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Callaloo 28.3 (2005) 604-609


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The Herido Project

Dennis Gonzalez


Click for larger view		 Dennis Gonzalez, Yusef Komunyakaa, Susie Ibarra, Mark Deutsch on stage in Chicago
[End Page 604]

In May, 1999, I received an e-mail from Chicago jazz record producer Tony Getsug offering me a chance to collaborate on a concert and recording project with the great southern poet Yusef Komunyakaa. The Chicago Humanities Festival had asked Tony to put the concert together and record the performance. The festival organizers had the idea of using another jazz trumpeter, from Chicago, to write and arrange music to accompany Yusef's readings of his own works, but Tony decided to decline the offer unless the festival agreed to use me instead. Getsug, who didn't know me personally, had known my work for years and was convinced that the project would work well with me as musical director and composer.

The festival didn't know my work, however, and was, in fact, skeptical, though I'd led lots of jazz ensembles with some well-known legends of jazz as my sidemen: Max Roach, Roy Hargrove, Malachi Favors, Charles Brackeen, Douglas Ewart, and quite a few others. The festival organizers asked me to send them my credentials to see if, in their estimation, I could take on this important project and succeed with it, especially given Yusef's stature. I waited two months and was about to give up on the offer from Tony, given the doubts expressed by the organizers and the shrinking amount of time remaining before November, when I received several calls from the festival's director, Eileen Makevitch, by way of interviewing me, not quite three months before the work was to be performed. It took a few more calls and my sending some samples of my recorded music and my prose and poetry for her to peruse in order for her to understand my history, my work, and my capabilities. The organizers were putting their all behind this project, and Eileen didn't want to move ahead before she was sure of me. Though I understood the organizers' concerns, I felt a bit insulted about having to "sell" myself. But finally, about a week after the last interview, the organizers gave their blessing. I realized at that point that I'd made a great friend in Eileen. And it was then that I could finally begin working on the music in earnest—though I'd really started writing down sketches of ideas and melodies several months before.

Eileen instructed her staff to give me full technical and financial support, and Yusef's assistant, the late Zöe Angelsey, along with Tony Getsug, jumped into the project and began working with me on a very professional level, facilitating access to Komunyakaa's work and sending me his very latest writings so that I could familiarize myself with it and get a feeling—as I myself am a writer—for just what the music's role should be in its involvement with his words. Yusef himself was unreachable and totally undecided about which pieces he would read. My instinct was that he didn't really know the complexity of this project, which derived from several factors: my [End Page 605] making sure all participants' schedules meshed; finding a way to unite the various individuals' artistic and generic directions; subsuming the strong identities and egos of the participants within the larger context; and, again, having to intuit what would work among all the unknowns presented by the project. My guess is that he had not had all these factors explained to him. The other possiblity that I understood after the second project I did with him was that Komunyakaa's incredibly full schedule made him a bit aloof, removed from this project somehow. Tony had previously put out a CD with Komunyakaa and the jazz saxophonist John Tchicai, a work known as "Love Notes from the Madhouse," and I began listening to it, especially to place Komunyakaa's voice in the music as an instrument of expression. The musical approach taken on that project was totally...

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