Tyrone Henderson

[JSngry]

A good friend just hipped my to poet/vocalist/whatever (mostly poet, I guess) Tyrone Henderson - two sides on Konnex, and one on Atonal.

I dig this cat. The timbre of his speaking voice reminds me of that of Joe Lee Wilson's singing voice, and his poetry is African-American-centric (as opposed to Afro-Centric) from the jazz tip, if you know what I mean (he actually gives thanks to Hank Mobley at the end of one of his pieces, not that that's meaningful in and of itself...). The music's good too, the Konnex sides have Wadada & Fred Hopkins, and the Atonal is a really nicely musically quirky funkjazz groovething.

There's some really joyous stuff here, the kind of thing you'd suspect that Gil Scott-Heron would do if nobody was looking (if you, again, know what I mean...). The guy pulls no punches, but dourness seems to be antithetical to his being. Anybody who does a thing called "Jazz & Jesus" which has the lines "I got jazz and Jesus....not necessarily in that order...." and then goes on to talk about nothing but jazz puts a smile on my face, just because. And then there's a thing called "Grandmama" which could easily slip into cliche. Maybe it does, but the guy turns the word into a badass drum rhythym and just dances with it (as does the band). If there's any cliche in the poetry, I was too busy dancing along with everybody else on the record to get stressed by it.

Thing is, I'm just now finding out about this Tyrone Henderson cat, and I feel as if I should have known about him long before now. Educate me, please!

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Sorry, I can't. But thanks for posting this. I'm going to look for him myself.

MG

[rostasi]

Don't have Strawman Dance (yet),

but the other's are pretty fine.

Don't know much about his background,

but often see his name associated with the

hip NY (is it UPtown or DOWNtown these days?)

scene. Poetry readings, performance art events,

etc usually finds him putting together a group of

musicians for a night of fun and frivolity.

Soup was one of these groups, I think?

A VOICE found thru the Voice for me.

If Maren were around, she'd probably have something to say(?)

R~

[JSngry]

I really like the implications (all of 'em) of the title "Not So Unusual blues".