Ken Nordine with Howard Levy

March 11, 2000

The Old Town School of Folk Music

Chicago, IL

Early Show

As I sit down to write this review I am realizing how hard it is to describe Ken Nordine. If you have heard his work before you probably know what I mean. Ken got started in the 50's during the time of the beats. Back then it was a fairly common practice to recite poetry over improvised music. Even when the beatniks disappeared Ken continued to expand the ideas of the beats and created something he calls Word Jazz.

What is Word Jazz? Word jazz involves music and words working together, creating rhythms and pointing to revelations that neither could have reached with out the help of each other. Not songs exactly, but not not songs either.

What helps to make Word Jazz successful is the unique talents of its two main collaborators, Howard Levy and Ken Nordine. You may know Howard as the former keyboard/harmonica player for Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. His music is a perfect foil for Ken's vocal musings. Howard is an incredibly gifted technical player as well as creative improviser. Ken Nordine is a master of finding the meaning and humor in even the most common of things. He is just as likely to rap about a speck of dust as he is the big bang. On top of his observational skills he also possesses one of the greatest voices I have ever heard. He is not a singer but he is a speaker. His voice seems to come form somewhere beyond his physical body. It is otherdimensional and can be funny or ominous or more likely both at the same time.

My friends Josh and Bri as well as my Dad and I all attended this show at the Old Town School of Folk Music's new location on Lincoln Avenue in Chicago. We are all veterans of past Ken Nordine shows, but he doesn't play very often so we always try to catch him when he plays. There were two shows that night and we had tickets for the first one. There was a big crowd waiting in the lobby when we got there. A combination of younger hippies and older public radio listeners testified to Ken's cross over appeal.

We grabbed some ice cold bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon and found our seats. The old Town has a small theatre with no bad seats in the house. We were just off to the left of the stage near the front. I saw that there was an opening band called Marvin Tate and Desettlement that were going to kick off the show. I wondered what kind of band could pull off opening for Ken Nordine. Once I saw them, it made perfect sense. Marvin Tate and Desettlement has about 10 members who all have unique and odd appearances. Marvin himself can be picked out by the pipecleaners in his hair. Their music mostly consists of funky groove oriented rhythms augmented by Marvin's semirapped poetry and 3 back up singers adding color. Throw in a cello and you get the idea. They were actually pretty cool and I enjoyed there set a lot, although I am pretty sure that the entire band are actually aliens who crash landed on earth and are marooned here so they decided to start a band. Nothing wrong with that though.

Marvin and the band finished up and they had mostly won over the crowd. Next up Ken and his band including Howard Levy on piano, Ken's son Kris on guitar, a bass player and a drummer took the stage and started with several pieces from Ken's Colors project. Because of Ken's great voice he has partly made a living by doing voiceovers for radio and TV. At some point in the 60's or 70's a paint company commissioned Ken to write and perform a series of commercials about the different colors of paint that the company sold. Ken took the idea and now has done dozens of colors. He gets at the heart of the feeling that a certain color evokes. For instance purple is a royal color so it is regal, proper and full of pomp and circumstance. As ken waxed about the qualities of purple. Howard and the band improvised something like a royal march in tandem with the words.

The music and word interplay continued throughout the evening with consistently great results. Ken told personal stories, read narratives and performed personal poems. The band was able to switch gears between blues, jazz and interplanetary music effortlessly.

Ken is 79 years old and at times looked frail but when he got into a piece he was full of energy and humor. I love the way he finds wonderment anywhere, like in the sunlight glistening on the ripples in the water which he talked about in a piece where the band was joined by vocalist Bonnie Herman, a frequent collaborator.

I got into listening to Ken Nordine through the Grateful Dead. He recorded an album with Jerry Garcia and David Grisman in the early 90's. Before that I had never heard of him although I had unknowingly heard his voice in commercials. I feel lucky to have come into contact with the work of this amazing artist. Ken rarely plays outside of Chicago, but if he comes to your area, check out his show.