Portland

Ghost Trains

Voices

New York

Prayer

Anthem

Brother Leap was formed in 2010 to put together modern jazz (Hal Onserud on bass, Rob Wallace as percussionist) and Peter Marin's poetry about the homeless. The name of the group was created by putting together the letters of the first names of its members rearranged appropriately.

The poems themselves were chosen from among those written over a ten year period, when Marin spent time, off and on, on the streets and in the shelters of various cities in order to see homelessness for himself and to hear about it from those in the streets. Oddly enough, there are at least a few convergences among some of the natures and experiences of the homeless and those of certain artists, writers and musicians. What they share is a way of seeing into the world from the outside, of understanding certain things about the world others do not, of making lives "beyond the pale" out of choice or necessity. The Irish dramatist Synge once commented that, in Ireland, if you were rebellious, discontent or at odds with the world you became a vagabond and tramp if you were poor; if you were better off, you became an artist, a writer or musician.

Is that true in America? Maybe not entirely. But surely a relationship of some kind still exists between the homeless and poets and musicians like those in Brother Leap who struggle at the edges of society or rebel against it.

No doubt, of course, the homeless suffer these days in ways that few artists do. There is something terrible at work in our nation that does not presently get the attention it should. In every American city there exists a world, with countless inhabitants, everyone wants to pretend does not exist. And maybe one of the many jobs of artists to draw attention to it -- the way Synge and O'Casey did in Ireland,or John Steinbeck, in America, in The Grapes of Wrath.

Thus, the words and music in MARGINS are meant to convey a bit of the reality out there on the margins of America but also right here among us: on our corners, in our alleys and abandoned buildings, in forgotten subway, in shelters and missions. It is there (and, we hope,  in these words and this music) you find the insulted and injured, the throwaway people drowning individually in a sea of cruelty, indifference and, yes, sometimes hatred.

Brother Leap tries to give voice to the voiceless, to make you look, if only for a moment, at those who otherwise remain invisible. We hope you will find beauty as well as sorrow here, and at least a bit of joy and humor within the pain and difficulty of the men and difficult of the men and women exiled and forgotten within their own country. That too is part of homelessness. "Joy weeps,"  Blake said, "sorrow laughs."


