Poetry melds with music in Ecosound Ensemble show at Northside Stage

Picture this — a happening in a time before many of you were born. The room is dark, you can imagine it filled with smoke, people in turtlenecks sipping drinks, seated, eyes closed, their bodies pulsing to verses and stanzas and musical riffs on flutes, strange drums — and a piano that sets the place on fire. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen.

With his eyes tightly shut and his head thrown back, a poet is saying things you’ve never heard, poetry underpinned by music that seems to grow spontaneously from the words.

And if you can imagine all of that, you’ll have just an idea of the synthesized experience that is the EcoSound Ensemble, playing for one night this spring on the Northside Stage from 7-9 p.m. Friday, March 25.

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And for this performance, along with the ensemble, comes the piano fireworks of Bob Malone, a genre-crossing master whom the New Yorker has called, “a keyboard wizard,” and who has played with the likes of Ringo Starr, Avril Lavigne, Bruce Springsteen and John Fogerty across the years.

Yet not all of the onstage talent that excels in creating the magical fusion of word and sound is “imported.” Indeed, every one of the artists who make up the Ecosound Ensemble is a maestro of his own art and luckily situated here in Tallahassee.

• Longineu Parsons, Associate Professor of Music at Florida A&M University, is a singular trumpeter who has played with Cab Calloway, Nat Adderley, Branford Marsalis, among other greats. He also heads Tribal Records here in the capital city.

• Michael Bakan plays drums and percussion and is Professor of Ethnomusicology and head of the World Music Ensembles program at Florida State University. He is a master of the Balinese gamelan, and has performed with John Cage, Tito Puente, and George Clinton.

• Brian Hall (upright bass) is Associate Professor of Music at FAMU and a composer. He is equally at home in rock, jazz, or world music.

Michael Rothenberg and “let it all fly” pianist Bob Malone are excited to be together again.

Malone says that he loves the feeling of “not knowing what’s going to happen onstage when we play together. We’ve played in St. Louis, Chicago, New Orleans, and L.A since around 2000.” They have also written songs and recorded together. But it is the theatrical magic that is unplanned that thrills them both.

To see the long-haired Rothenberg, intense, speaking poetry almost as electric as if he were speaking in tongues, is to see a man moved by Art. The Ecosound Ensemble’s combination of inspired musicians, who, each in their own sphere let their art converse, is not often experienced in Tallahassee.

Rothenberg, has said, “This combining of poetry and music in performance is an accelerated exchange of information between artists, it allows for flux and evolution, and moves us to create beyond the restrictions of our separate disciplines. We mix it up, open up, and learn to collaborate. There is an important conversation taking place in this kind of performance.”

And Rothenberg thinks he has captured more of it in his newest recording, "Dystopic Relapse," featuring Parsons, Bakan, Hall and Rothenberg.

With liner notes in poetic narrative style by Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor David Kirby, and produced by Longineu Parsons’ Tribal Records in Tallahassee, Rothenberg once again melds the fervently-felt spoken word with music that speaks its own language.

Kirby writes: “That’s what poetry and music are for, especially when they are in spirited dialog with each other as they are here. Not that art fixes everything that’s broken, either. It can’t teach you to speak another language or be punctual. But if you listen up, friend, these four world-class artists will help you see, feel, and think a little better than you were doing when you jumped out of bed this morning and ran off to make or miss your appointments. As I say, it’s a gift.”

You can almost see Michael Rothenberg nodding to the beat — maybe even a Beat beat— and agreeing with Kirby. “I believe poetry, and all art, has a way of peeling back illusion and cutting to the core of reality,” he says. “All art has a way of healing and articulating the needs of humanity.”

A high objective, but it just may happen at the Northside Stage on March 25.

If you go

What: Michael Rothenberg with Bob Malone & the Ecosound Ensemble

When: 7-9 p.m. Friday, March 25; free and open to the public

Where: Northside Stage, Northside Community Center, 8005 Oak Grove Road

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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Poetry, music meld in Escosound Ensemble at Northside Stage