Lucy Gellman Photos
An eminent domain case in 2005. A cassette, itself drenched in nostalgia. A plot of land still empty in New London, wind whipping at some refuse that had been left on the property over the years. And at the center of all of these things, a true Swamp Yankee — two of them, actually — spinning the stories of misused land and a city’s ultimate betrayal into musical being.
That was the story at Three Sheets last weekend, where Danny Ravizza and John Longyear, who comprise the relatively new group Swamp Yankee, dropped their first album, Kelo v New London. More than a work of art, Kelo V New London demonstrates how music and civic engagement go, in the best of circumstances, hand in hand.
The album’s story starts in 2014, the first time guitarist, activist, and labor organizer Danny Ravizza heard Susette Kelo’s name. For Ravizza, who was doing research “examining development from a worker-based perspective,” it didn’t just stick — it found a special place in his brain, in the same cerebral nook that informed his job for the Carpenters’ Union. That year — exactly nine years after Kelo had found herself locked in a bitter suit with the city of New London, which was using eminent domain laws to transfer public land into Pfizer’s very private hands — Ravizza found himself intrigued by the case. And then, slowly, his intrigue changed to revile.
Kelo, a New London resident who predicted — correctly — that a public-to-private transfer of land would bring difficulty, displacement, and health problems on the community, sued. After reviewing eminent domain laws, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against her in favor of the deal. Homes were demolished. Pfizer got ready to take control, then balked. The property, which had changed hands again and was slated to become luxury apartments, was still vacant. (Click here for the Boston Globe’s reporting on the story.)
Ravizza was angry. “As I began examining more of the development deals happening across the state, I became increasingly alarmed that so many development deals are touted as wins for the community yet rely on exploitation and abuse of workers and taxpayers alike,” he said.
“It’s with alarming frequency that I see developments get tax breaks from a city or grant money from the state, only to hire the most low-road contractors that rely on the continued exploitation of working class people, people of color, and immigrants,” he added. “Pfizer using eminent domain to force people out of their homes was very emblematic of the type of ethos we’re seeing in development.”
So he did what years in union organizing and action had taught him. He got engaged. He kept reading. And, inspired by the fingerpicking stylings of John Fahey, he formed Swamp Yankee and started writing an album. The name of the former — Swamp Yankees are folks “who hail from east of the Connecticut River,” who “don’t ever back down from a fight,” and who are the New England with which Ravzza says he’s most comfortable — informed the latter.
Kelo V New London is the spot-on and unapologetically fresh result of that work — over a year of writing, fuming, debuting, and tweaking his songs, and thinking a lot about music. Now that it has been released (the casettes are limited edition, and well worth it), he and bandmate John Longyear are also selling through the group’s Bandcamp page.
That Ravizza and Longyear have spent a year working on the release is apparent at first listen; it offers a rich, thorough, and heartfelt narrative for guitar and cello, taking listeners through five aural chapters that begin with Kelo’s story and travel through a Connecticut that doesn’t have summer seaside cottages, bed and breakfast visits, and recreational clamming outings.
From the moment Kelo’s voice crackles over the first track — I picked up the paper and discovered that Pfizer pharmaceutical was coming to town — and low, mournful but angry guitar and cello cut in, it’s hard not to be hooked. A break in the tension makes you think, maybe, just maybe, everything will be okay for Susette and her lot; frenetic guitar and wailing, ambulance-like cello just two minutes later make abundantly clear that it will not be. That’s true for other tracks on the tape as well: “Gold Star Bridge” evokes, with impressive care, the heavy steel lifted and hammered in its building, the wide expanse of the thing, and the water gurgling beneath it. “Dirge for Jewett City” leaves the listener feeling exhausted in exactly the way music should. And “Shoreline East Rag” celebrates the area it depicts in song, while revealing its complexity with every bar.
“I think which notes you use and which textures you chose to bring out can do a lot more to convey emotion than singing about bridges and planning and zoning, which very few people care about,” Ravizza said after the release. “If you instead say: ‘This song is about this event or place’ they the audience can fill in the blanks with their imagination.”
His sentiments came alive as he played, his eyes falling to the guitar, and then to Longyear, as the notes came pouring forth. But Three Sheets, which Ravizza calls “the best bar in New Haven,” wasn’t quite the right venue for this music. It’s something intended, it seems, to be put on in a car, turned to three-quarters full volume, and played on repeat , windows rolled down, fingers combing the Connecticut air, riding right into the low-hanging sky and horizon.
