FOR ALL WE KNOW---2007

 (Recording by The Ishmael Reed Quintet, featuring David Murray)

Surprising, perhaps, to all those who for years have known Ishmael Reed only as gifted, high-energy novelist, playwright, and poet, is this quite lovely album of music employing the great wordsmith in the roles of jazz pianist, combo leader, and trenchant narrator.  These twelve numbers unpretentiously played by Reed, flutist Roger Glenn, guitarist Chris Planas, David Murray on tenor saxophone and bass clarinet, and Reed’s wife Carla Blank on violin are dedicated to “those young people who, with few options, entered the Armed Forces to further their education.” The album combining as it does its pianist who has studied late in life and turned himself into a competent jazz man, its competent violinist not known for jazz styling, and competent background guitarist with the titanic and famous David Murray and the equally brilliant and experienced Glenn, has the effect of a community banded together for emergency action.  This laid-back album must be taken seriously.  In its very understated manner FOR ALL WE KNOW must be considered one of the truly powerful and meaningful statements created so far in the face of the interminable Iraq War.

The title piece features a totally delicious statement of the melody by flutist Glenn followed by a fine lag-time, Hawkinsesque solo by Murray.  The piece exhibits jazz’s unique ability to be at once mournful, beautiful, and positive.  In fact Glenn (especially on “Blue Bossa”and “You Don’t Know What Love Is”) and Murray (throughout but taking no prisoners on “Blue Bossa” and “What Did I Do To Be So Black and Blue”) evince the wonderful trait of playing brilliantly but at the same time relaxed.  Carla Blank, once-famed dancer and choreographer on the New York Downtown scene, picks up the violin here and plays plangent and honest melodies, particularly coloring “When Sonny Gets Blue” and “What Did I Do…” with that special ‘20s-‘30s root sound.  Planas’s guitar work backs all tunes up well, as does Ishmael Reed with spare, righteous chordings---even soloing delicately on Miles Davis’s “Solar” and “Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise.”

But Reed makes his most powerful contribution and makes this CD a must  as the poet of and spokesperson for three iconic females---ironic to those who’ve categorized him as anti-feminist---on the three pieces “They Call Me The Prophet of Doom,” “If I’m A Welfare Queen, Where Are My Jewels and Furs?”, and “Army Nurse.”  Speaking as Cassandra (to Bush and the gang?)---“I told that fool to leave that woman alone…/I said the country would fall---and it did...”; as a wronged welfare mother on “If I’m A Welfare Queen”; and as an observer of a ruined, once-happy young nurse returned home on the chilling “Army Nurse,” Ishmael Reed again shows himself to be one of America’s truly indispensable voices for change, this time with the added backing of the changes.