This one is very good.  I highly recommend this album for anyone who's into spoken word and slam poetry.  Excellent poems from some very talented folk, excellent recording quality, all round great album.
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THE NEXT MOVEMENT is one of the most influential and talented poetry projects circulating around at present. The excerpt was filmed at the pioneering coffee house Kijiji's (which means "village" in Kiswahili) located in Nashville, Tennessee on the historical black college campus of Fisk University. This poetry collective is predominately composed of college educated students who are putting their college training to work in the modern spoken word / poetry arena.
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Big Ups on "The Open Mic Sessions" cd!! - OFF DA CHAIN!
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Various Artists
The Open Mic Sessions: Live from Kijiji's
Next Movement 

Nashville's spoken word scene consists of a constantly changing stream of names, faces, showcases and venues, all operating under a common accord: a respect for the freedom of creative expression in practically any form it might take when performed on a microphone. 

This stance is laudable. It takes guts to stand in front of a crowd of strangers and say what's on your mind and in your heart. Moreover, most poets don't expect to land a major-label deal, gain national notoriety, or get much recognition at all, save for the high they get when the audience claps and someone tells them that a particular line from a specific poem affected him or her in some poignant way. 

The Open Mic Sessions captures a live evening of open-mike spoken-word performances at Kijiji Coffee House on Jefferson Street with little of the fluff associated with many similar releases. Poetry CDs tend to get a bad rep for featuring poets who are inexperienced in the studio blandly delivering lines over a jazz track, or trying to be so against the grain that they turn off listeners in the process. However, on The Open Mic Sessions, the poets stand on their own, unaccompanied, delivering their verse as many of them do every week at the North Nashville coffee house. 

The most memorable performances come from Suga, Neophite, Simply Sil, Tia and Poet & Black Boy, all of whom seem to have a masterful grasp on delivery, hitting all the marks that spark audience reaction and demand unbroken attention. They also seem to have more of a knack for literary writing which appeals to both veteran listeners and newcomers. 

Even though the project aims to be "raw," one minor low point is the sound of a cell phone ringing several times in the background. Since the producers knew in advance that the recording would be used for a CD, perhaps measures could have been taken to prevent such distractions. 

‹ K. Danielle Edwards
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