SOUNDTRACK: LARA DOWNES-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #29 (May 30, 2020).
I don’t know Lara Downes, although from the picture you can see that she is a pianist, obviously. But she also works in communities with young people–something she has been unable to do since the coronavirus took over.
This Tiny Home Desk is visually more interesting than most of the others, because she has a mobile cameraman, her son Simon, who walks around and zooms in on her fingers and elsewhere.
She plays three songs
all from her recent album Some of These Days… They are strong statements that resonate in new ways. From Margaret Bonds, one of the first celebrated African-American women composers, there’s “Troubled Water,” a poignant riff on the spiritual “Wade in the Water” that Downes says takes a “journey from classical virtuosity to gospel, jazz, blues and back again.”
It has a very fluid feel but is also quite dark.
The next piece surprised me not because of the song but because of the arranger. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, yes the author, created this arrangement of “Deep River.” I’m surprised that there is nothing else said about him. I had no idea he was musical as well.
She says there are many interpretations of the river in this song. For some, it is crossing over into the afterlife. In the time of slavery, it meant crossing to freedom. For Downes it represents “crossing over” the coronavirus crisis, to something better.
She is looking to raise money for FeedingAmerica. If you go to her site and donate you can get a signed copy of her new album.
The final song is Florence Price’s “Some of These Days,” which she sees as a vision of better times ahead. It is a beautiful slow piece.
The set ends with a jump edit to her snuggling her beloved pooch, Kona.
[READ: May 31, 2020] “Two Nurses, Smoking”
This story is broken up into titled paragraphs. The title often works as the first part of the first sentence. At first I didn’t understand this technique, but by the end it made a lot of sense.
The story is indeed about two nurses smoking.
Gracie grew up living in a motel that people paid for week by week. A high school counselor encouraged her to go to nursing school. Marlon grew up on the Shoshone reservation then his mother moved East and married a man who drank as much as she did. He had been in the war and has a scar from an IED.
Gracie worked with kidney stone patients–employing the kidney pounder (a lithotripsy machine) that breaks up kidney stones. Marlon worked in the E.R.
They started bonding over their jobs and their patients, one thirty minute cigarette break at a time.
After about two dozen paragraphs, one is titled WE SHOULD GET OUTTA HERE and they head to a hotel.
What makes the story and the technique interesting is that a later section is titled NO.
And it continues, “Wait, before they go to the hotel, they stopped at a diner.” There are seven “NO” sections in all, each one backtracking to get more information.
Then the story resumes with a SO. Now there are in a bed listening to each car passing on the road.
It’s the details of their lives unfolding that make the story sing.
Leave a Reply