Not Black and White
a jazz musical
in gratitude to Louis Armstrong
Clyde R. Forsberg, Jr.
Kingston Jazz-Theatre Productions
2001
29 tracks, disc 1
7 tracks, disc 2
Attempting to review this release as though it were simply a musical performance would be an exercise in futility. I'm not even going to try. Clyde Forsberg's Not Black and White is more than just music. The first disc is a powerful, almost indefinable theatrical experience, a philosophical exercise, and a whole lot of catharsis. Taken seriously, it can be emotionally draining. And Clyde R. Forsberg, Jr. is nothing if not serious. The second disc features performances of freeform jazz, what Forsberg calls "derangements" of Louis Armstrong songs, all with a haunting, dreamlike quality that is sometimes calming and sometimes disturbing.
Forsberg's play and the concert of related music which follows it was recorded live at the 4th stage of Canada's National Arts Centre in Ottawa. Listening to the play without seeing it is like listening to some of the more esoteric drama on CBC radio. There is minimal narrative, but the music carries the transitions, drawing the listener from one scene to the next. While knowing the background of the author adds several dimensions to the story, there's something elemental and universal at its core that requires no explanation at all.
This play demands that you drop everything and just listen. The words reach out and grab you. The emotions grip and tear at you. Try this, though. Put the play on and then walk around the house doing other things. Remember years ago, when you were just starting out and lived in that low rent room with the paper thin walls. Played in the background, the voices of this play invade the room with all the pathos of that angry family whose voices had come through the walls of your low rent dwelling. You may begin to feel like you had once lived next door to the Forsberg family.
It may even be that you recognize some elements of your own family in Forsberg's. You may recognize only bits and pieces and they may have not been so powerful or so near the surface, but you may nonetheless recognize the memories. In even the most perfect families, there are flaws. The flaws of the family in this play differ from every family's flaws only in number and severity.
Before seeing this play, I had been watching Clyde Forsberg for years. Wherever jazz was being played, he would show up with his trumpet and sit in on a set or two. He was a joy to watch, a player who loved his instrument and could coax beautiful music out of it. It was clear the other musicians enjoyed playing with him, and his playing seemed to coax the best out of them. When Forsberg brought his play to Kingston, I jumped at the opportunity to see it. At that performance, I discovered a whole other side of this fine musician.
Clyde R. Forsberg, Jr. is a complex, many facetted man. Born an American, he was raised in a large Mormon family with thirteen brothers and sisters. Through his parents and community, he was exposed to racial prejudice, family abuse and violence, American jingo white nationalism, and a variety of other narrow viewpoints on how the world should work. When he was about twelve years of age, the family moved to Canada, where young Clyde spent his formative years. He credits much of his survival to the fact that his parents bought him a trumpet and that he soon discovered jazz music and especially the music of Louis Armstrong.
Forsberg has described the first disc of Not Black and White as "The true story of how Louis Armstrong and the family of jazz emancipated a little boy from an abusive, patriarchal home and racist, social vision for the future." More than that, in some ways this play prefigures Forsberg's later writing and was perhaps a necessary act of emotional cleansing before he could move on to his later successful career as an academic teacher and writer.
Dr. Clyde R. Forsberg, Jr. is a respected scholar of religion and history whose interests and knowledge extend into a wide variety of related fields including such areas as gender history and fraternalism, white studies, masculinity, and, of course film studies, theatre, and music, especially jazz. He is the author of numerous articles published in academic periodicals and of two books: "All the King's Horses and All the King's Men: Love, Alienation and 'Reconciliation' in a Big, BIG Mormon Family" (2000) and "Equal Rites: The Book of Mormon, Masonry, Gender, and American Culture" (2003). He's also a talented jazz musician.
Forsberg has described the second disc of Not Black and White by saying, "It made sense that such music should be that inclusive." The music here is dysjunctive, experimental, at times seems deconstructionalist, like some universe exploded and the elements moving outward in all directions in slow motion. Yet there is also a unity and sense to the music that makes it whole in spite of itself. The end result is interesting, creative jazz that tends perhaps to be just a bit too introspective and cerebral.
Forsberg's "derangements" are organic links between the torn family of his play and the world of jazz into which young Clyde had escaped. The music is intense and evocative, demanding not just to be heard but to be actively listened to. It helps that Forsberg has chosen musicians with whom he had played and jammed for years, musicians who will understand instinctively where he is going with this music.
I'm most reminded of the sort of jazz music that was being released by some of the finest musicians of the day, usually but not always on small labels, during the late Sixties and Early Seventies. There is a haunting quality to the music, a seemingly chaotic interweaving of instruments, and disembodied echo-ridden vocals might be the score to some perhaps unresolved dream. Throughout can be heard elements of an eclectic set of classic jazz songs deconstructed then, infused with a new vitality, brought together again.
It's unlikely that Not Black and White is still available to be bought new, but it's worth buying if you can find a copy and it would make an interesting addition to any collection of Canadian jazz performance or theatre. If we get lucky, maybe Clyde Forsberg will take a break from his academic career and make another recording. That will be worth the wait.
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Review written: March 28, 2005
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