William Parker & Ellen Christi - Cereal Music (AUM Fidelity, 2024)

By Don Phipps

A heartfelt beautiful effort, bassist William Parker and vocalist and composer Ellen Christi’s Cereal Music will warm your soul. Parker, an acknowledged bass virtuoso and an accomplished performer on bamboo flutes, shakuhachi, flute, and double reeds, combines these instruments with Christi’s compositions and vocals to create an evocative and fascinating backdrop for his poetry. And what sublime poetry it is!

Parker, who performed and recorded with the late great poet David Budbill (check out Parker’s collaboration with Budbill on the excellent “Zen Mountains-Zen Streets: A Duet for Poet and Improvised Bass -Boxholder Records, 1999” and “Songs for a Suffering World: A Prayer for Peace, a Protest Against War - Boxholder Records, 2003” where the pair is joined by percussionist Hamid Drake), uses his own, as he puts it, “text” to offer words of wisdom and spiritual guidance for this dark and troubling moment in history. The music, then, becomes a backdrop to the “text,” like a stage for an actor, as he makes his appeals to humanity’s better angels. And when united with Christi’s tender and soulful voicings and her choice sound production, the compositions pack an emotional wallop.

Music of great beauty permeates the album. And Parker’s gentle reading of his text plays a central role as the music unfolds.

Excerpts from Parker’s poetry:

From “Ode to Kidd Jordan:” “Life is not fair. Only beautiful.” “Hallelujah and the joy of sound.”

From “Baseball:” “I’m concerned about the president who drops bombs on other human beings without blinking an eye. What’s wrong with this guy? What’s wrong with us? Why do we sit back and allow this to happen?”

From “Do Dreams Sleep:” “I want to live in between the rainbow.” “Do dreams sleep? I wonder. Does sadness weep?” “What is, is not, and what is not, is.”

From “Plea:” “The most precise measuring tool is love…. I would mend the world with sound.” “We’re angry because they would not put Willie Mays on the cereal box.”

From “Into My Heart:” “When I see - feel the sound of you, tells me hope is on the way. Today is the day all dreams will fall into my heart.”

From “Sonny:” “I want to be the music.” “Recycle your mind. Renew your membership in the human race…. Lay in the sun on the sparkling rocks.” “Sound of light, vibrating of sound, speech into sound, sound into light.”

From “Uninvited Guest:” “Do your own dirty work Mr. Politician…. If you want someone killed, do it yourself.” “We will not be used any longer.” “You are mentally ill. You have been since 1492.” “It is time to wake up. Step out of the nightmare.”

From “We Were Very civilized:” “I see. I-s-e-a.” “Where is where?” “We have lost our identity.” “We were very civilized before we were civilized.”

From “Batala:” “Every sound is precious.” “Touch the box labeled old song and it comes out new.”

From “Windshield Wipers:” “I was born to be. Born in the middle of two saxophones and three trumpets.”

From “Prayer:” “From above I can see the entire world. I see little children standing on the edge of clouds waiting for angels to return.” “We are not born over the rainbow but inside the rainbow.”

Behind the text, the music often evokes urban environments, the subconscious, and spirituals. Parker’s bass lines are prominent in many of the numbers (for example, his work on “Into My Heart”), with bowing and string plucking in a graceful, poignant manner (check out “Ellen and Leaves Floating” where the bass blends perfectly with Bea Labikova’s striking, haunting alto sax and Christi’s buoyant vocals). And Parker’s gliding butterfly flute work greets the listener on the opening of “Sonny” – maybe the most sonically complex work on the album.

Christi’s strong yet graceful vocals add just the right touch of soulful earnestness to the tunes, and her production throughout the album provides sweet dissonance – trombones, trumpets, orchestration, percussion, saxophones, bird tweets, all wander in and out of the music and sometimes take over (check out the syncopation Christi offers up on “Touring” and “Batala”).

Cereal Music emphasizes the maxim that music can add beauty to even the bleakest landscape or moment in space time. Perhaps that is the message that wraps around this album like a sky-blue hopeful ribbon. Perhaps that is what is meant by “inside the rainbow.”