William Parker's Raining on the Moon - Corn Meal Dance

AUM Fidelity 43

Poetry and lyrics have populated William Parker’s artistic pencil box since his boyhood days as a fixture at the Brooklyn Public Library. Alone amongst the stacks, he read voraciously, tying together a worldview from a multiplicity of cultural sources and translating it into verse. In recent years, Raining on the Moon has served as his primary incubator for songs hatched from these multicultural eggs. A conventional quintet with vocalist, the ensemble bridges the bassist/composer’s post bop and free proclivities, his own instrument often in charge of the girder work. Songs revolve around carefully constructed and inclusively minded cosmologies. Parker recasts Native and African American historical heroes as benevolent deities in opposition to less concretely defined forces of tyranny, violence and apathy. The underlying messages – universal love, social justice, human rights, and the like - are clear and transmitted in language that might seem naïve and transparent to some. Lyrics like the softly entreated chorus: “I am your brother, please don’t cut my throat” leave little in the way of contextual nuance. Still, Parker’s sincerity is never in doubt and it’s hard not to find one’s cynicism cleansed away along the route.

The sounds are more accessible than earlier similarly structured Parker ensembles like In Order to Survive, or even the earlier incarnation of this band featured on a self-titled Thirsty Ear release from 2002. He extends the tenor of a grass roots affair by opening the set with a false start, hardly the gesture of a man with ego-affirmation at the top of his mind. Bass vamps serve as the skeletal supports of most pieces, the musical roots wound around the Impulse! catalog of the late Sixties. Parker isn’t prone to composing for chordal instruments, but Erin Yamamoto’s piano fits right in, grounding the music with gilded patterns that stress structure over dissonance without fencing freer moments off. Trumpeter Louis Barnes and altoist Rob Brown improvise expressively and expertly, but it’s Leena Conquest’s pipes that dominate by virtue of their range and lexical urgency. Her gospel-inflected duet with Yamamoto on “Prayer” can safely be called a tour de force. All tracks are faithfully recorded and the disc’s accompanying booklet contains complete lyrics, liners and full color photos of band and tile art. While the music and words sometimes make for simplistic and slightly slippery fits, the emotive reciprocity suffusing them remains sound. The payoff is plenty of that intangible quality called “heart”.

AUM Fidelity turns a decade old this year and this album is part of the celebration. Caps doffed to Steven Joerg for keeping the ship afloat through seas of constantly beset by shifting currents and obstacles. Creator willing, the label will ring in its twentieth anniversary in like fashion.

~ Derek Taylor