Chuck Perkins: Master Storyteller and Performer

23rd October

This event was held at Zion Arts Centre – a vibrant youth and arts centre just outside of the city centre. The theatre space had been set up with cabaret style seating, creating the feel of a jazz bar rather than a straight performance space.

Young Identity poetry collective kicked off proceedings. This group of poets and performers was founded in 2006 in Moss Side, and has since gone from strength to strength. The performers were confident and engaging: young, honest voices offering poetry and spoken word that was brutal, moving and hilarious. I wasn't sure what to expect from the group, but I’ll definitely be checking them out in the future.

Chuck Perkins took to the stage accompanied by his 'Manchester band': Aid (percussion), Rich (drums), Andy (double bass), and Lawrence (piano). We were treated to two sets with an interval, the first set described by Perkins as “all the pissed off political poems!”. He started with a poem inspired by The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, examining the human impact of economic turmoil: "What's the mark-up on a soldiers casket?". The poem, about the unfair distribution of wealth, was accompanied by the frightening statistic that CEOs in the U.S currently earn 821 times more than the lowest paid workers in the company!

Perkins is a master storyteller and performer; his poetry is relevant and beautiful, and has at its heart the people and places he knows well. He grew up in New Orleans and returned there after years of moving around with jobs; its spirit and rich musical history has clearly influenced his work a great deal.

As a performer, Perkins is passionate, entertaining and, well, pretty damn amazing. He also has a natty line in wild and wonderful anecdotes, such as a story about ending up in a crack den after befriending a homeless guy: “I don’t smoke crack and I’m an atheist but hey, it was 6am and there I was reading the bible to them. Don’t try that at home!”.

The jazz-fusion and blues music is part of the poetry, rather than an accompaniment, and the music inspires a new appreciation of the rhythms in the spoken word. Jazz and blues influences, social history in America from the Civil Rights Movement to current economic issues, and the personal history of friends and family all feature in Perkins’ work – you get the impression that he was born to tell these stories.

After the interval, Perkins returned to the stage celebrating the diversity of New Orleans, a city that “had no choice but to be different” – Spanish, French, Haitian, Cuban, African and then American people settled there, creating a truly unique city rich in culture and diverse in terms of its festivities. A poem accompanied by traditional Native American music was about the Mardi Gras custom of African Americans masking themselves as Native Americans. Perkins summed up this beauty and diversity: “African-Americans masked as Native Americans on an Italian-American holiday!”

He went on to tell us about ‘Jazz Funerals’, where the mood starts somber with hymns and slow marching, but develops into celebrations of the person who has passed – “From soft and sad to wild, happy and a little mad”, a true expression of feeling through music and movement. One poet and four musicians painting a picture of the noise, dancing and outpouring of emotion of hundreds.

At one point, a challenge was issued: Perkins said that despite being past the age where you can legitimately rap, he wrote one anyway. In the ‘80s, rap artists like NWA and Public Enemy were political, brave and important, but now rap music is derivative and materialistic. To this, and to new generations, Perkins says: “Tell me something I don’t know!” Members of Young Identity Collective were still in the audience, and it’s safe to say it’s a challenge they rose to.

Chuck Perkins told the audience that if any of us is ever in New Orleans, we should drop him a line as he’d be the best tour guide ever. I don’t doubt that for a second.

by Alex Herod

Alex is Deputy Editor of For Books’ Sake. She has just finished her MA (Performance Works, Leeds Met) and is keen to meet writers, makers and do-ers through her Collaborate Here project.

Swimming with words and beats in your head

22nd October

MLF in association with Young Identity, Contact, Speakeasy and Commonword present Saul Williams, one of the outstanding Slam poets of his generation – a poet, writer, actor and musician known for his blend of poetry and alternative hip hop.

Winner of the 1996 Nuyorican Poets Cafe’s Grand Slam Championship, he has featured in the documentary film SlamNation and star of the 1998 feature film Slam. He has performed with The Fugees and Erykah Badu, as well as with the poets Allen Ginsberg and Sonia Sanchez. He is a self confessed dodger of all the labels that are ascribed to himself, his classification being that of a free artist.

Band on the Wall is full, hot and host to an amazing carpet. Everything is running late and yet the crowd don’t seem in the slightest bit bothered. One guy is doing press-ups and telling his friend how he eats a pound of turkey or chicken - this is sure to be an interesting night.

Before the acts start, the man on camera, aka Winston, tells me that the support act Speakeasy is about “Expression of the mind,” this philosophy stays with me through the entire experience, anticipation and all…The artist we are all waiting for appears 2 hours later than scheduled, and the crowd shuts up to the still of his immediate start into Untimely Meditations from the 1998 film, Slam Nation:

I lack the attention span to meditate

My attention spans galaxies here and now are immense

seconds are secular

moments are mine

The crowd is swept under by the rhythm as Williams hypnotises us:

No man is an island but I often feel alone

So I find peace through OM

OM

OM

He moves seamlessly onto Rise and Shine:

a quiet mind

is labelled sound

and coloured purple

my little boy

has not yet learned

to colour within the lines

The words flow effortlessly as he embraces the language of us all. As the man himself explains, “In music I think of myself as an explorer participating in the construction of the soundscape of the new world that is being hatched out of our dreams, hope and visions, peace and harmony... that don’t necessarily mean my shit is soft though."

It is far from soft – his lyrics and tempo cut through any wanderings of the mind to jolt you back into the here and now. The name – The Saul Williams Experience – is self-explanatory. It is a journey with the word, we move into Coded Language. Williams describes every person as beings of sound, as the rhythm gets into the underbelly of us all the mood is transported beyond that of Manchester. You can hear him read for yourself here.

As the evening draws into the early club night hours, Williams speaks about how he didn’t like himself when he was younger because he wasn’t white, opening us all up to thinking about the phases in our own personal growth.

Ending on the song Black Stacey, he explains it’s titled so because Stacey is his middle name. The lyrics speak for themselves, as he vocalises the song he originally wrote at high school:

Black Stacey.
 They called me Black Stacey.
 I never got to be myself 'cause to myself I always was Black Stacey, in polka dots
 and paisley, a double goose and bally shoes, you thought it wouldn't phase me. 
I was Black Stacey. The preacher's son from Haiti who 
rhymed a lot and always got the dance steps at the party. 
I was Black Stacey. 
You thought it wouldn't phase me, but it did 'cause I was just a kid

Williams says that poetry and music make sense of all that he has been through, he works harder on himself to become a better artist and no-one could argue that he hasn’t crafted the skill of performance art to an exceptional standard. From crafting a name for himself on the New York poetry scene at the infamous Nuyorican Poets Café, Williams has rocketed into multiple genres.

“It's not that I balance [those arts] out, all the different arts balance me out. There is a certain type of emotion that is more easily accessible through music than poetry. Some things are meant to be written, some are meant to be sung, some things are meant to be hummed, some things are made to be yelled, and so that's just how life works".

An artist of such calibre was a great addition to the Manchester Literature Festival. I had been especially excited about this event after seeing Saul Williams, donned with a feather head piece, perform at ATP festival back in 2008. He leaves you swimming with words and beats in your head, bringing out the natural highs a good gig leaves you feeling. If you haven’t checked him out before you really should embrace this dude, I’m certainly going to be exploring more and am especially looking forward to watching Slam.

by Rebecca Guest

Rebecca is a freelance writer and workshop host, she welcomes any collaborative projects. You can find her on twitter @babamonchichi

New Orleans in Manchester

I have to admit, I don't know much about the Spoken Word Scene or its participants (aside from my favourite angry man Henry Rollins) but there is something I find very appealing about it. The passionate display of slightly moody social commentators protesting on behalf of the person on the street is romantic. Combine that with a bit of Jazz, please.

So, in my mission to learn, I'm extremely excited that this year's MLF presents one of America's premier spoken word poets, Chuck Perkins - dubbed the poet laureate of New Orleans by New York Times music jounalist, Larry Blumfeld.

Chuck has appeared extensively across America and at last year's Banlieues Bleues festival in Paris. He has performed with many jazz greats and in 2004 he created his avante garde circus Voices of the Big Easy, fusing poetry, music and dance.

Chuck will be performing with local jazz musicians, Aid Todd, Andy Boothman, Rich Sliwa and Lawrence Woof. Members of the Young Identity poetry collective will kick the evening off.

This is the event that I'm most looking forward to.

Saturday 23rd October, 7:30pm, Zion Arts Centre

Have a look here for more info

Book here

Watch Chuck perform at The Jazz Gallery, NYC