A Note on Stew, "Notes of a Native Song"

Last night, I saw “Notes of a Native Song” at the Harlem Stage in Manhattan. It was written/composed by Stew and Heidi Rodewald, of “Passing Strange” (one of my favorite musicals) fame.
As in “Passing Strange,” Stew sang lead and played electric guitar, Heidi Rodewald sang backup and played bass, and they were joined by a loose and energetic band consisting of percussion, keyboards, and wind instruments. The music veered from rock to jazz to Western-country styles, but was mostly centered in blues.
The show treats James Baldwin’s books as records to which Stew listens, records that are guidebooks to race relations and the racial character of America today. Behind Stew is a large projection screen in which Baldwin’s face was projected into various popular music icons: Robert Johnson, Jimi Hendrix, George Harrison (and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi with the Beatles). Several times during the show, Stew turned and bowed low to the screen toward Baldwin’s visage in another’s body. Even more striking to me was an extraordinary gesture with (for me) profound religious evocations: late in the show, Stew reached his microphone up to the screen towards Baldwin’s words and just held it there for what seemed like minutes. As if to: plea with Baldwin to speak now; listen to the “record” still to be spun for us; emphasize a (divine) silence just when we think we need words. I’ve never seen a microphone held aloft to a screen like that before. The (secular) liturgical evocations seemed intentional.
The fresh, inventive, and timely show included a gentle but insistent, haunting song about Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman. Stew mentioned toward the end that parts of “Passing Strange” were essentially reworkings of Baldwin’s life and work, and in “Notes of a Native Song” (a play on Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son), Stew has found in Baldwin a profound traveling companion, and artfully asserts his continuing “musicality” for the United States today. In Baldwin, he seems to find the heady mix of daring diagnosis of America’s racial toxicities, and the imagination to glimpse the very manufacture, and the expiration, of the dehumanizing machine of race and racialization–and the importance of getting out of the USA to get a clearer vantage on all this. (Again, familiar from “Passing Strange.”)
Stew’s freedom to re-travel Baldwin’s itinerary in a way that spoke to broad and important social questions, and in a manner that referenced liturgical practice — did I mention that all the musicians wore diverse “religiousish” garb? — in an open-ended yet morally challenging way, commanded my attention — as a theologically significant form of expression.
Tom Beaudoin, Newark, New Jersey
Here is a discussion with Baldwin from 1963: