In some collaborations between poets and musicians it’s more a collaboration with the enemy where sound strangles the poet’s words or vice versa and both go their selfish ways.
But in Skywriting with Glitter you get a cross-fertilization, an interweaving, a mutual creative respect, the best of the best of collaboration – human voice and piano. Ellyn Maybe’s poems, like apocalyptic fairy tales, are narratives of surreal/real adventures from her well-read storied mind. They are stories of innocence in a world of indifference, evocative of the post-Beat revolution.
And Robbie Fitzsimmon’s sonorous rhythmic piano urges through every phrase and lingual delivery as perfect as the warp and weft of a Navajo landscape transfixed in weaving. His counter-tenor voice compliments and amplifies, accompanies and lifts both his and Ellyn’s words and is secure in the groundwork of its own.
These works are often a revolution of the lyric where doggerel and repetitious rhyme are simply unneeded, in fact foreign to the song-poem. Poetry has been freed to be music again. We are dealing with a poet’s inspiration and the remarkable creativity of a musician.
Trying not to listen to the pieces on this album again won’t succeed. Once you enter its world, Ellyn’s poems and Robbie’s music, you’ll find each hearing opens up doors like stars that are there blinking with amused deference.
The compelling mystery and insistent story board of these collaborations will fill your room, your headphones, your speakers, your mind-space with fresh energy and plenty of rhythmical dance to move you around.
Larry Goodell / Placitas, New Mexico / 15Sep2016
Skywriting with Glitter, Ellyn & Robbie
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