The Impossible, a new CD by Teeyaeachee Ferguson, a Holyoke-based composer and musician, examines, through a combination of music and the spoken words of Malcolm X, Cornel West, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and Justin Lewis, the very heart of some of this country’s most pressing and most critical problems. Hypnotic, gritty, beautiful, thought provoking, anger inducing, fascinating – these are some of the terms that come to mind when I listen to this piece
Music is many things to many people, and in the case of this album, the shifting rhythms and riffs of all the performers, spoken as well as instrument-based, takes you from thought to thought, idea to idea, concept to concept. The idea of pairing the spoken word with music is an ancient artistic device going back as far as the Greek dramas, and perhaps in the farthest reaches of time, to the very earliest hero tales. Poetry itself is a form of music, and in the hands of great orators like Malcolm X and West, speech is some of the most powerful music imaginable.
Each of the 11 tracks takes the listener from thought to thought, mood to mood, tempo to tempo, nuance to nuance. Ferguson has given us a true gift in this piece as a way to begin to question our own assumptions and attitudes toward the difficult and ongoing question of race in this country.
Honest dialog both between the races and within them is what is needed today, more so than at any other time. Dialog, like culture, evolves and changes. We have to guide this dialog in the directions that it needs to go to bring about true justice as well as continue to slay some of the older dragons that continue to plague us. As Ferguson points out in his liner notes, “This CD sheds light on the paradoxes which exist in a society divided by wealth and race, and it reminds us that progress is a matter of opinion. These may, indeed, be the best of times. But for whom?”
No matter what your race, an examination of the sometimes subtle, sometime overtly violent oppression that has continued in this country from before it was founded in the late 18th century and continues to this day will, if you were honest with yourself, leave you with the same conclusion as I – that although many strides have been made, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, much still needs to be addressed and solved today, in 2003
