The Paha Sapa Give-Back
The Paha Sapa Give-Back
New York City, NY
| The Paha Sapa Give-Back - EPiTunes Artist's PageiTunes Album Page | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Song Title | Time | Price | |
| 1. | The Green Automobile | 08:30 | $0.99 |
| 2. | The Paha Sapa Give-Back | 15:01 | |
*Please note that 'Winter Count' is only available on the CD format, for licensing reasons. Don't miss out!
Composer Jerome Kitzke’s ongoing concern with the American landscape and how we live in it manifests in full flower on The Paha Sapa Give-Back, his first all-original release in fifteen years. The political and the personal are interwoven in three intensely theatrical pieces whose music thrives on the spirit of Plains Indian song, driving jazz, Beat Generation poetry, and contemporary classical music. The result is a sound that is uniquely and bracingly American, where freedom and ritual converge.
Language that is stinging, tender and humorous figures prominently in these pieces where the poems of Allen Ginsberg, Aeschylus, John Scott, Anonymous, Helen Mackay, Harold Pinter, Walt Whitman and Rumi are brought to ecstatic life in Kitzke’s hands. The disc begins with Kitzke’s rollicking account of “The Green Automobile,” his 2000 setting of Ginsberg’s 1953 poem about friendship and love, for amplified speaking pianist. On the title track, Kitzke’s band, The Mad Coyote, gives a hard-driving reading of this 1993 exhortation to give the Black Hills back to the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho nations, thus honoring the 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaty. Rounding out the record, actor Jennifer Kathryn Marshall teams with ETHEL and percussionist Barbara Merjan in a searing performance of Kitzke’s 2008 anti-war work, “Winter Count,” which uses the aforementioned poets’ words as a libretto.
An image of friendship, a call for justice, and a protestation of war, all given forth in Jerome Kitzke’s inimitable musical language. That is The Paha Sapa Give-Back.
CLASSICAL-MODERN MUSIC REVIEW
“There is an intricate rhythmic timing of recitation and solo piano that gives you plenty of dynamics and vocal-musical interaction. The piano part fits the text quite well and has its own very attractive way about it. The recitation has great energy … It's a bundle of almost jazzy energy that appealingly reproduces the frantic quality of the Beat Generation in sound. … Kitzke gives us much more than the obvious here. … It is original, contemporary, well-executed.” [FULL ARTICLE]
—Greg Edwards
MUSICWEB INTERNATIONAL
“[A] tour de force but great fun, with plenty of manic jazz inflections and fragments of walking bass to go along with moments of reflective atmosphere and frantic improvisatory playing and following of word-rhythms. … [Y]ou are sure to emerge "sadder and wiser", from the opening words — ‘The first casualty of was is Truth” — to the sublime musical simplicity which accompanies the final "pondering the themes thou lovest best, Night, sleep, death and the stars." … This is a CD with something to say, and it says it very well indeed. A bit like those cunning street acts which tempt you in with comedy and then deliver a more serious message, we are softened up by The Green Automobile before being clobbered by injustice and the sufferings of war, but with the quality and sincerity on offer here I am happy to go along with the journey on which Kitzke takes us.” [FULL ARTICLE]
—Dominy Clements
