Review: Sucking On Sugar Cane @ Chapter
Sucking on Sugar Cane: Looking for Meaning Ten Years After Hurricane Katrina
Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff
Wednesday 1st July 2015
Hurricane Katrina can still linger in the mind of most.
It is hard to consider it has been ten years since this awful disaster which befell Louisiana and the infamous aftermath.
Here poet Clare Potter and the Gareth Roberts Quintet have collaborated on a striking evening of written word and jazz.
Potter's prose is vivid and mostly accessible, having lived in New Orleans for some ten years. She paints pictures of the spice and total colour of the city and post events of the cataclysmic hurricane and controversies that soon followed with an emotional grip. Her shame in leaving and the return to total devastation has stayed with her as she still thinks she could have done more. There is something lacking in her work, but the personal level of her writing is what makes it of interest.
I don't listen to enough jazz (Whiplash however is one of my fav films at the moment). Gareth Roberts and his band were our New Orleans band for the night. The jazzy musicianship was unbounded, Roberts making his trombone sound tinny or even mellow or livid. All the players were grand in their swing and the ease they brought to their instruments and the music. In short, they were happening man *clicks fingers*.
Chapter had turned the theatre into a jazz club, but I think we would have been content in the raised seats. It would have even brought in a bigger audience.
An unexpected joy and a moving testimony.
Rating: 4 stars
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