Jherek Bischoff, Daniel Miller and Gabriel Witcher
So Fragile, So Blue (2022)
William Shatner (speaker)
National Symphony Orchestra/Steven Reineke
Artistic Advisor: Ben Folds
rec. live, 29 April 2022, Concert Hall, John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington D.C.
Texts included
National Symphony Orchestra NSO0019 [39]
There’s something called Earth Week, which focuses on sustainability and environmental issues, and takes place on 22nd April every year. In 2022, to celebrate the week, a special concert took place in the Concert Hall of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington D.C. which starred – and no other word will do – William Shatner and the National Symphony Orchestra directed by Steven Reineke who together performed ‘So Fragile, So Blue’. These are six orchestral songs with narrator, or perhaps, more realistically, six songs for speaker with orchestral underlay. I’ve listened to it numerous times over the last fortnight, which is not difficult as it only lasts 39 minutes and nearly eight of those minutes consist of spoken introductions by Shatner. He has form here, of course, as those who recall his ‘stoned’ versions of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ and ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ will surely recall. Their reissue in a CD called ‘Spaced Out’, along with the more Countrified leanings of his erstwhile chum, Leonard Nimoy, is one of my most treasured discs. However, lest one thinks ‘So Fragile, So Blue’ is in any sense James Tiberius Kirk on the rampage, let me suggest otherwise. It is, instead, a meditation on the beauty of the earth, the perils it faces through man’s destructive husbandry, and also a quirky reflection on death – Shatner’s death, which cannot, for all his virility, for all his immense love of horses and life, be too long delayed.
Shatner was 90 when he went on Blue Origin’s sub-orbital spaceflight in 2021, the oldest person to fly into space. He is now 93. He is a teller of stories and a natural ham – of course he is – but immensely, overwhelmingly alive. His experience of space flight is a direct turbo charger for this project, one that I found strangely and compellingly moving. He has told stories to Robert Sharenow and later Dan Miller for a number of years. It is the former who is co-credited with Shatner as compiling the lyrics. Ben Folds, titular leader of the Ben Folds Five, is the artistic advisor to the National Symphony and invited Shatner to perform with the orchestra. Composers and orchestrators followed in the shape of Jherek Bischoff (four songs), Daniel Miller and Gabriel Witcher (one song each). The performance in April 2022 was the result.
The songs begin with ‘Eight Days on the Water’, a strongly autobiographical account of his arduous canoe journey from his Canadian homeland to New York City when he was 16 years old. The journey itself, for Shatner, and only in retrospect, recollected decades later, embedded those elements of neglect and despoilation that the album later foregrounds. Yet it’s not a dirge of a song, the minimalistic orchestral repetitions supporting Shatner’s characteristic vocal inflexions, pauses, hesitancies, and theatrical outpourings. At 90 he has lost little in vocal power or charisma. All this, and the introductions to each song, would have been read off autocue, with Shatner sitting stage left, just in front of Folds at the piano, so it’s understandable if occasionally there is a minimal discrepancy between what is spoken and the written texts printed in the hardback book.
The dappled piano accompaniment to ‘The Meaning’ and carpet of strings develop into filmic richness whilst the text, channelled into four-line verses with a B-D rhyming scheme, offers an ardent, personal but decidedly straightforward vision – Shatner as Everyman, devoid of poetic flounce, employing everyday vocabulary to articulate his vision of life. ‘Are You the Bayou?’ sports some Louisianan funky bass that buttresses a New Orleans dancing band vibe with ardent percussion. It’s a kind of Scherzo, a conflation of swamp and love, ending in a squealing Cat Anderson-like trumpet. This induces Shatner’s laughter and the audience’s too. ‘I’ll Be With You’ is a song in which Shatner projects beyond his own death, to hymn the beauty of nature and his own posthumous place within it, how ‘I’ll be with you at dawn…’, which is a more romanticised vision of himself than the following ‘I Want to be a Tree’ which instead offers the jester’s pitch; ‘’Don’t stick me in an urn/For some relative to keep…’ Instead, for Shatner, he can nourish the soil of a growing tree and invites listeners ‘to sit right down under my shade’. It’s wittily orchestrated with repeated piano notes from Folds and then a tighter, up-tempo that mirrors the triumphant peroration.
The final song is the album title, ‘So Fragile, So Blue’ which opens with Alexander Courage’s ‘Star Trek’ theme both self-referential and self-mocking – a dangerous but delicious balancing act that Shatner has invariably maintained – and that divides up into four sections; Lifting Off, Space, The Blue Dot, Touching Down. The music moves through incremental warmth and charm toward the dramatic, powerful final section, Shatner’s commentary hymning the manifold tiny beauties of the earth as seen from his journey, and reflections on it, into space – ‘Purest pleasure, piercing pain’. He ends with the repeated, rhetorical ‘What can we do?’ The answer must surely be that we must do what we can, however little. Shatner would expect no less from us.
That evening Shatner wore a jacket printed with autumnal and violet leaves, vibrant indices of his love of the natural world. It’s his home now and, as he assures us in his lines, it will be his home after he’s gone. Simplistic? Commonplace? Maybe, but ‘Like to the silver swan, before my death I sing;/And, yet alive, my fatal knell I help to ring.’ Shatner is a hero and visionary, a lover of horses, conqueror of new worlds, even ones where the rocks are polystyrene, a teller of tales both tall and long, who has come to tell us of the beauty and fragility of our planet, to encourage us to become better stewards of our natural resources, and to foretell his own death.
Jonathan Woolf
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