Jazz musician Phil Venable and North Carolina poet laureate Jaki Shelton Green joined Aaron Keck on Live and Local this week, to celebrate the release of a jazz/spoken word project called “Bringing the Light.”

Listen to “Bringing the Light” on Bandcamp.

“Bringing the Light” is a three-track collaboration between Venable and Shelton Green – who have also worked with each other in the past, on an earlier spoken-word album of Green’s. For this project, Venable says he was inspired by the challenging of returning to normal (or something like it) in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic and the Trump presidency – and the extent to which we’re all still struggling to get to that ‘normal’ place. (This is not a new thing: Venable says today’s reality reminds him of the disruptions and tumult of the late 1960s.)

Given those challenges – and our collective anxiety and despair about the present and future – Venable says he wanted to suggest a possible “path forward.” That was the genesis of “Bringing the Light,” which begins with a track called “The Valley” (representing our current doldrums) and rises, musically and metaphorically, toward the sky. The project’s centerpiece is “The Climb,” a ten-minute piece with Venable’s music backing a “love letter to the ancestors” by Shelton Green. (She says Venable had asked her, a bit cryptically, to write an “invocation.”)

In addition to Venable and Shelton Green, “Bringing the Light” also features music from saxophonist Crowmeat Bob and percussionists Tommy Jackson and Ken Moshesh – and vocals from Jennifer Evans on the EP’s final track, “The View.”

Phil Venable and Jaki Shelton Green stopped by Live and Local to discuss “Bringing the Light” and play “The Climb.” Listen:

 

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