Review: Spirit Soundtrack "Masterwork"
Spirit - the Seventh Fire (Live Soundtrack Recording)
Peter Buffett/Chief Hawk Pope
Whatever cultural ironies manifest everytime someone declares that Eric Clapton wrote Crossroads , or Paul Simon invented Afro-Pop, we need to get over it. The reality is, audiences like what is musically and culturally alien transmogrified through one of their own, an empath who can live in both worlds. The Village gathers around this spiritual messenger as they interpret entire realms of the Outworld heart and soul into the local tongue, the local rhythms. This is how we evolve as a people.
This new live soundtrack recording of Spirit - the Seventh Fire is an evolution of the original 1998 Spirit live recording. In fact, of the 14 original songs, 10 are re-interpreted here, with 11 new pieces added. If you've not yet taken the Spirit journey, this is a great time to book passage. Categorizing it is not so easy. This is in part: program music serving a story of personal transformation, rock musical, traditional Native American performance in concert and Suite for the American Indian. Or whatever it brings to you, and you to it.
Blending rock band, Native drummers, singers, a cello, digeridoo, flute, various electronica and piano together, this hybrid orchestra offers an amazing palette of colors, textures and emotions. And when it gets wound up, does it ever blow the doors off.
With this release, Peter Buffett imbues his masterwork with such a fierce loyalty to the Native source material that it feels like he's opened some enormous Stargate and the ancestors and stories and spirits of 500 Nations cross the centuries and burst upon us at once. The effect is overwhelming, moving, breathtaking.
Buffett's long road to this triumph began back with his contribution to the 1990 Kevin Costner film Dances with Wolves, the Fire Dance epiphany. Since then, the ego-less merging of his electronica and pop sensibilities with Native drums, flutes and voices has become a highly evolved craft. As he progressed as an artist through a wide variety of American Indian-themed films and other projects, and as his studio tools blossomed into digital splendor, a new language emerged, a hybrid American roots sound all his own.
Like Jerome Moross's score to The Big Country literally became the oft-imitated sound of the Western film, Peter Buffett's distinctive Native American-inspired, pop-infused sound has become an accepted musical lingo by which our Village gets the message from our own indigenous People. With Spirit - the Seventh Fire, the message comes through loud and clear.
Sonically, one expects a live stage recording to lack the seamless tightness and sparkling presence of a studio album, but here mixer and mastering guru Jeff Wolpert has managed to avoid the classic foibles of off-miking, dingy over-ambience and over-saturated pre-amps with a really stellar audio performance rivaling the best of studio clarity while still capturing the energy and the spacial dimension of the stage setting. Dynamic, clean and alive.
This is made possible by Spirit's hellaciously rockin' rhythm section of Doug Lunn/bass, Brian Pothier/guitar and DJ Brooks on drums that not only knows how to get in the pocket and stay there, but produce great sounds from their axes.
A major force in the creation of the Spirit dynasty has been Chief Hawk Pope, a Chief of the Shawnee Nation for over 29 years. His collaborations with Buffett hail back to the 1995 500 Nations network documentary soundtrack. From his haunting wail on Wolf Love Song (with its surprising echoes of a Negro Spiritual) to his resonant, poetic recitations, it's his voice guiding us through the generations of magnificence and sorrow.
If you have the original Spirit, rest assured Spirit - the Seventh Fire, given its 11 new pieces and thoroughly modern remounting of the original works, is a must-have. And if you're new to Spirit, this is an excellent starter kit. The CD comes complete with a 32-page booklet of gorgeous images and words from the current stage show.
-- Ken Melville
Contributing Editor Ken Melville is an Emmy-winning composer and former producer for the Kronos Quartet, the London Symphony Orchestra, Michael McDonald, Bruce Hornsby and serves as Executive Producer of Indie Film Composers.
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