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Michael Antonucci
The series "K.C. Blues":
Boss Goat (Pendergast, Politics, & the K.C. Scene)
Witness: A Map (w/ Legend & Keys)
Stormin': (Southwestern Swing)
Bird
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(Robert Lowell)Boss Goat (Pendergast, Politics, & the K.C. Scene) Brother Jim’s, Climax Saloon, your own cradle of liberty; its namesake, like Truman, a long shot that paid. Business as usual: barn yard politics and a day at the races; Lazia and Payne watching goats chasing rabbits, the State House, dubbed “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in your honor. With “home-rule” all bets are off. High stakes alongthe Northside, High times at 14th and Vine; constituencies and offices in concrete and liquor turning the deals, winning the tricks, making the votes and keeping the fix upstairs at 1908 Main Street. Your pleasures, few and simple, like your people, anything but cheap.
Witness:A Map (w/ Legend & Keys) Hear that “KC Moan,” “One O’Clock Jump” setting out on a big band train, going to the vanishing point, on foot by bus, or box car, They go out and come back, again: moving through the territory, its cryptic cartography spitting spelling lessons in the vernacular, framed by the snapshot requisites of its invisible geography, proof Troost don’t twist, West Bottoms flood, and there’s a man they call Piney Brown.
Stormin’: (Southwestern Swing) --for Walter Page and the Blue Devils Orchestra In photos: blowing like the wind, blazing black and white trails across the grainy territory, they rise, smoke quick, on the prairie’s commonwealth of earth and horizon. Circling their wagons they swing the compass, needle and dial, backs to the breeze, bodies in motion, telling their tales in sets and movementsalong the Great Plains’ savannah of cross-overs, jump-offs, and jammed-up jooks; their caravans riding twisted paths through cyclones of sound.
Bird The history is its own headache: the music another story. “Cherokee,” “Parker’s Blues,” in sounds pure, distant, pulsing. In Kay Cee, Major Smith and Lincoln High couldn’t keep you; on the road, your constituents pledge allegiance and vote with their feet. Their nightly nominations launched from platforms with bandstand loyalties while you played, turning your changes into anthems through the dawn’s early light.
(Robert Lowell) Along the Hub, lines bending, your orbit, turning; History, Life Studies spun from a mind “perched on the outer ring of decency.” At play, the poet-emperor, Caligulla, last of your kind, circling Beacon Hill, its gold dome a birth right confounded in oval D.C., a swamp and stage: your parade ground marches, grandstanding in lines, for Che, the days of rage, RFK, but not a word of King. Still, I hear your blues; running, vein deep, from the buckle-shoe stockings of pumpkin eating puritans, to Nantucket’s lost sailor, his seaside burial touched with frost, and in the empty tunic of your Civil War namesake.