S
aul Williams — poet, actor, vocalist and alt-Hip Hop musician — has a worldwide following that includes one unusual Classical composer in Switzerland.
You’ll be able to see and hear the results of Williams’ collaboration with that composer, Thomas Kessler, when Williams and Mivos Quartet perform the Ohio premiere of “NGH WHT” Thursday at the Woodward Theater. It’s part of the Contemporary Arts Center’s performance series.
The work, which matches a daring New Music string quartet with Williams’ impassioned recitation of a poem from his book
The Dead Emcee Scrolls :
The Lost Teachings of Hip-Hop , lasts about 30 minutes. It will be followed by two shorter pieces that Williams collaborated on with the New York-based Mivos Quartet but without Kessler. These include the track “No One Ever Does,” in a radically reworked version from the one that appeared on Williams’ 2007 Trent Reznor-produced
The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust album, plus a new piece by Ted Hearne and maybe others.
In a phone interview, the busy Williams — he is also planning an international tour behind a new album of original, politically tinged musical compositions, Martyr Loser King — recalled how he and Kessler met.
“It was back in 2003,” Williams says. “I was just finishing my third book of poetry, Said the Shotgun to the Head, and I received a weird email through a manager from a man in Switzerland who said he would like to come to Los Angeles to talk to me about a proposal he had for a Classical piece he was going to compose.
“I agreed and when he arrived I didn’t expect him to be such an old man,” continues Williams, who is now 44. (Kessler is almost 80.) “And he immediately played for me a recording where he had sampled what he thought was my voice but was actually my father’s voice off my first album, from a song called ‘Our Father.’ He had composed strings around it.
“Now the weird thing about this was my father had just died two months earlier, and here was this old man — probably about the same age as my dad. He had arrived and within 10 minutes had me listening to this music and hearing my dad’s voice cut through the speakers with these strings around it. So I immediately had this feeling — ‘Whatever he wants, let’s do it.’ ”
With a commission from Switzerland’s Basel Symphony Orchestra, Kessler set
Said the Shotgun to orchestral music. Williams performed it in Basel and, subsequently, elsewhere.
“Because of that we became friends and we started talking about other works,” Williams says. “And then he went on and composed another piece for a string quartet, using the poem ‘NGH WHT’ years later.”
Williams, who has a Masters of Fine Arts in acting from New York University, became involved in the theatrical slam poetry movement of the 1990s. His background helped him get selected for the lead role in the 1998 indie feature Slam, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and had a national release. He has kept busy since then with his poems, albums and acting. Among other things, he starred in the short-lived but influential 2014 Broadway musical Holler If Ya Hear Me, which used the music of Tupac Shakur.
He is an experimental artist and a thoughtful intellectual, constantly looking for new ways to present his progressive observations about art, race, politics, the internet and much else. He likes to try as many musical projects as possible.
“I always look to see what else is out there,” he says. “In terms of my poetry, I have worked in and felt welcome in so many different mediums, whether dealing with classical arrangements or Jazz improvisation. I’ve just recorded an album of poetry with Jazz musician David Murray, a saxophonist, to come out next year. And I’ve collaborated with a lot of electronic musicians over the years, which includes my creative output in albums of my own as well.”
Also, in general, he separates his albums like Martyr Loser King from projects that match his written poems with musical accompaniment. For lack of a better term, those albums can be called “Pop” — Hip Hop and Electronica arrangements and a vocal delivery that mixes Rap, recitation and singing. Because of that and his progressive political outlook, he has been called an heir to Gil Scott-Heron.
“In terms of what I do with my albums, I’m usually writing the music first and not necessarily connecting poems as they would exist on the page,” he says. “With my albums, poetry is not only the words. I’m playing around with the idea of sonic poems. So the tone of the bass and drums are as important to me as how many words are there.”
Williams has provocative insights on many contemporary issues. He’s been outspoken on how the rise of Donald Trump, with his conservative and isolationist values, corresponds with the decline of pop culture as a force championing the underdog to one that idolizes and glorifies the rich and wealth for its own sake. He finds reality television a prime catalyst for that.
“I think what happens in pop culture happens cyclically like everything else,” he says. “There are moments when pop culture seems more receptive to progressive ideology, and those moments may last five to 10 years. Then there are moments when it really doesn’t reflect that at all, where it’s going in another direction.
“I have been observing what’s been happening primarily in relation to reality shows,” he continues. “I feel like art has suffered in the face of that. I feel like music sounds more packaged, that the underground is less revered.
“I was talking with Don Letts, who directed all the music videos for The Clash, and he said, ‘We used to make music to break the system, but now it seems artists are making music to be a part of the system.’ ”
Saul Williams, for one, is resisting that trend.
SAUL WILLIAMS performs with Mivos Quartet Thursday at Woodward Theater. Tickets/more info: contemporaryartscenter.org. Any remaining tickets will be sold at the door.
This article appears in Apr 27 – May 4, 2016.