 Zero Church – Suzzy & Maggie RocheSometime, I think it was around the winter of 2000, Suzzy Roche asked me if I had any special prayer that I wanted to share. Anyone who knows me will not be surprised that I had nothing for her. Suzzy, when pressed, refused to tell me why she was making this, to me, anyway, particularly peculiar request. It turned out that she and her sister Maggie were working on a project with Anna Deveare Smith’s Institute on the the Arts & Civic Dialogue at Harvard University. They collected prayers from many people of different cultural and religious (and even non-religious) backgrounds and set them to music. One of the results was the Zero Church CD. Many of the prayers were in prose form, some no more (or less) than excerpts from interviews. What most impressed me was how Suzzy and Maggie found the poetry in the spoken word, and set the natural, unrhyming rhtyhms of speech to the metered melody and harmony of song. Once I heard what they were up to, I implored them (I guess that was my prayer) to let me in on the deal, and I got to write a few arrangements and play on some of the songs. The project, as a whole, was profoundly moving to me, and it was a privilege to participate.Zero Church (1/22/02) is available for purchase and download at Amazon and for download from iTunes. As the Roches, Suzzy and Maggie, together with their sister Terre, have their own website and a page on MySpace. Part of the Roches’ site is devoted to Zero Church. |
