Ishmael Reed has been renowned as a novelist, poet, and playwright for more than half a century, yet his progress in the music world came more slowly. Introduced to jazz music in the front room of a bootlegger’s house at age four, Reed has been immersed in the genre his whole life. He would later tell Max Roach that bebop kept him and his friends out of reform school because they were too busy listening to records to get into trouble. Reed first recorded in the early 1980s, performing vocals and recitations alongside Conjure, a supergroup of jazz musicians—including Allen Toussaint, Olu Dara, Taj Mahal, and David Murray, among others—that Kip Hanrahan, of American Clavé Records, had assembled to arrange music for Reed’s poetry. “But I wanted to apply my ‘sensibility’ to more than songwriting,” Reed later said. “I found that lyrics ranked second to music, and though I had written the songs and poetry, the famous performers had a higher status than the writers.” And so, at the age of 60, he began to study jazz piano seriously. In 2007, a cancer diagnosis motivated him to assemble an ad hoc group and record a collection of jazz standards, For All We Know. Fifteen years later, he finally steps out as a composer on The Hands of Grace, a sweetly earnest and stirringly beautiful collection of jazz tunes for piano and ensemble.
Reed began composing out of necessity when his recent play The Slave Who Loved Caviar was short on funds. The titular slave is Jean-Michel Basquiat; Andy Warhol is the man who supplied the caviar. Rather than the usual story that casts Warhol as Basquiat’s mentor, here the Pop Art icon vampirically feeds off young Basquiat’s growing fame to prop up his own faltering career. For Reed, Basquiat is a Black genius killed by the art world and blamed for his own murder. Four of the tracks here are elegiac piano compositions that soften his characters’ angry polemics on Warhol’s complicity in Basquiat’s early death, while the rest of the album consists of occasional pieces written for Reed’s friends and family.
In a text accompanying the album, the poet Fred Moten compares Reed to Charles Mingus, another musician who came late to the piano; Reed’s approach is as refreshing as Mingus’ on Mingus Plays Piano, with a playfulness that demonstrates a deep fondness for the instrument. Reed’s style is casual and unpolished as he adds his own twists to carefully studied jazz techniques. “Bells of Basquiat” slowly teeters back and forth between two notes that are supported by sparse chords, while “When Beautiful Boys Drown in the Nile They Become Gods” is grounded in a straightforward exploration of the pentatonic scale. “What I Hear When I View Basquiats” works itself up into a ragtime rhythm before faltering again and again, as if each painting generates a joy that quickly dissipates as Reed draws his eyes across a museum wall. In the play, these compositions color the plot of Basquiat’s life in the 1980s, but on record they work wonderfully as a series of simple, expressive vignettes.
