A cycle of lyric poems illustrated with woodcut prints, drawings and photographs.
I always “heard” the poems from For Women Missing or Dead as late night blues “tunes,” so years later I set them to music: O-honest-to-God songs (not just words with a musical ambiance behind them). I posted twelve of these songs in the “Music” section of my website (www.bminor.org), short audio samples, crude “homegrown” demo versions I hoped might attract the attention of performers who’d want to sing them–but that didn’t happen. So on occasion I sing them myself, and two of these songs were included on a site J.J. Webb, a former head of web development at Stanford University Business School and a poet with a long history of internet editing, set up for me–Bill Minor’s Mortality Suite: A Broadside of Jazz Riffs–on his Beau Blue Presents series that included MP3 readings, and in my case, original music and art work: http://jjwebb.ihwy.com/mortalitysuite/. I’ll discuss this interesting venture–and a CD I produced as a spinoff (or “expansion” of this work), Mortality Suite–in a future blog.
Bill's Blog 