Most jazz-based vocalese is unlistenable drek. Jazz poetry is even worse. Yet as the cool kids hyperventilate to Shabaka and the Ancestors’ entirely adequate new spiritual jazz album
We Are Sent Here By History, I’m obsessed with R.A.P. Ferreira’s
Purple Moonlight Pages. Backed by the faux-jazz band Jefferson Park Boys, the rapper formerly known as Milo avoids the pitfalls of the form by applying a hip-hop sensibility and a protective cloak of ironic detachment to rhythmic poetry. Smart and funny,
Purple Moonlight Pages’s simultaneous evocation of Nas and Thelonious Monk is rarely corny. My fingers involuntarily snap when Ferreira raps lines like “whisper-singing Nelly Furtado/wishing I was a Yardbird/plastic saxophone/ashy metronome.” Although the songs are among the album’s weakest tracks, Ferreira created videos for
“Doldrums” and
“Leaving Hell”.
(Original image by There Stands the Glass.)
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