Blue Matter

Blue Matter was commissioned by the Grant Park Music Festival and as 2020 has been named “the year of music in Chicago” by the Department of Cultural and Social Events (DCASE), this work celebrates the legacy of Chicago music.  Blue Matter was originally inspired by a poem titled “Ray” by the brilliant Natalie Richardson, former National student poet laureate in 2012-13.  In this poem, we are confronted by the necessity and the deepest spiritual essence of the blues through the lens of Ray Charles; “I was born into blues, but I’ll be…some days, it just ain’t enough.”  The power of this inspiration lead to commissioning additional poems by Natalie representing two other musical genres important to the cultural life of this city; namely Jazz and Hip-Hop.  Jazz as conveyed in the first movement, “The Music Knows”, suggests that improvisation is not so much leading rather than following the spiritual force of the music itself; a force that knows where it needs to go. Resilience resounds in this personal narrative where better days are promised and fulfilled through close attention to that “pitter-pat” that “blitz of sound coming from a future time”.  The music searches continuously, but finally a bassline that has been insistent from the beginning discovers its fate at the end when the poet proclaims, “the music so wise it comes from a promised land”.  In the second movement, “Ray”, we experience the blues in a three stop Ray Charles tour (Indiana, Chicago, Los Angeles).  The music, like Ray’s “slow-going high” is a sanctuary, a defense from the world, a faithful lover that sooths the soul and yet, sometimes “it just ain’t enough”.  The setting is turbulent with sounds reminiscent of wailing slide guitars (Chicago’s electric blues) and haunted by the specter of Ray’s beloved piano heard cascading down from the heavens at every highpoint of this movement as the poet recites in Ray’s voice.  The last movement, “Hip-Hop Ode”, immerses in the colors, the smells, the feel, the sounds and ultimately the necessity of Hip-Hop in the proclamation of the soul, “which is another way of saying I’ve seen a prayer released, somewhere a hum, music blitzing from a stereo you can’t see, somewhere a hymn, here a drum, tattoo sleeves, boys turned men by a slight breeze”.  The Chicago Bucket Boys are the inspiration of this work and the sounds of the buckets remind us that hip hop is everywhere;  everywhere “the Bucket Boys drum”, everywhere there are “black girls with fanta colored weaves”, everywhere there are “gold chains and tattoo ink sleeves” and every time “one body cradles another”.   All of this music, all of this “blue matter”, this spirit substance that makes our lives richer and allows us to feel the depth of the human soul comes to us courtesy of the great migration of African American’s from the Southern states.  We owe them everything when it comes to laying the foundation that is the beat of this city.