SOUNDTRACK: BENJAMIN BOOKER-Tiny Desk Concert #673 (November 17, 2017).
Benjamin Booker has a lovely soulful voice with a distinct “accent” or enunciation. He sounds more mature than his 28 years.
It’s interesting to watch the video because Booker seems so laid back and calm singing while backing vocalist is much more impassioned with her gestures and look.
“Believe,” seems like a happy song, but there is emptiness at its core: “I just want to believe in something, I don’t care if its right or wrong.”
For the second song, “Witness,” Booker plays the lead guitar riff while Saundra Williams (who sang alongside Sharon Jones on a previous Tiny Desk Concert) sings the opening chorus. The verses are faster and Booker’s delivery is a bit rougher. The song swings, but as the lyrics are serious: “The song reflects on two main questions: Will we be a witness to the wrong in the world and is that enough?” It also “bears witness to both the racism he’s experienced and the hatred still prevalent in our culture and reflected in the daily news.”
It’s amazing that his speaking voice is so different from his singing voice as he introduces Mikki Itzigsohn on bass, Sam Hirschfelder on drums and Matthew Zuk on guitar.
The final song, “Carry” picks up musical intensity a few times as the bridge seems to build and build before returning to the slow pace of the music. Booker has a quiet intensity that is hard to resist.
[READ May 7, 2107] The Case of the Weird Blue Chicken
For Thanksgiving, why not do some Chicken Squad books?
This is the second book in The Chicken Squad series illustrated by Kevin Cornell.
I had fondly remembered the first book in the series. I saw what I thought was the second book at the library but it turned out to be the fourth! So I waited till the 2nd and 3rd came in so could read them in order (which is not necessary).
I remembered enjoying the first book quite a bit but I didn’t love this second one as much.
One of the things I liked about the first book was that it was basically narrated by J.J. the dog. This one, while having the dog as a sort of bookend, didn’t follow that formula exactly. And maybe that’s why it wasn’t as funny? It also felt really insubstantial.
The weird blue chicken comes into their detective agency and Sugar asks the bird a lot of questions. Typically, Sugar’s over-excited and badly misdirected questions are really funny. This time it felt a little tedious. Funny at first but it went on really long, so we didn’t get to the “mystery” of the book for a while.
I did laugh a lot at Sugars’ basic notes about the weird blue chicken: small, blue, tiny feet, wings, possibly a small blue chicken and the blue chicken’s misunderstanding of inches and feet (there’s a few very good jokes about hat). I also really enjoyed the joke that you should never trust a bird who doesn’t name her tree.
So the crux of the case is that the little blue chicken’s house has been stolen. Although it’s still where it was–someone else is in it. And that someone else is another bird. How do you know? I know a bird when I see one.
But Sugar, ever suspicions, writes in her notebook that the weird blue chicken is lying.
The story gets a little convoluted and Sugar is proven right (sorta) but the thief of her house also proves to be an unexpected comic surprise as well. The little surprises were certainly fun, but the whole thing felt like it could have been a much shorter book (and it’s pretty short).
I have also read Books 3 and 4 and I found both of them to be a bit more enjoyable than this one.
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