UpSurge! 

The Oakland-based jazz poetry ensemble UpSurge! did a sold-out performance on Friday evening, July 3, at the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music (OPC) in honor of an Annual Frederick Douglass Day/Alternative Fourth of July Celebration. Warming up the stage was the Frederick Douglass Youth Ensemble under the musical direction of Steven Turner. Founding director of OPC and UpSurge! band mate, trombonist, and vocalist Angela Wellman provided leadership for the youth ensemble, while UpSurge! is the brainchild of Raymond Nat Turner, Oakland poet and productions impresario.

UpSurge! is celebrating its twentieth anniversary. Recently, I interviewed Turner and his wife and fellow performer, Zigi Lowenberg. The anniversary of the time they have spent together coincides with the birthday of the unique jazz poetry ensemble that Turner launched in 1990. It is a testament to their creativity, resilience, and shared purpose that Turner--a southern-Californian, African-American poet--and Lowenberg--a New York Jewish visual artist--have sustained their long-term commitment to one another and their artistic pursuits. As Lowenberg put it, the art has been one of the things that has kept them going.

Turner grew up in the south-central/Watts area of Los Angeles. Raised by Caffie Greene of Arkansas who turned 90 this past March, Turner remembers his mother inviting him to come with her to political meetings when he just “wanted to play baseball.” His mother responded: “You know that baseball park where you want to play and that coach who comes to teach you? Well, they all came from people being involved.” Greene walked her talk; she helped found the Martin Luther King General Hospital in L.A. and pursued health and human services issues. The youth center where she served as director became the nucleus of the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party. But Greene also loved stories, nursery rhymes, and lullabies, and Turner remembers her reading to him a lot when he was growing up. His father, Raymond Douglas Turner, was a Hollywood actor who played many supporting roles in the segregated film industry of the 1930s and 40s.

In 1968, Turner’s friend was killed by the L.A. police. “I started to write, needing some kind of outlet.” He was studying theater in a local college and had the opportunity to open for an event featuring the great African-American essayist and novelist James Baldwin. Thousands had turned out to see Baldwin but Turner recalls that, in his warm-up, he went on and on. “In hindsight, the experience was a perfect lesson. I was foolish, young and arrogant--that’s what youth will do for you.” Baldwin was kind and patient, and the event led to other engagements where Turner was invited to speak and present poems. Soon others were calling him the “People’s Poet.”

Watts Writers Workshop poet Eric Priestley took Turner “under his wing” and invited him to contribute to an anthology showcasing young Black poets, including Quincy Troupe and California’s poet laureate emeritus, Al Young.  (We Speak as Liberators turned out to be a seminal collection of modern African-American poetry, along with an anthology produced by another East Bay Poet, Dices or Black Bones edited by Adam David Miller.) Turner continued to pursue his college education at Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington. On flights up and down the Pacific Coast, Turner recalls “looking down and seeing all the bridges of the Bay Area. I knew I wanted to visit there one day.” At Evergreen, he discovered Bertolt Brecht, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Langston Hughes as well as modern activist poets Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) and Sonia Sanchez. Evergreen, a liberal arts college was nonetheless caught up in the student movements and Turner took part in protests to demand a broader, more inclusive and relevant curriculum. By now, he was a seasoned activist and public speaker; he was asked to come to Oakland as a community organizer.

It was in the Bay Area that Turner’s trajectory of political organizing, poetizing, public speaking, and jazz intersected with that of artist and poet Zigi Lowenberg. Lowenberg was raised in Queens and arrived in California from the East Village in Manhattan in 1986. Although she grew up in a “somewhat sheltered Jewish community,” both her mother and great-aunt had been involved in politics. Her mother had met Eleanor Roosevelt and been involved in fair-housing issues, as well as in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Lowenberg’s great-aunt was an all-out communist.

               

Lowenberg was living in a group house in the late 1980s, and was practicing visual art and teaching in Oakland’s parks and recreation programs. A mutual friend introduced her over the phone to Turner, and they spent six hours “about politics and art--from Engels and Ellington and everything in between.” Turner was divorced and had two children, Charu (now a 32-year-old professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst), and Bryana (age 30, a teacher and the mother of two small children). Lowenberg says that “the thing that really made me want to meet Raymond was when he told me that a highlight of his life had been cutting the [umbilical] cord on his daughter at her home birth.” They dated for a year and lived together for another year, but then separated. “Our first years together were tumultuous,” Lowenberg admits, “but the art kept us together.” Even when did not live together, they continued to work together.

Turner founded UpSurge! in 1990, a unique ensemble of jazz-influenced musicians interested in exploring a word-sound, instrumental-oriented repertoire that often used Turner’s poems as an original starting point. One of their first performances was at Oakland’s Coffee Mill reading series where proprietor Peter Torsiello’s had established an Italian style salon atmosphere. Lowenberg played a behind-the-scenes role at first, making flyers and photographing performances. “I was a secret poet,” she says. Then, one December she gave Turner a Hanukkah/Holiday poem. “I got the bite,” she says, when Turner invited her to come up and do the poem at the end of an UpSurge! performance. She became a member of the now seven-member band. UpSurge! has produced two compact discs, “All Hands on Deck“ (1999) and “Chromatology” (2003). The title of the latter CD is drawn from their poem about their relationship and all the stereotypes and challenges that face a mixed-race couple.

In 2007, Turner created the Bay Area Jazz Poetry Festival, held in the Gourmet Ghetto/north Shattuck area. “I have to admit, I love food,” he says. The Festival’s vision is to present out-of-town jazz poets and musicians on the same bill with resident artists. At an UpSurge! performance at New York’s Cornelia Street Café in 2006, Turner and Lowenberg met New York poet Golda Solomon and saxophonist Saco Yasuma and invited them to perform at the first Bay Area Jazz Poetry Festival. Local poets and musicians who have participated have included Avotcja and her band Modupue, Adam David Miller, Gael Alcock, Julian Carroll, Yancie Taylor, Lisa B., Arisa White, and COPUS. Elephant Pharmacy and Café de la Paz initially support the event, but since their demise and the decline in arts funding the Festival had to scale back.

Turner has toured and read in venues in Chicago, Detroit and New York where he met performance poet Patricia Smith and many NuYorican poets including Bob Holman. Though he participated in poetry slams, Turner’s ideas for the presentation of sound-based poetry avers from slam culture’s competitive climate: “Judging poetry is abhorrent to me,” he says. Turner detects a repetitiveness in the style of many performance poets: they seem to be saying “I can shock you, I can dazzle you, and I can speak loudly,” but often, he notes, “everyone starts sounding alike and the content is not there.” Nevertheless, Lowenberg and Turner are excited to see so many younger poets active in performance.

Turner and UpSurge! are attempting to bring the music back to the poetry while continuing to foster a larger audience. Jazz is key, and band members take their inspiration from musicians they have been able to meet and work with. “When you go backstage to meet musicians after a jazz performance,” Lowenberg notes,” there is a down-home humility about so many of them. Even though they are fantastic musicians, they greet you with an air of respectful and a lack of pretense.” Turner adds that master performers often respond to praise with the statement that they are “just trying to play this music,” often implying that they are still on a learning curve. The musicians who inspire them seem constantly to be “digging deeper,” says Lowenberg, “as if art itself was pulling them along.”

As for influences, in addition to jazz musicians, Turner acknowledges June Jordan’s Poetry for the People project and her recognition that Walt Whitman was a poet who sought an authentic, yet diversely rich, American voice. Mary Webb, a local writing teacher, novelist, playwright and impresario, has also been an important model and mentor to Turner. Both Turner and Lowenberg have participated in, and helped moderate dialogues on race and racism that Webb initiated. Lowenberg also credits their acting and voice teacher Dr. Lissa Tyler Renaud of the Actors Training Project for helping to improve their performance skills. Currently, Lowenberg is doing dance and movement training to open a nonverbal avenue for exploring rhythm and improvisation.

Turner and Lowenberg finally tied the official knot on June 17, 2001, but have spent the past 20 years together growing their relationship and UpSurge! Lowenberg has contributed her visual arts background and marketing skills, while Turner has been the artistic impetus and producer of events. Turner cut his teeth on arts management working with the great studio musician Donald Duck Bailey.

UpSurge! is Richard Howell (saxophone, vocals, producer); Angela Wellman (trombone, vocals, percussion); Ron Belcher (bass); Tammy Hall (piano); and Rob Rhodes (drums). For the July 3rd event, Michael Spencer will be playing drums, Melvin Bell on sax, Steven Turner on alto sax and piano, and director of the youth ensemble, and Victoria Theodore may join them; she is a keyboardist and backup vocalist for Stevie Wonder who now lives in the Bay Area.