from the Bandcamp Web page for the album being discussed
I was a little too young to really appreciate the Beat Generation. However, I remember watching a television program about the Beats, unaware, at that time, that commercial television was probably not the best way to learn about them. One of the clips involved a poet reciting his work with the backup of a couple of jazz instrumentalists.
That distant memory was reawakened while listening to How Crazy Love Can Be, which Ben Goldberg uploaded to Bandcamp a little less than a month ago. This is a relatively short album, presenting five brief poems recited by their author SNEAL. Instrumental backup is provided by Goldberg on clarinet and Ben Davis on cello. There is a bit of Sad Sack rhetoric to SNEAL’s delivery. The wistful nature of his style, particularly when blended with clarinet and cello sonorities, cultivates an atmosphere that often distracts from the semantics of the words being recited. Since five is not much of a statistical sample, I do not know if such a tenuous approach to “meaning” is an element of SNEAL’s style as an author.
I would probably go to a club to hear more of this approach to performance, which, for me, would encourage reflecting back about half a century.
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