Voices

Bridecast of Voices is made possible in part by the Miller Brewing Company of Fort Worth, Texas. For centuries, African Americans have lifted their voices in praise and determination and support of a mutual struggle. The earliest music, known as Spiritures, became the forerunner for many popular forms of modern music and expression.

Certainly gospel jazz and blues, but African American poetry and prose often draw their power from the soul of the spiritual. So the voices from the past mingle their spirits with the voices of today to shape a powerful legacy and contribution of hope for the future. On the day when the Savoy leaps clean over to Seventh Avenue and starts jitterbugging with the Renaissance. On that day when Abbasinian Baptist Church throws her enormous arms around St. James Presbyterian and 409 Edgcomb stooped to kiss 12 West 133. On that day, do Jesus Manhattan Island will whirl like a desiglesque transcription played by Aynas and Timmy.

On that day, Lord, Sammy Davis and Marion Anderson will sing a duet. Paul Robson will team up with Jackie Mom's Mabily and Father Divine will sing in truth. Peace, it's truly wonderful. Nothing drives me, nothing interests me more than music. I have no fantasy of anything else in life more than I do with music. I enjoy knowing about it.

Marshall Ivory has loved music, jazz in particular, since his high school days. The music to me is sacred. Some people have a religion and some people are Baptist and so forth. I'm a musician. I mean, there are moments in playing that I guess you can consider it being heaven. There are moments you play that the technical and the theoretical part of the music, those two entities are not even important at that moment. And then this picture I want to take over. That is really scary sometimes. And she said, God, I don't think I can do that.

And you're doing things that you never did before in your life and it's something just drives you to do it. I have to tell you that I've been on the bandstand with some of the greatest people in the business. Ivory first began to rub shoulders with American jazz giants while stationed in Europe and the Army. But Ivory's professional career began with the intuition of Dallas legend Red Garland. He taught me much more than I think I could have learned in anybody's school professionally. And that's a human being. Garland was the original pianist with the Miles Davis quintet. He heard Ivory play in small Dallas jazz clubs in the 70s. Garland later influenced Ivory to go on the road with him. The road eventually led to New York. Professionally, Marshall Ivory was on his way.

He was good about playing. And he used to kind of care. He used to kind of care. If he says he's going to give you extra amount of dollars, he'd give you almost twice as much as some cases. He played well. He was kind of draw. But you know, he'd keep you up all night to give it to you. These days, Ivory shares stories about Red Garland with musicians who make up the Marshall Ivory quintet. Red Garland passed away in 1984. As members of his group prepare for an evening performance, Ivory takes them down memory lane, names like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Art Blakey punctuate the conversation. In the early 80s, Ivory was invited to become a part of Art Blakey's world famous jazz messengers. He said, well, I don't have you in my band tonight. I said, wait a minute. Whoa, I don't. First of all, I think you're joking. I just don't believe it. I can't believe the great Art Blakey is asking me to join his band.

I had to let it soak in to say, this is an opportunity. Do you want it or not? Ivory decided he wanted it. In the summer of 1984, he joined Blakey's band. One of the main reasons I wanted to go to the band is because it has such a historical significance. I wanted to learn, I wanted to find out what made it click. Because it's something that great players can't do, like Wayne Shaw, The Heart, but you know, just not of the great players. I mean, you just call them. I mean, anybody you know that's any good in jazz can't do Art Blakey's band. And it's referred to many times as the Art Blakey School of Music. But Ivory gave it all up less than a year later. He didn't like living in New York. Family obligations in Dallas led him home. No one was more surprised at Ivory's decision than Art Blakey.

I think I let him down. Maybe I let myself down probably to some degree. I probably would have been further along in my career if I stayed with the band. And I had a nice warm welcome for a hometown fellow, Cornell D'Frieve, of a national Cornell. I've recontinues to share the stage with nationally recognized musicians. But like in his early days, the stages are close to home, close to Dallas. The chances are I probably could be greater or somewhere else if I could get some more chances. But I don't live with that. I just want to enjoy the music.

I'm hungry for the music. Very hungry for the music. So it's your personal expression of how you feel at the moment. And you want to make sense at the same time and you want to make somebody feel it. So it's the communication process goes on. I don't envision in terms of becoming a star. And the kind of music I play, jazz or whatever you want to call it, that brand of expression to me is the utmost in one's expression. So it's your personal expression of how you feel at the moment.

If we picture language and writing as a kind of huge tide, I'm this tiny little vessel on it. You know, just being swept along. And the more the further I go, the more I want to ride. You know, you can't quite get finished with it. I wouldn't know where to begin finishing writing. Language in fact was a way out into the world of saying, this is what's happening in me. Is this happening in you? Or do you know anything about this kind of longing or this kind of confusion? Once that became clear to me. My God, how can I stop writing? And I can't. I'm hooked. I'm lost to it forever.

Sometimes I turn to the past as if it is a safe place to go. The future turning on me and charging like some mindless ball. If someone had said 10 years ago, you know, people will come and hear you and your friend Carlo, you know, do poetry and classical music. I was like, why not? It'd be nice, but I don't know. Now I'm not going to fill the convention center. I'm not going to fill the Texas stadium. But I read to more people than I ever imagined reading for in this city. This is a poem called Meep. When I was younger, I used to root for the rabbit in his sneaky quest for that fruity cereal, raspberry red, lemon yellow, orange orange. And I hated those big headed little brats, especially the boy when he'd say, silly rabbit, tricks him for kids. I used to console myself believing the silly rabbit swiped a bunch between commercials. And I used to cross my fingers for the coyote too.

Sometimes running like a maniac, his legs bulging from acne muscle builder. He'd get so close I could feel the road runner's tail feathers tickling his nose. But suddenly meep and the road was smoke all the way to the horizon. And my best moments as a reader, I'm reading them as they, as my blood found them. I'm reading them as they hit me, you know. And so if you've never heard the poems before, you might like the poems reading them quietly. And that's wonderful. But then you get to see what happens to the language when it's infused with blood, with the blood of a living person. The fame is sweet, it's nice. It's nice to have people notice you. But that's not the thing that really makes your heart jump, your heart jumps. When you're reading a poem, or you're writing one, or reading it to someone, and you can sense them coming to meet you right in the middle of it.

They're right in there with you and you're just reading a poem. And for that moment you have this kind of union of sorts, you know. That's both romantic and abstract, but it's very intimate in a certain kind of way. And that is the thing that you live and die for as a writer. Oh, moon, basket ball of bone, white heart of the great moth that is night. Where would I go if you would not hear my story? My infinite desire and stupidity. There's a type of an inescapable solitude that is a part of being human. And I think the moon is simply an emblem of that. Something silver white. Last night, I saw the moon, and remembered the earth is also just a rock riding the infinite dark wave of space. That somewhere else deep down in the Milky Way, someone very different could look up from a garden to see something silver white,

candleling faintly above a hilltop, and think that dull star seems so weary near the rest. Not knowing that all of us are living on that small taste of light, buying food, calling friends, killing each other, sleeping, and sometimes staring back into the speckled blackness. After saving this blue arc so many years together, you might think we would be kinder, because no matter what anybody says about anybody else, we were all born to this planet, suddenly blinking under the same star. And the evening sky means the universe is floating. I think it's just a matter of time till people think, you know, I can't get anything, I can't get from television or whatever, or whatever other media sources, I can't get from these things what I can get from poetry.

And once people identify a need and identify a way of satisfying that need, then we're on. News, it's almost dawn, the paperboy sets out his white bag and bicycle flash under the lights. He is too late, everything he carries has already happened. If you identify some aspect of your soul in a poem that I've written or someone else has written, and I also identify an aspect of my own soul in this poem, you and I are necessarily closer, even if I haven't met you yet. For brothers everywhere. There is a schoolyard that runs from here to the darks fence, where brothers keep going to the hoop, keep rising up with basketballs, ripers, pumpkins, toward rims, hung like piñatas, pinned like thunder clouds to the sky's wide chest.

Everybody is spinning and banking off the glass, finger rolling off the glass, with the same soft touch you'd give the head of a child. A child with a big ass pumpkin head, who stands in the schoolyard, lit by brothers, posting up, giving, going, taking the lane, flashing off the pivot, dealing behind the back, between the legs, cocking the rock and gliding like mad hawks, swooping black with arms for wings, palm in the sun, throwing it down, the ball burning like a flute with a soul in their velvet hands, while the wrists whisper backspin, and the fingers comb the rock, once, giving it up, letting it go, letting it go like good news, because the hoop is a well, a well with no bottom, and they're filling that sucker up. You've taken my blues and gone. You sing them on Broadway, and you sing them in Hollywood Bowl, and you mix them up with symphonies, and you fix them, so they don't sound like me.

Yep, you done taking my blues and gone, and you done taking my spirituals and gone too. You put them in Macbeth, and Carmen Jones, and in all kinds of swing macarons, and in everything, but about me, but someday somebody'll stand up and talk about me, and write about me, black and beautiful, and sing about me, and put on plays about me. Yep, I reckon it'll be me, myself. Yeah, it'll be me. Go on about your business, lady. Go on about your business, girl. Leave this woman alone. You stay out of this old lady.

Get her, get more. I want venom in your voice. It's still kind of sweet. You're such a nice person. V of B-I-T. All right, good. Go on about your business, girl. Leave this woman alone. You stay out of this old lady. Good. A keen Bob Attunde would love to see every aspiring actor get a chance on the stage. It's an opportunity he was denied as a young seventh grader who wanted to act. So I went to the principal who was the assistant principal who was directing it, and I said, please, can I be in this play? And she looked at me like I was out of my mind, and I'll never forget that look. It was almost a look of, you know, you can never be on this stage. And at the time, you know, the whole thing of look, if you're darker, you stay back, if you're lighter. You know, some of that, I guess, came into play too, or that's what I assumed.

The other day, something come to me and say, just like somebody talking. Cone bread, it's killing you. Now, over 20 years later, a keen Bob Attunde is an accomplished professional stage actor. His career began in New York with a national black theater company. From there, doors continue to open for the young actor, with help from many of theater's biggest names. Bob Harder! Eventually, Bob Attunde was invited to come to Dallas and become a member of the Dallas Theatre Center. I said, oh no, I'm not going to Dallas. I said, please, that's the south. What you mean in Mimi? Nobody ever asked me that before. It means your human movement is low. What you mean in your group? What you mean low?

Yes. Low blood. Ah, ah, do you have low blood? Why did you say that? Say like this, low blood. No. I have embraced Dallas as my home. Dallas is on the threshold, I think, of a lot of things, artistically, definitely. There's a lot of eyes on what will happen when this egg opens up and hatches. And I'm kind of happy to be a part of that embryotic stage here. And I will fight for that embryo. Okay, let's get met with dramatic. Still angry, alright? Yeah, you're still there.

It's not necessarily the angry, but what you are, look at me. That was wonderful. When you took the time to just ask her to look at you, let's just stay on her. Look at me. I talked to her, don't write, simple. Look at me. Go home. I'm just a little scared like a man of a complete life. Don't wait. I'll live my life away. I'll wait. I'll wait. I'll wait. Yeah, there's power in that. Do you see the difference? Because then all of that screaming in the battle that you guys didn't, then when you just simply just stated the facts that I'm not here to fight you or argue with you, and as you are, without any neurosis or any of the histionics of the hands and all, the anger, just simply stating the facts does it more. Bob Atunde not only gets a charge from being on the stage, he spends much of his free time helping shape the futures of young, dramatic talent.

Several years ago, he founded the Vivid Theater Ensemble, an acting troupe made up of African American artists. What are you doing for him? You can't keep me tired of being like I'm some kind of dog. You can't let me go for it. It gives me a great joy to work with an actor, especially, you know, actors who have not had the opportunity or will not have maybe had an opportunity if Vivid was not formed. To see them just communicate and evolve as an artist is just brings tears to your eyes. Go there, babies. Five, six, seven, and one. Two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight. Go back. Go back. It can't be a dream. Go back. Go back. Go back. Yeah, that's it. In time. Go back. In time. Go back. Go back. Go back. Go back. Go back.

Go back. Bob Atunde is also lending himself to non-professional actors from the community. He received a grant to conduct a year-long residency at Paul Quinn College. What's going on? What's going on? What's going on? What's going on? I'm very excited about the artists that are working because it's a combination of the Vivid Theater Ensemble members of community actors who don't get the opportunity a lot to have a creative laboratory to work at their craft, students, and also some of the staff. What I applaud is the fact that we were committed to this idea and were loyal enough to each other, honest enough with each other, and committed to each other to see something like this, this vision, become a reality. This skull, the crossbones on the K and means it's private food, nurse Evers. Corcurrrrr. Corcurrr. Corcurrr. You're the way you go. Acting is always dear to my heart.

Sometimes I'll have people say, boy, you're a good actor, but you're a great director. And that I go, ooh. But I'm an actor first. I'm an actor first. Bob Ahtunday says he's received a lot of advice over the years, but he especially remembers the words of one actor who's work he admired. Boy, he said, my friend hears what you do. He says, you bury the character. He says, at the end of the evening, at the end of the run, you say, bye-bye to the character. He says, because you have created a personality. If you're a good actor, you have created a soul and a personality of a living human being. And you must send that human being on their way. So I've never forgotten that. So at the end of all of the end of my plays, at the end of the run, I say, OK, thank you. Bye-bye. I'm back to me now. So you don't have to haunt to be anymore. There. That baby's gone, nurse, ever.

That hate done skips on home. Seen our soul, who loved the faith that the dark past has taught us. Seen our soul, who loved the hope that the present has brought us. Facing the rising sun of our new day, be gone. Let us march on till victory is won. Seen our soul, who loved the faith that the dark past has taught us. Seen our soul, who loved the hope that the present has brought us.

Facing the rising sun of our new day, be gone. Let us march on till victory is won. Broadcast of Voices was made possible in part by the Miller Brewing Company of Fort Worth, Texas. There are moments in playing that I guess you can consider it being heaven. Oh, my God, how could I stop writing?

Am I kid? I'm hooked. I'm lost to it forever. But I'm an actor first. I'm an actor first. Celebrate Juneteenth with an inspiring portrait of three exceptional Texas artists in Voices. Celebrate Juneteenth with an inspiring portrait of three exceptional Texas artists. Celebrate Juneteenth with an inspiring portrait of three exceptional Texas artists.