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