POET PUTS HER WORK TO MUSIC
Calgary’s Sheri-D Wilson lands big-name help for her latest CD
Sheri-D Wilson calls it “cosmic.”
The poet and spoken-word artist had been toying with the idea of making music an integral part of her next album, producing tracks where the soundtrack was given equal weight to the words.
So she recorded four songs with guitarist and songwriter Barry Reynolds, best known for his collaborations with Marianne Faithful, and began looking for someone to help oversee the project.
So she googled “best producer in the world.” Not surprisingly, a number of names came up. To narrow it down, she began thinking of albums she liked and thought of the Tragically Hip. She googled “Tragically Hip producer.”
There was an overlap. Steve Berlin, the multi-instrumentalist of Los Lobos and the producer who had been at the helm for the Hip’s Phantom Power and Music @ Work, appeared on both lists.
“I sent off an e-mail as a joke,” Wilson says. “It really was a joke because I didn’t think I would ever hear back from him. Literally 10 minutes later, I get an e-mail back from him saying ‘I’ve checked out your website, I really like your poems, I’m really interested in what you’re doing. Please send me the tracks.’”
Before long, Wilson was in Portland recording with Berlin to finish the album. The music veers from acoustic, to atmospheric to swinging blues, all wrapped around Wilson’s energetic performance of her poems.
“He stands in the centre and orchestrates the whole thing and everybody plays and there’s a whole improvisational nature to it,” she says.
“He’s all about feel and emotion and truth — all these wonderful things.”
If the experience truly was “cosmic,” then it fits nicely into the themes on the resulting CD, Dragon Rouge, and Wilson’s accompanying poetry collection, The Book of Sensations (University of Calgary Press, 120 pages, $18.95).
Wilson had been studying the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, a mystical symbol used to describe the path to God in the Kabbalah of esoteric Judaism, and the ouroboros, which is the ancient symbol of a dragon eating its own tail.
“In my studies I was working on all these things and chose poems that explored various aspects of both the dragon and the tree of life,” Wilson says.
“The dragon being the warrior but also the peacekeeper. How do we reconcile the things that are happening in the world and to the earth in a peaceful way without giving more energy and frequency to the ugly sound?”
Ugly sounds probably will not play into Wilson’s performance Sunday as part of the Calgary Spoken Word Festival, the celebration of words and music she founded 15 years ago.
At the Festival Hall, she will be performing with her Orbiting Ouroborus — Reynolds, Dave Bauer, Kenna Burima, Liam McDonald and Mark Williams — as part of the festival’s Wild Women & Friends event.
Hosted by Aritha van Herk and also featuring Adrienne Adams, Cobra Collins, Afua Cooper, Lorna Crozier and Julie Trimingham, it’s part of this year’s scaled-back festival, which runs from Saturday to Tuesday.
After 15 years, Wilson said she wanted to make the festival more manageable.
“So I can still do it without getting a migraine,” she says. “The large festival is a thing of my past, but I still wanted to do something in the community so I decided to make it smaller. Then I get to enjoy it.
“That’s why I started it and it grew too large and I stopped enjoying it because I was literally working around the clock to make it happen.”
In my studies, I was working on all these things and chose poems that explored various aspects of both the dragon and the tree of life.