By Dylan Hicks The Evidence of Silence Broken by Texan poet-performer Zell Miller III begins like a wordless encomium to Fred Rogers. Miller’s aide-de-camp, musician Kitundu, saunters on stage, sits down, takes off his sweatshirt, and thoughtfully changes his footwear. It’s tedious, but I’d have sat through several costume changes to hear what the guy planned on doing next. Sitting behind the front half of a rusted Volkswagen bug is Kitundu’s sui generis instrument––or maybe the word for it is “rig.” It includes samplers and effects pedals, but its centerpiece is an instrument of the composer’s own creation, an ingenious hybrid of turntable and harp that filters the strings though the record player’s microphonic stylus. Kitundu plucks or hammers mood ostinatos over scratchy-record accompaniment, variously sounding like a displace West African kora player or a DJ tinkering after the dancers have retired. It’s great stuff, enough so to overshadow the star. Miller’s piece is a desultory mixture of stories, vignettes, and poems, sometimes delivered with a staccato chuckle, sometimes rapped with much fervor if not much flow. He touches on politics, but mainly presents memoir about his artistic and familial life. In Joycean searching-artist mode, he can be self-important, but his pensive explorations of family are touching, with much of the poetry calling for a second listen. And when he locked with Kitundu’s soundtrack, I wished I’d smuggled in a tape recorder.

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