New Jaimie Branch and poignant blackout poems hitting hard this week
The late trumpeter gives us one more work of indefinable music, and poet Crystal Simone Smith carves poetry out of a George Saunders novel
When I saw Jaimie Branch perform last July, I marveled at her creativity and reveled in the knowledge of what was to come. She already had performed in Iowa City several times, so I knew I would have the opportunity to watch and listen as she grew as an artist.
A little more than a month later, she was gone, leaving behind a compact but dazzling catalog. I started to explore her less-known work as a side performer on others' projects, resigned to the fact that what I had was what I was going to get.
That makes today's announcement of a new album from Branch's Fly or Die project a bittersweet affair. Yes, it's new music, but it's also likely to be the last we will hear from one of the most creative voices in whatever you may call the genre that she was quickly making her own.
At heart, Branch was a jazz trumpeter. Her debut album under her own name, 2017's Fly or Die, is more adventurous than most, but it is still pretty clearly jazz. Five years later, in the course of a residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, she was making music that might have been rooted in jazz, but was blending dance, trance, no wave, noise, and more into a sort of post-fusion, post-everything stew that was uniquely hers.
Recordings from those performances will be issued as what I assume is Branch's final album of new music, Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)). The album is due August 25, almost a year to the day of her passing.
Her bandmates on those dates -- Lester St. Louis, Jason Ajemian, Chad Taylor on cello, bass, and drums, as well as about a dozen other instruments -- provide liner notes for the album.
“jaimie never had small ideas. She always thought big. The minute you told her she couldn’t do something, or that something would be too difficult to accomplish, the more determined and focused she became. And this album is big. Far bigger and more demanding — for us, and for you — than any other Fly or Die record. For this, jaimie wanted to play with longer forms, more modulations, more noise, more singing, and as always, grooves and melodies. She was a dynamic melodicist. jaimie wanted this album to be lush, grand and full of life, just as she was. Every time we take a listen, we feel the deep imprint of her all over the music, and we see all of us making it together.”
She worked on the album in the month before her death, leaving only mixing tweaks, final titles, and artwork unfinished. Her family, bandmates, and record label pulled the rest together for what looks to be a beautiful package and a fitting tribute.
I had the chance to see Branch three times here in Iowa City over five years, all thanks to Chris Wiersema, either through the Witching Hour Festival or his Feed Me Weird Things series. Twice she was with Fly or Die, once with drummer Jason Nazary as Anteloper. All stick in the memory more than most shows. Those, along with her three Fly or Die albums, three with Anteloper, and various side projects, have made the last year bearable. I'm happy to soon add another to that stash. It is music that will feel fresh for a long time, because it will take a good long while for the rest of the world to catch up to what Branch was doing.
Dark Testament, Crystal Simone Smith
Another piece of art that hits hard this week is Dark Testament, a collection of erasure poems by Crystal Simone Smith. For those who don't know, blackout poems take existing writing and, through a process of blacking out words and phrases, creates new poems from what remains.
I first paid attention to the practice in Mary Ruefle's 2006 book A Little White Shadow. Here, the poet took a small, 19th century book called A Little White Shadow and, using White-out, covered most of each page to reveal a small poem from what was left. These were haiku-like in some places, aphoristic yet surprisingly poignant in others.
I've been fascinated by the process ever since, a writer seeing something within something else, a word sculptor cutting away prose to reveal the poem within. In my admittedly limited experience with the practice, it is usually done with something fairly anonymous. This makes Smith's new book all the more daring, for she took one of the most heralded novels of the past decade as her source material: George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo.
In a conversation with Saunders that closes the book, Smith says she was reading the novel during the protests after the murder of George Floyd. A passage resonated and "certain words began to illuminate the pages, becoming a poem and new narrative."
Many of the poems are from the point of view of titular Black victims of police violence, such as Tamir Rice, Breonna Taylor, and Trayvon Martin. Others are in the voice of family members, still others offer a broader collective voice. "White Witness" hits particularly hard:
As always at Sun's rising, all
Was Ours, all the Stones,
Trees, Shrubs, Hills, Valleys, Streams, Pondlets, Marshes,
Patches of Light & Shade,
Much that was new & Strange &
Unnerving had occur'd this night. We
Watched it all unfold from On-High: safe, separate, &
Free--the way we liked it
Saunders' prose, so much of it dealing with Abraham Lincoln's grief of the death of his son, Willie, offers so much for Smith to work with, but the artistry here is in crafting, through what she takes away, something that feels both specific to each situation and timelessly relevant to the ongoing struggle.
Credit to Saunders for allowing the book's publication. "I just felt a deep sense of wanting to support a fellow artist who had done something so wonderful that seemed to be coming right from her heart," he says in the book.
But the triumph here is Smith's. Dark Testament is a moving, meditative work that continues to resonate long after the final page is turned.