D.D. Jackson – Poetry Project
D.D. Jackson; various artists and vocalists
Independent (ddjackson.bandcamp.com)
D.D. Jackson is a JUNO and Emmy winning composer, producer and jazz pianist. In the spring of 2021, eminent Canadian poet George Elliott Clarke commissioned Jackson to set music to one of his poems. This initial collaboration snowballed into The Poetry Project, an album of 13 songs mostly arranged for piano and voice with small ensembles of varying instruments. The last song in the set, Daedalus’ Lament (Giovanna Riccio) is performed by D.D. Jackson and the Czech National Symphony Orchestra via Musiversal.
In addition to Clarke and Riccio, The Poetry Project features poems by Canadian writers Ayesha Chatterjee, Luciano Iacobelli, Irving Layton, Micheline Maylor, Bruce Meyer, Al Moritz, Libby Scheier, Choucri Paul Zemokhol and Chinese poet Xiaoyuan Yin. The performers on the album include many well-known names, including Laila Biali, Dean Bowman, Yoon Sun Choi, Ethan Cronin, Sammy Jackson, John Lindsay-Botten and Raina Sokolov-Gonzalez.
The Poetry Project includes a variety of themes. For example, I call (Zemokhol) is about the poet rediscovering his mother’s Egypt. Daylight Shooting in little Italy (Iacobelli) is about an incident Iacobelli and his family witnessed. On Silence (Chatterjee) is a layered and imaged interpretation of silence and how in its stillness we can truly hear. Self-Composed (Clarke) is a song from a father to his daughter and 2641 Fuller Terrace (also by Clarke) is an homage to guitarist Gilbert Daye.
For all of the intensity of the words chosen for The Poetry Project, Jackson writes surprisingly dynamic and rhythmic music with both fluid and, at times, challenging vocal lines that sway in all of the right places. Kudos to him for transforming sometimes long pages of poetry with its own rhythmical pacing into song length material that has retained the writers’ intentions and emotions.
