Information/Write-up
Galt MacDermot is a restless, perpetually seeking, “doing” composer. While his score for Hair was becoming the most frequently and widely performed music of modern times, MacDermot was plunging ahead with film soundtracks (Cotton Comes to Harlem; Fortune & Men’s Eyes; et al), composing and producing Isabel’s a Jezebel, an avant-garde musical in London, The Divine Hair Mass in F, and the newest smash hit on Broadway, Two Gentlemen of Verona.
“The songs of this work, Ghetto Suite, were composed, scored and recorded in two weeks. Most of MacDermot’s music came out of new tunes scored for and recorded in the Broadway world. How it came about is told here by the young schoolteacher from the Harlem ghetto schools who unearthed the poems of his young students.”
As both a teacher and a writer, I had long been interested in the writing of the young, especially that extremely personal, direct sensitivity to their environment of ghetto kids. Not long ago I sought to give some writing of Black children greater exposure. I gathered poems from two New York City elementary schools (P.S. 125M in West Harlem and P.S. 140X in the South Bronx). I tapped ten classes ranging from third to sixth grade. The other teachers (all of whom were white) had asked the children to tell what it was like to be young and Black today. Their poems astonished me in their intensity and anguish.
All the poems were defiantly honest, some pathetic. What does one say to an eleven-year-old boy who writes: “This ol’ heart of mine been broken a thousand times...”
The editors of Evergreen Review were moved by these poems and published fourteen of them in their magazine. I was delighted and so were the children. I had no idea the project would go any further.
But Martine Barrat, a French filmmaker, saw the issue of Evergreen and brought it to the accomplished composer Galt MacDermot. Soon after, ten of the poems became lyrics—utterly un-tampered with. MacDermot selected a band of outstanding musicians to back up vocalist Angie Ortiga in the recording. 25-year-old Angela, who has sung in jazz and appeared in several films, is herself a product of the world she and MacDermot inhabit with these poems. According to those with her career, and memories of friends from her childhood strung through her—ruined by drugs, or slaughtered, battered, and burnt out on the unmet needs of ghetto existence—she deeply understands the emotions and fears that course through the youths whose poems she sings.
Ghetto Suite is more than an entertainment record. It has been used by teachers and counselors to inspire and motivate the muted tongues and voices of the Black inner cities... their triumph... our shame!
-Tom Seligson
Author: The Highschool Revolutionaries; and To Be Young in Babylon
Angela Ortega: vocals
Produced, arranged and Conducted by Galt MacDermot
Record production supervision: John Holden
Jacket design: Milgraphics, New York
Photograph by Tom Lesley
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