The rhythms, sounds, and cadences of human speech played an essential if oft-overlooked role in the emergence of jazz as a distinct musical language, to say nothing about the infinite possibilities of signifying meaning and emotion with words. Recognizing kindred spirits, jazz artists and poets started keeping company while the music was still young, relationships that brought together epochal writers such as Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Sonia Sanchez and Ishmael Reed with seminal composers like Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, and David Murray. It’s no surprise then that Mahogany L. Browne, one of the 21st century’s most acclaimed spoken word artists, found her way to Sean Mason, a jazz pianist and composer with an aesthetic that encompasses nearly a century of jazz ferment.
Which isn’t to say that their collaboration, the 2024 album CHROME VALLEY, is much like any of the jazz-meets-poetry projects that preceded it. A visceral musical snapshot of the early 2020s, a period roiled by protest and historical reckoning, the album stands boldly by itself as a timeless work even as it captures a fraught moment in American history. The fact that it was released the same year as My Ideal, Mason’s singular, blues-steeped collaboration with vocalist Catherine Russell, reveals something essential about Mason, an artist whose identity is both protean and forged in jazz’s deepest currents. “Musicians tend to stay in their own lane these days, but there’s a through-line connecting the music of the past and today, an ancestral, spiritual lineage,” Mason says. “For me, it’s all human expression.”
The debut release on The Soapbox Presents label, CHROME VALLEY draws on an array of creative pursuits, including spoken word, jazz, R&B, and gospel. It’s a study in bluesology as defined by the great essayist Albert Murray. Rather than wallowing in pain and despair, Murray writes that blues artists create public rituals “to generate a disposition that is both elegantly playful and heroic in its nonchalance.” In transforming Browne’s potent verse into lyrics and inspiration for composition, Mason creates a deeply textured account of the raw experiences contained within her poetry.
The collaboration with Browne was born when she witnessed Mason playing a low-down blues on a detuned piano at The Seashore Farmers’ Lodge, a museum in Charleston, South Carolina, that holds Gullah Geechee artifacts. In the midst of finishing her latest book of poetry, Chrome Valley, she raised the possibility of working together. Months later, as a part of her tenure as Lincoln Center’s inaugural poet-in-residence, Browne commissioned Mason to compose music for a live multisensorial performance piece that included dancers, projected imagery, and an all-star cast of jazz musicians. The evening was produced by The Soapbox Presents, a Harlem-based performing arts organization. The organization was founded by Marija Abney, and Mason was its artistic director.
His first time composing directly with poetry, CHROME VALLEY emerged as a captivating hybrid program with five new songs and five pieces featuring Browne’s drama-laden spoken-word performances. A roiling work delving into a Black woman’s tribulations, celebrations, and spiritual resilience, the evening received rapturous acclaim, and the obvious next step was to record the work.
“She sent me the book and said choose whichever poems speak to your heart,” Mason recalls. “I read it front to back and picked 10 poems that spoke to me most, and that had potential to be lyricized and repurposed for composition.”
Alternating between Browne’s recitation and the songs that Mason crafted out of her verse, CHROME VALLEY toggles between heart-stopping poems and wisely detailed lyrical settings. In composing for Browne’s verse, Mason keeps the focus on her lines, hinting at subterranean feelings and forces between the words. The album opens with “Homer, Louisiana (Prelude),” a piano/spoken word duet that sets the somber but resolute mood, as Browne elaborates on the phrase “what I mean is” again and again, artfully shifting her cadence over a flowing, rubato piano line that buoys and caresses her invocation. Ushering another “voice” into the foreground, “The Blk (est) Night 1993” pairs Browne’s recitation with Stacy Dillard’s thick, inviting tenor saxophone line, which rises and falls on Mason’s major key theme.
Anthony Hervey’s Harmon-muted trumpet introduces “Kerosene Litany,” Browne’s bleak portrait of a neglected neighborhood. The track unfolds with deep-focus cinematic depth as the lapidary arrangement both heightens and softens Browne’s staccato delivery, leavened by Ekep Nkwelle’s and Jillian Grace’s warm background vocals.
No piece better captures the yin/yang power of the collaboration than “A Chorus of Hands,” Browne’s account of her search for male approval and abuse at the hands of her father. Delivered with smoldering precision over Joel Ross’s luminous vibraphone line, she dances with his counter narrative, which speaks to the poet’s transcendence. The ascension is complete with “Crowned,” a regal processional, complete with Nkwelle’s and Grace’s affirming “ummms.” While Browne intones “If the mouth is a house/then most days I am homeless,” Mason builds her a glorious palace, knowing that deliberate restraint is the height of elegance.
Browne gave Mason free reign to repurpose, edit and condense her verse in creating a new set of songs for CHROME VALLEY. In transmuting poetry into lyrics, he “started with a line or two and the whole piece blossomed from there,” Mason says. “She trusted me with her words and gave me artistic freedom, and the pieces seemed to write themselves.”
That’s exactly what Browne was looking for. “I’m one of those artists, when I ask to collaborate, I’m interested in the perspective of the artist,” she says. “What inspires you? Rather than me telling you what to do, what do you want to tell me that the poem’s telling you to do.”
Featuring Nkwelle’s soul-steeped, soft-edged vocals, “Redbone Dances” is a blues-inspired emotional x-ray of a young woman’s awaking to the thrill of eros and romance. It’s a dance that embraces the sacred and profane, from strains of gospel and sleek ‘90s R&B leading to the concluding hip-hop tinged groove, all heightened by Dillard’s hurricane solo. As throughout the project, bassist Russell Hall and drummer Domo Branch are an exceptional tandem, playing with power and sensitivity, ever alert to Mason’s shifting textures and Browne’s signifying text.
Mason’s and Hall’s tick-tock figure opens “Best Time III” as Nkwelle’s and Grace’s shimmering vocals give way to Hervey’s gleaming plunger trumpet growl. It’s a late-night minor key wail that runs through the song in counterpoint to Nkwelle’s and Grace’s matter-of-fact intoning of the fateful line, “the last time we saw Dion alive.” Both Grace and Nkwelle supplely intone the devastating “Trivia,” and as one question leads to another Ross’s deceptively beautiful vibraphone accents accentuate the sing-song theme over the “Poinciana”-like groove. Moving out of time into a rubato passage, the song ends with a gut-punch as Branch’s polyrhythmic burst registers dismay at the infliction of violence.
A feature for Grace, “Working Title” is the most topical piece in the program. With its litany of cautionary advice and anxieties haunting the minds of Black parents, it keys on a gorgeous Hall solo, followed by the increasingly frantic, trauma-laden tableaux, “How to write about that one time you had a gun pointed to your face?” Accentuated by Mason’s thick harmonies, it’s the most volatile piece on CHROME VALLEY. Gradually coming down from the spiking anxiety, the lulling phrase “It ain’t got no name” repeats until it drifts off into the night.
Climbing up out of the depths, “If We Praise (We Are Beautiful)” is an invocation that Grace and Nkwelle turn into a soaring celebration. Keying on a line that only appears once in the poem, “We are beautiful,” Mason creates an affirming mantra that spirals upwards, lifted by Branch’s Afro-Cuban beat and a ringing montuno piano figure. They take us up and over the Valley, a perspective that provides a panoramic view of a triumphant poet and the world out of which she emerged.
More than the sum of its prodigious parts, CHROME VALLEY adds a brilliant new chapter to jazz and poetry’s ongoing cross-fertilization. “I think my words expand. I think my words soar differently,” Browne says. “With music, it’s the equalizer. Everyone is welcome. I love that Sean made it accessible to the world.”
An invitation. A benediction. A study in redemption and healing through the alchemy of creative expression. CHROME VALLEY is a searing work that extends the charged territory where poetry and jazz mingle and morph into something brave and new.
