In the film we are told, “he came out of prison a storyteller able to awaken a pride in all of us”.
#Sublime singer how to#
It was in this period that he learned about the history of Ethiopia and the Oromo, as well as how to make music. It was feared that this move would accelerate the evictions of ethnic Oromos from their ancestral land.Īt the age of 17, Hundeessaa was imprisoned for five years for his political activities. The decades-old struggle of the Oromo people for political and cultural independence came to a head in 2014 when the government proposed a development plan to expand the limits of the country’s capital, Addis Ababa, into neighbouring Oromo villages and towns. Historically, Oromos have been subject to persecution and marginalisation, which has led to them living on the periphery of Ethiopia’s political and social life. The Oromo are the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, and represent well over a third of Ethiopia’s estimated 120 million people, mostly residing in the federal state of Oromia. So sings Haacaaluu Hundeessaa to his people, the Oromo, in the song Waa’ee Keenya (Our struggle), calling on them to take action against centuries of oppression in Ethiopia. We are in despair and idling, that is why I am whispering. Then comes the next mystery.Our situation has defied resolution, our misery isn’t improving As performers, all we do is to try to cast our own light so that another artist’s work can be seen-the way the light touches the water. Now that the music’s done and out in the world, I hope it leads others down that river, a river where the water is sometimes incredibly clear and lucid, and other times beautifully, complexly muddy. His work may seem super-cool and super-smart, but just beneath the shimmering surface is a deep river of empathy-the incomparable richness of his music approaches a spiritual level for me, a sanctity, a call to care for other human beings, to share in jubilation with people we love, to love, to touch, to vote, to marry, to empathize with struggles and most of all, to move forward.
I wanted to let my own experience as a woman shine over his experience as a man. In my latest album, I wanted to shine my own light on Sondheim’s, light on light-Sondheim can provide us actors with plenty of pizzazz, but that wasn’t the light I hoped to cast. “Understand the light/Concentrate on now.” The power of now-that’s Sondheim’s light. Light! And I don’t mean the spotlight of the theater, that “look at me” light of center stage. I mean the light of experience honestly observed, the light that happens when a window long shut comes open, the light that lets us see the world as it is. (I sometimes tell my singing students that “light” is the key word in Sondheim, the way “love” is in Sinatra.)
When a singer meditates and sings, live on stage, it’s an act designed to happen and be gone in an instant. How do you capture a musical meditation? You search for a theme-and a central theme in all of Sondheim’s work is light. Sondheim! Look, I made a hat! Where there never was a hat! It’s a Latin hat, at that!”Ī recording is a chance to capture a passion and its contradictions, to preserve the intimacy of connecting to music. He writes truths for us to live by: “It’s not so much do as you like/As it is that you like what you do” and “Careful the tale you tell/ That is the spell/ Children will listen.” Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the musicals Hamilton and In The Heights, in his first Tony Award acceptance speech, proudly announced “Mr. The need to unburden my world and make it intelligible again led me directly to Sondheim. He lightens us not by false distractions but by real wisdoms. I was juggling three daughters, a marriage, a career, aging parents and all the rush and worries of maturity. I began thinking of recording a Sondheim album at a mysteriously unintelligible moment in my own life.
Why “sublime”? Well, by sublime I mean what the poet Wordsworth meant by it: Being an actor is a hard life, and a strange life. But those of us who are musical theater actors cannot imagine our lives, cannot imagine the experience of being an actor at all, without the influence of Stephen Sondheim. I’m blessed to have just completed the passion project of my life-made more passionate by my having once appeared in his great musical play Passion-and that’s a recording of Sondheim’s sublime songs.