Brooklyn Bound, written for the Brooklyn Youth Chorus’ Silent Voices project, evokes the full continuum of composer and singer-sonwriter Toshi Reagon's sound world: irresistible grooves, poignant blues harmonies, testimonial gospel melodies, all in the service of unrelenting honesty. Hers is a music based in the tradition of seeing things for how they really are, music that is without a single superficial moment. The truth of her music clarifies and ennobles the thinking of the listener. Put more simply: You are better after listening to Toshi Reagon’s music.
In Brooklyn Bound, Reagon wrote a piece that explores the complexity and injustice of gentrification, a topic which is frighteningly urgent in her Crown Heights neighborhood. Particular to this piece is Reagon’s sense of irony. Poignant lines of erasure like "No, there never was a building, there never was a building here. No this never was a school, nobody taught here," are set to an upbeat, danceable rhythm, with the choristers smiling and getting down to the music. The final lines of the piece are set to what Reagon calls an "ironic gratitude": "It’s the moment when someone who takes your heart thanks you as if you gave it to them."
In this second Silent Voices documentary — the first features composer Kamala Sankaram's Keeping the Look Loose — we spoke with Reagon and the choristers about the current wave of gentrification, as well as how Reagon wove the many stages of injustice into a single, cohesive work.
Watch: Brooklyn Bound with music and lyrics by Toshi Reagon (arranged for strings by Juliette Jones), performed by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus.
Brooklyn Youth Chorus's Silent Voices was a multimedia, multi-composer stage work conceived, produced and performed by the chorus. Unfolding over the course of the chorus’ 25th anniversary season, and culminating in a world premiere at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House in May 2017, the work was co-commissioned by Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and WQXR.
