The album Leaving CLE  Songs is a musical adaptation and performed remix of my poetry collection LEAVING CLE   poems of nomadic dispersal, published by Miami University Press, which bloomed from hindsight efforts to understand my family’s reverse migration moves from the Jim Crow'd landscape of the Deep South to Chicago, Cleveland, my birth city, DC, Newark, and New York before eventually reverse migrating to Alabama.

After the book was published, I began to perform the poems from the piano and with other musicians — poems that wanted to be played, sung, intoned. The music is also a sound-memory map of a Black woman artist’s survival in contemporary and rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn.

—Janice Lowe 

The Band - Janice Lowe & NAMAROON + guests:

• JANICE LOWE — piano, rhodes, synth, flute, lead & background vocals

• OLITHEA ANGLIN —background vocals; MEREDITH WRIGHT — background vocals 

• JOHNNY BRITT**— trumpet, voice-over; HERU SHABAKA-RA**— trumpet

• DEVIN BRAHJA WALDMAN — alto saxophone; GWEN LASTER — violin

• GREGORY KAGE — guitar; YOHANN POTICO — bass guitar

• MAURY HAYMORE — drums, voice-over; HOWARD ALPER — drums

• SHAWN BANKS — percussion

To read more, listening to samples, and purchase:

• Leaving CLE Songs

• Jazz Right Now Profile

• Leaving CLE Poems

• Janice Lowe

• Contact Namaroon Music