bitterly describes lynching, then later teased listeners with just a few lines of Eyes on the Prize.

Between power-packed spoken – and sung – word spat out with a fervour often only seen in the Sunday morning performances of many a Baptist preacher, Knight also spoke of love, and of growing up in Louisiana, assuring audiences that while his work is strongly grounded in the US South, his themes are no stranger to the Bahamian shores, or to anywhere.

Speaking about the poem On Being Black in America, he told the audience “The title could be erased and it could be applicable in the Bahamas... Because I’ve been here for two weeks and I’ve seen a lot of stuff . . .”

Knight, who said in an earlier interview that he expected his material to be applicable to Bahamian audiences despite its very Black-American content, wove local references into Chaos in E Minor, a powerful rant that contrasts classics like John Coltrane and Nina Simone with the contemporary “roar of an audience as they sit/ waiting, with guts churning, hearts racing, palms sweating/ for announcer to sing ‘ladies and gentlemen, we proudly present for your listening enjoyment this evening, the one, the only/ Brittany Spears.” The original version then describes a young, undiscovered black girl, in contrast, singing somewhere in a house in Jacksonville; for the Nassau audience, it was aptly – and successfully – adapted to “a young girl in Fox Hill stands in a bathroom and sings heavenly into a hairbrush”. As well as describing classic Black American musicians, Knight broke out with a recollection of “Ray Munnings making Nassau a little bit funkier, singing ‘Nassau’s got rhythm, Nassau’s got soul!’”

“I know the fourth verse too,” Knight laughed, to approving whoops and claps from the audience.

“[I wanted] just to connect with the audience and to let them know that no matter where the piece was written, it’s still applicable wherever it’s being performed,” explained Knight, after the show. “It was just to give the audience the opportunity connect, and establish that link.”

Even without tangibly reaching out to Bahamians with familiar names, his content and strong delivery guaranteed that the audience would relate. If the applause was anything to judge by, the audience was pleased with the power-packed performance that combined fury at the past, passion for positive fights, Miles Davis-style ear play, lyrical story time, and old-style spirituals with new-time commentary. Only one question remained after the show: when next?

That remains to be seen. But, says Knight, “Definitely, I will be back.” And, if word spreads, it’s likely that next time will be another well-attended treat for ears, heart, and mind.

Published Wednesday, June 20, 2005 by The Tribune

Bahamian Literary Minds and the American in Transit

(from left) Michael C. Pintard, performance poet, storyteller, author, and motivational speaker; Bodine Johnson, Island 102.9 FM radio personality and poet; Dr. Carlton Watson, professor of physics at the College of the Bahamas and poet; Janice Lynn Mather, Tribune reporter and poet; Larry Knight, (the American); and Nadine Thomas-Brown, Nassau Guardian reporter/columnist and poet at the A Life Supreme show in Nassau, Bahamas in July 2005.

A Life Supreme Review [ARTICLE]

Poetry: Louisiana Native’s Sound on A Life Supreme
By Janice Mather, The Tribune (Nassau, Bahamas)

Expect lyrical twisting and turning and conscious speech spoken in confident tones at this weekend’s poetry event featuring American artist Larry Knight.

Knight, a Louisiana native, hits the local spoken word scene Sunday night with his show A Life Supreme. He brings an American-South-inspired sound that, he says, will provide Bahamians with something new.

“I want people to feel something that they’ve never felt before,” says Knight, who is also a teacher, photographer and avid jazz fan. He is visiting the Bahamas until early next week.

Providing emotions and sensations never experienced before may not be easy; many poetry fans are familiar with expressions of hope and oppression, ancestry and lost ancestry, violence and a struggle for cultural meaning, themes that are evident in the spoken word tracks on Knight’s latest album, also entitled A Life Supreme, which presents poetry and music from his longer upcoming album entitled Affinity.

What he does bring is the perspective of a 1970s and 1980s product, tackling poignant memories of the civil rights movement, making sense of a past he experienced second-hand but still struggles to come to terms with. That’s clear on his album, a 12-track trip from slave ships to current day beer-clutching head bobbing Saturday night partying. And while the sentiments he expresses may be familiar, he offsets carefully crafted poetics with background sounds that range from mellow music to beats as sultry and deliberate as a slow-walking woman, to wailing sirens, rioting crowds and the haunting bark of police dogs.

A Life Supreme starts out with Knight’s pure speech, which he uses to paint a verbal picture of a guitar-playing griot singing into the Southern air. Music eases its way into the album with the evocative ‘Motherless Child’ before the auditory journey continues with the heady beat that backs ‘A Blue Southern Night,’ a spoken performance that’s humid and divine. Again, Knight uses tongue as paintbrush, and paintbrush as pen to spin a narrative.

By the time Knight reaches ‘Chaos in E Minor,’ where he laments “the raspy vocals of Nina Simone overpowered by the low tech drone of some / pre-manufactured studio siren / a 21st century diva wailing against the background beats of an old-school sample / a form of recycled culture, instantly packaged for the masses”, the ear has been lulled, wooed, won over and entirely hooked.

“It’s not only an American thing,” says Knight, of his work. He tackles emotional topics with a controlled tone of voice and deliberate words, doling out rhymes skillfully but sparingly, pauses poignantly interjected into the performance.

“I was a product of the ‘70s and the ‘80s, I didn’t go through the civil rights movement… but I’ve taken my blindness away and (am) seeing what it would have been like to be in that position,” says Knight. He is hoping Bahamian audiences will, through his work, do the same.

“The 17th (of July) is going to be my first experience with a Bahamian audience, and an international audience,” says Knight. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t somewhat nervous about how it’s going to be received.”

The poet, who has performed in Louisiana, Georgia, New York, Washington DC and Florida, decided to try his work out in Nassau after talking with a friend at Mirrors Therapy and Spa on Solider Road, where the show will be held. And if his album keeps its promise, that show will be a treat for those of any background.

Published Wednesday, July 13, 2005 by The Tribune