Updated at 8:40 a.m. Oct. 17
What exactly does Regie Gibson do? Here's how he explains it: “[I] find the best words, put them in the best order, perform them in the best way to get the best result.”
In other words, Gibson is a poet, musician and self-proclaimed “literary performer.” He and his bandmates Jaques Pardo and Steve Davis, who make up the Atlas Soul Trio, stopped by Boston Public Radio on Friday ahead of their two weekend performances with the Boston Celebrity Series.
The group performs a genre of music they call “global funk,” which Gibson described as a "gumbo" of sounds influenced by jazz, hip-hop and North African rhythms. He says the trio uses music to further propel the messages contained within his spoken word.
The song “Seven Billion,” which Atlas Soul Trio performed on Boston Public Radio, shares the message of how people are but “a bunch of human instruments attempting to play in harmony." Other songs the group performed reflected on what it's like to experience a good day in a bad world, and about the value in looking up from your phone.
The group originated when Pardo and Gibson first met over a decade ago, with Davis joining slightly later. Pardo invited Gibson to perform with his group at the time, and after just one song, he knew it was something special. He remembered telling Gibson: “You don’t leave the stage, you stay up here with us.”
Gibson says that his love for language has deep roots. He said his great-grandfather, who was illiterate, “had to create songs and stories and poems in order to remember stuff. … I think if I go back, that’s where [the love] started.”
And the development of that love continued when, on his seventh birthday, his uncle gave him the only gift he could spare: a dictionary. Gibson said he took “two or three years to read through the entire dictionary." He still carries it with him today, 43 years later.
When asked about the healing power of poetry, Gibson reflected on what he thinks makes it such a powerful medium: “[Poetry] drills down on a moment. It makes the most out of a moment through literature, those of us who have so precious few moments left, which is all of us, the closer we get to the space of realizing our mortality, we begin to drill down into the precious moments and we want to mine those for all that they’re worth. Poetry has that tendency to mine that moment in time and tell us what each moment means.”
Correction: This story was updated to correct the spelling of Regie Gibson's name. We regret the error.
