On Lizz Wright's The Orchard

from Critical Noir @ Vibe.com

(Covering) Strange: Lizz Wright's The Orchard
by Mark Anthony Neal

Location, location, location, as in when Fred Moten theorizes about the tropes and aesthetics of escape and fugitivity that power certain black expressive cultures, it is always almost understood this also about a devotion or incarceration (take your pick) to place. Simply put, there's nothing never to escape to or escape from if without this fidelity to someplace, somewhere. So when Stuart Gorrell got to thinking about "Georgia on My Mind" it was the sister of Hoagy Carmichael (who wrote the music) and we'll accept that the feminine can be a metaphor for place, but when Ray Charles sings "Georgia on My Mind" it can never be nothing but place.

Lizz Wright's most recent recordings, Dreams Wide Awake and The Orchard, evoke the beauty of the pastoral south, which for African-Americans of southern heritage, animates the irony of loving (even aesthetically) the very Southern plantations that were the literal sites of our brutality; so desired because of that very beauty (amidst the betrayal) and the capacity of these places to generate a generational wealth that we hungered for. It's no surprise that many of the institutions in Black America have appropriated some aspects of the political economy of the plantation--including aesthetically--in order function as legible subjects in an American contexts. I can't help thinking about what's on Lizz Wright's mind.

In publicity photos, Wright often possesses a sly look of bemusement, like someone whose very being is linked to a fated incarceration to the images that propel her into a relative celebrity among jazz contemporary aficionados. Wright's smile--something like an offhanded joke played out only in her mind or an all too secret shiver in her coital region--is less about the boredom of doing yet another photo-shoot where Verve can exploit her own pastoral beauty (in direct opposition in the girlish android-noids found in contemporary R&B), but an artful act that itself represents an engagement (not a masking) of the full weight of having to be in this place.

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