ABLE -MINDED POETS ,Concert Review, LIve @ Curve Bar, June 26th, 2003

by -Lyle Brooks

The most refreshing things about my first exposure to the Able Minded Poets were both the idea of a community represented on a stage as well as the sense that you don't always have to know what it is to like it. From the outset, there were memories of my first Roots show in 1994. That show, on a side stage of the Horde Fest in August in Texas, helped me to become excited about a type of music of which I was growing tired. Just as everything had started to become stock, these guys got on stage and had fun and didn't have to be anything but good.

AMP also doesn't seem to need to be anything but good. Are they poets with a musical flair? Are they a live hip-hop crew? Ultimately, these questions arise and can be ignored. Jacob Jones' flows are sometimes broken, with the rough edges splintering into shards that cut; sometimes they are idealistic tumbles of exploration. There is no single approach to rhyme making in this collective.

Songs like "Is It Love?" and "Spirit" allow Lewis Hill to show his many talents, most notably driving the beat with force as well as subtlety, belting out soulful lines to counter the heavy rhymes, his is a voice which soars just above the bedlam of the mix, and as if that weren't enough he mimics cuts and scratches using his mouth. It requires some inspection, but there were no turntables. The music comes to you. Whether you are grabbed by the deep funk beats and bass lines that hop, or by the rhymes that never sound forced, or perhaps, the soulful vocals that expand the sound as well as making more concrete the music's direction. If the listener is busied by trying to identify all of these parts they may miss the whole.

But the music works so well in creating space because the poetry is poetic; it knows where it wants to go and what it wants you to feel. This is best felt in moments where repetitions become incantations, which change their meanings in the context of the song's space as well as the repeating measures.

The Able Minded Poets are just that, flexible with language as well as its delivery. Worrying about the layers of music, which fold together in the set, would only distract the listener from getting into it and dancing.