TalkStory
Music composed and performed by Noa Bursie
TalkStory has twelve songs composed and perfprmed by Noa Bursie
The song (mp3) attached is called From the Shadow.
Cover and images by Mark Dellas.
c. 2005 Noa Bursie All rights reserved.
Shadows and Somnambulists: TalkStory Revisited
by Noa Bursie
I’m fast approaching the twenty-four hour mark–without sleep, that is. The late hours passed with me deep in contemplation and buried between the lines of a new song. Insomnia has its perks as any true writer will tell you, but I confess to a more perverse malady and find myself often compelled by the muses to the point of exhaustion.
There was a time in my youth when I actually followed the school of thought that I was bound to suffer for my art. Angst ridden and craving legitimacy my shielded and comfortably safe upbringing denied me, I dove headlong into every imaginable excess and cliché even moving to San Francisco’s Haight-Asbury. The organic quality of that season still provides much of what inspires me today, though the excesses have been toned down considerably by age and the clichés I immersed myself in then have mellowed out to familiar landmarks of the unique ethos that defined the era of ‘peace and love’.
As the youngest in a family of nine, I learned early on to assert myself. No shadows. It was either speak up and be counted or be lost in obscurity. As the old saying goes, there were two types of people in our house–he quick and the hungry. “I call the last piece of chicken–Oops, too slow – You snooze, you lose–Ma!!!” And there were always the visiting relatives–holidays, house parties, and the grown-ups eager to remind a child to, “…stay in a child’s place.” Unless, of course, that place was to entertain one’s elders with the latest dance steps or a precocious rendition of Ray Charles’ “Hit the Road Jack” or Nina Simone’s “I Loves You Porgy”. And so, I learned first to sing. My mother sat at the piano – alongside, my sister and I. There we’d sing in the little vestibule wedged between statues of the Virgin Mary, the Infant of Prague, and two holy water fonts shaped like clam shells. The sacred glow of votive lights in that impossibly close space made our shadows dance together to three-part harmonies of “I Come to the Garden“, “Ave Maria”, a random aria or some traditional Scottish hymn. Occasionally, mom would fall from grace, just a little, and tear into a surprisingly raunchy bar tune from the 30’s or 40’s or an old Bessie Smith number. A self-taught piano player, like her self-taught guitar player daddy, my mother, like my grandfather, believed in taking matters into her own hands when it came to just about everything, and music was no different. The story goes that some teacher showed her where middle C was on the keyboard, and mom never looked back.
My instrumental epiphany was born of that same DNA. One of my brothers got a guitar for Christmas, a Brand Names special–only the very best seasoned plywood and polymers. He tired of it quickly and consigned it to the back of his closet where I discovered the pathetic thing while foraging around in the ‘forbidden room” one rainy afternoon. I remember that moment, holding the curved surface against my stomach and feeling the vibrations resonate through me as I strummed, clueless and green. The seduction was immediate. It was as if my grandfather, whom I had never met, introduced himself to me, spoke and told me stories I never could have known or shared except he told them through me. Fingers found their way along the fretboard, and like my mother and grandfather before me, I never looked back.
My facility on the guitar developed simultaneously with my adolescent identity, which wasn’t always consistent with the narrow limitations of my middle-class, very parochial community. Her I was, enough of an aberration in my family with Led Zepplin damaging my mother’s stereo speakers along with her nerves, but on top of that, at school, I was the African-American nerd – in pigtails while everyone else wore Afros – who played the acoustic guitar and belonged to the church of the Divine Folkie where Joni Mitchell and Phoebe Snow were my patron saints. James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Janis Ian, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young–if they wrote their own music and played a Martin, I was their acolyte. Mine was a very progressive religion, however. Joni ministered to the faithful along with Stevie Wonder and Bobby Womack while Sly and the Family Stone or the Isley Brothers led the congregation in praise. We’d entertain visiting evangelists from time to time, Miles Davis, Stanley Turentine, Django Rhinehardt, Pat Metheny…yeah, I learned early on to assert myself.
Of all of the sources that served as grist for the songwriting mill, my family and personal history were never far from the top of the list of appropriate inspiration. So, as I began to work on my first album, it was a natural extension of the character of that ancestral muse that created an immediate bond for me with Maxine Hong Kingston’s autobiographical memoir, The Woman Warrior: A Memoir of a Childhood Among Ghosts. In the book Kingston labels her mother’s stories about their ancestors and the various struggles and triumphs they shared as ‘talkstories’ – living, oral histories passed down from generation to generation of ancestors lost, honored, and cursed. These stories examined tales of alienation and misogyny, culture shock, dreaded assimilation, and racism. I identified. As Maxine describes walking the whisper thin line of social contrivances and familial expectations, soundtracks of my older brothers castigating me, mocking me for grooving to Canned Heat’s rendition of the blues tune, “Goin Up to the Country” echoed up from my childhood. But I asserted myself back then and continued to develop my craft, eschewing labels and boundaries and stereotypes. That song still puts a smile on my face and a swing in my hips these many years later and the term Maxine coined was a fitting title for the tale I had to tell.
“TalkStory”, (one word – capital ‘S’) released in the winter of 2005, was the culmination of years of fitful dreams and sleepless nights and offers a veritable gumbo of genres consistent with nothing except for its commitment to the eclectic. Because many require labels in order to provide some frame of reference, my music has been called r&b, acoustic soul, jazz, blues, and when all else fails, ‘alternative folk’, whatever that is. The album was a collaborative effort and wouldn’t have the magical vibe that drives it without the input of every single musician and technician who played a part in making the disc a reality. Guitarist, Ron LoCurto, bassist, Jerry Livingston, percussionist, Emile Latimer, Mary Ramsey and her purely divine viola arrangement on “Holes in My Pockets”, and former Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra conductor, Arie Lipsky with his poignant cello accompaniment on “From the Shadow”… each one is masterfully accomplished and transcendent in his/her ability to capture the precise tones and melodic statements that make a song memorable. Recording engineer, Michael Rorick’s stunningly proficient technical skills capture those musical moments with pristine clarity. His brilliant production, mixing and mastering of the disc is the reason the music and voices have ‘presence’. Each background vocal and horn, drum or mandolin arrangement from Liz Abbott, John Allen, Andy Peruzzini, Paul Kneis, and Dejuane Motley is essential to the whole. Graphic artist, Katie Hildreth’s contributions and Audio Magic owner and resident guru, Robbie Konikoff’s encouragement and inspiration were strategic to the overall success of the project. Truly, without the input of each and every individual who contributed to the album, the artistic element that makes “TalkStory” such a unique body of work would be significantly diminished. Undeniably, the crucial element that makes these twelve songs a special work is their organic honesty. There are horns and cellos, violas, moaning blues guitars, acappella voices, mandolins, and yoga bells to be sure, but the unifying chord is the passionate expression of the woman at the twelve o’clock position in your stereo speakers determined to assert herself amidst the din of siblings and songwriters and sleepwalkers to come out of the shadows to find her voice in the world.
___________________________
Noa Bursie is a singer, songwriter, and musician, and is a member of the English Department faculty at City Honors School in Buffalo, New York.
The song (mp3) attached is called From the Shadow.
Cover and images by Mark Dellas.
c. 2005 Noa Bursie All rights reserved.
Shadows and Somnambulists: TalkStory Revisited
by Noa Bursie
I’m fast approaching the twenty-four hour mark–without sleep, that is. The late hours passed with me deep in contemplation and buried between the lines of a new song. Insomnia has its perks as any true writer will tell you, but I confess to a more perverse malady and find myself often compelled by the muses to the point of exhaustion.
There was a time in my youth when I actually followed the school of thought that I was bound to suffer for my art. Angst ridden and craving legitimacy my shielded and comfortably safe upbringing denied me, I dove headlong into every imaginable excess and cliché even moving to San Francisco’s Haight-Asbury. The organic quality of that season still provides much of what inspires me today, though the excesses have been toned down considerably by age and the clichés I immersed myself in then have mellowed out to familiar landmarks of the unique ethos that defined the era of ‘peace and love’.
As the youngest in a family of nine, I learned early on to assert myself. No shadows. It was either speak up and be counted or be lost in obscurity. As the old saying goes, there were two types of people in our house–he quick and the hungry. “I call the last piece of chicken–Oops, too slow – You snooze, you lose–Ma!!!” And there were always the visiting relatives–holidays, house parties, and the grown-ups eager to remind a child to, “…stay in a child’s place.” Unless, of course, that place was to entertain one’s elders with the latest dance steps or a precocious rendition of Ray Charles’ “Hit the Road Jack” or Nina Simone’s “I Loves You Porgy”. And so, I learned first to sing. My mother sat at the piano – alongside, my sister and I. There we’d sing in the little vestibule wedged between statues of the Virgin Mary, the Infant of Prague, and two holy water fonts shaped like clam shells. The sacred glow of votive lights in that impossibly close space made our shadows dance together to three-part harmonies of “I Come to the Garden“, “Ave Maria”, a random aria or some traditional Scottish hymn. Occasionally, mom would fall from grace, just a little, and tear into a surprisingly raunchy bar tune from the 30’s or 40’s or an old Bessie Smith number. A self-taught piano player, like her self-taught guitar player daddy, my mother, like my grandfather, believed in taking matters into her own hands when it came to just about everything, and music was no different. The story goes that some teacher showed her where middle C was on the keyboard, and mom never looked back.
My instrumental epiphany was born of that same DNA. One of my brothers got a guitar for Christmas, a Brand Names special–only the very best seasoned plywood and polymers. He tired of it quickly and consigned it to the back of his closet where I discovered the pathetic thing while foraging around in the ‘forbidden room” one rainy afternoon. I remember that moment, holding the curved surface against my stomach and feeling the vibrations resonate through me as I strummed, clueless and green. The seduction was immediate. It was as if my grandfather, whom I had never met, introduced himself to me, spoke and told me stories I never could have known or shared except he told them through me. Fingers found their way along the fretboard, and like my mother and grandfather before me, I never looked back.
My facility on the guitar developed simultaneously with my adolescent identity, which wasn’t always consistent with the narrow limitations of my middle-class, very parochial community. Her I was, enough of an aberration in my family with Led Zepplin damaging my mother’s stereo speakers along with her nerves, but on top of that, at school, I was the African-American nerd – in pigtails while everyone else wore Afros – who played the acoustic guitar and belonged to the church of the Divine Folkie where Joni Mitchell and Phoebe Snow were my patron saints. James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Janis Ian, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young–if they wrote their own music and played a Martin, I was their acolyte. Mine was a very progressive religion, however. Joni ministered to the faithful along with Stevie Wonder and Bobby Womack while Sly and the Family Stone or the Isley Brothers led the congregation in praise. We’d entertain visiting evangelists from time to time, Miles Davis, Stanley Turentine, Django Rhinehardt, Pat Metheny…yeah, I learned early on to assert myself.
Of all of the sources that served as grist for the songwriting mill, my family and personal history were never far from the top of the list of appropriate inspiration. So, as I began to work on my first album, it was a natural extension of the character of that ancestral muse that created an immediate bond for me with Maxine Hong Kingston’s autobiographical memoir, The Woman Warrior: A Memoir of a Childhood Among Ghosts. In the book Kingston labels her mother’s stories about their ancestors and the various struggles and triumphs they shared as ‘talkstories’ – living, oral histories passed down from generation to generation of ancestors lost, honored, and cursed. These stories examined tales of alienation and misogyny, culture shock, dreaded assimilation, and racism. I identified. As Maxine describes walking the whisper thin line of social contrivances and familial expectations, soundtracks of my older brothers castigating me, mocking me for grooving to Canned Heat’s rendition of the blues tune, “Goin Up to the Country” echoed up from my childhood. But I asserted myself back then and continued to develop my craft, eschewing labels and boundaries and stereotypes. That song still puts a smile on my face and a swing in my hips these many years later and the term Maxine coined was a fitting title for the tale I had to tell.
“TalkStory”, (one word – capital ‘S’) released in the winter of 2005, was the culmination of years of fitful dreams and sleepless nights and offers a veritable gumbo of genres consistent with nothing except for its commitment to the eclectic. Because many require labels in order to provide some frame of reference, my music has been called r&b, acoustic soul, jazz, blues, and when all else fails, ‘alternative folk’, whatever that is. The album was a collaborative effort and wouldn’t have the magical vibe that drives it without the input of every single musician and technician who played a part in making the disc a reality. Guitarist, Ron LoCurto, bassist, Jerry Livingston, percussionist, Emile Latimer, Mary Ramsey and her purely divine viola arrangement on “Holes in My Pockets”, and former Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra conductor, Arie Lipsky with his poignant cello accompaniment on “From the Shadow”… each one is masterfully accomplished and transcendent in his/her ability to capture the precise tones and melodic statements that make a song memorable. Recording engineer, Michael Rorick’s stunningly proficient technical skills capture those musical moments with pristine clarity. His brilliant production, mixing and mastering of the disc is the reason the music and voices have ‘presence’. Each background vocal and horn, drum or mandolin arrangement from Liz Abbott, John Allen, Andy Peruzzini, Paul Kneis, and Dejuane Motley is essential to the whole. Graphic artist, Katie Hildreth’s contributions and Audio Magic owner and resident guru, Robbie Konikoff’s encouragement and inspiration were strategic to the overall success of the project. Truly, without the input of each and every individual who contributed to the album, the artistic element that makes “TalkStory” such a unique body of work would be significantly diminished. Undeniably, the crucial element that makes these twelve songs a special work is their organic honesty. There are horns and cellos, violas, moaning blues guitars, acappella voices, mandolins, and yoga bells to be sure, but the unifying chord is the passionate expression of the woman at the twelve o’clock position in your stereo speakers determined to assert herself amidst the din of siblings and songwriters and sleepwalkers to come out of the shadows to find her voice in the world.
___________________________
Noa Bursie is a singer, songwriter, and musician, and is a member of the English Department faculty at City Honors School in Buffalo, New York.