Putting Anderson's Words To Music

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Music Review
A Flood Of Songs Washing Over a City

By Allan Kozinn
Published: August 25, 2010

John Lennon used to say, during the period he was writing overtly political music, that his songs were a form of journalism. Ted Hearne, a composer who was born in 1982, two years after Lennon was killed, seemingly takes a similar view. He described his “Katrina Ballads” — an expansive song cycle about Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, and the government’s inadequate response — as a “somewhat journalistic piece.”

But where Lennon saw himself as an author of editorials couched as ballads, Mr. Hearne confined his editorializing to his music. The texts of the 10 “Katrina Ballads” are drawn entirely from news reports, mostly from the week of the storm. It is in the selection of those texts, and in the way they are set and accompanied, that Mr. Hearne’s sadness and anger come through.

What he was after was not a documentary about Katrina as the people of New Orleans experienced it, but rather an inflected, interpreted record of how the rest of the country watched it unfold — that is, as the news media presented it, complete with resoundingly famous sound bites. They include President George W. Bush’s praise of Michael Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency — “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” — which Mr. Hearne made into the full text of an extended jazz aria, and Kanye West’s declaration that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

To commemorate the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina — and to celebrate the release of the “Katrina Ballads” on CD (New Amsterdam) — Mr. Hearne and nearly all the musicians on the recording performed the full cycle on Tuesday evening at Le Poisson Rouge.

The contrast between the disc and the live performance was extraordinary: the fastidiously produced recording, though it delivered some of the work’s punch, left me cold. But the concert reading had a tough edge and a wildness of spirit that suited the music, and the subject.

It had an important visual element too. The four vocal soloists sat on high stools in front of a scrim, with the instrumental ensemble, conducted by Mr. Hearne, behind it. A film by Bill Morrison, using footage from New Orleans, as well as some of the television interviews Mr. Hearne set to music, was projected onto the scrim and a wall to the side of the stage.

Mr. Hearne’s Prologue uses part of a report from The Houston Chronicle about New Orleans’s vulnerability, originally published in 2001, and set as a slow blues number. René Marie sang it with a supple, evocative lilt, with the rest of the singers joining in for a staid, polyphonic rendering of the final line, “to some extent, I think we’ve been lulled to sleep.”

The melding of popular and classical styles begins immediately. The bluesy vocal line of the Prologue is underpinned by a score that seesaws between chamber scoring and rock guitar. The second ballad, “When We Awoke, It Was to That Familiar Phrase: New Orleans Dodged a Bullet,” is mostly an essay for French horn and electronics, and the two instrumental interludes take in some of the livelier elements of New Orleans jazz. “Dennis Hastert: 8.31.05,” given a dark, jazz-tinged rendering by the tenor Isaiah Robinson, is accompanied by a churning, almost Minimalist piano figure.

The work’s centerpiece is a setting of an interview conducted by an angry Anderson Cooper, the CNN anchor, with the calmly, almost robotically diplomatic Senator Mary Landrieu. It is presented first as a duet between Anthony Turner and Abigail Fischer and as a quartet when Mr. Cooper presses Ms. Landrieu to say she is angry, and at whom.

But an extended, jazzy riff built around President Bush’s “heck of a job” statement, sung with unbridled energy by Mr. Hearne, is also a clear highlight, as are Mr. Robinson’s barnstorming performance of Mr. West’s speech and Ms. Marie’s affectingly direct rendering of a long, reflective quotation from Ashley Nelson, an 18-year old resident of New Orleans.


Ted Hearne and his ensemble will perform “Katrina Ballads” on Saturday at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts in Houston; (713) 315-2525; thehobbycenter.org

A version of this review appeared in print on August 26, 2010, on page C1 of the New York edition.