A remembrance

Updated Jan. 15

The road traveled by John Forté delivered him from Brownsville, Brooklyn, where he was born, to Chilmark, where he died suddenly on Monday. 

It brought him on an extraordinary, half-century journey. Along that road, he navigated New York’s toughest neighborhoods and made his way to elite academic institutions. It took a celebrated turn down city streets of hip-hop in its heyday, bringing him to a red-carpet walk at the Grammys. It sent him on a detour down the corridors of a prison and then to a dramatic exoneration, which led him to an on-ramp back on life’s highway.

Ultimately, the road led Forté to the Island. He first came in 1998 through an invitation from his friend Ben Taylor, son of Carly Simon and James Taylor, and Forté was drawn in by its unique community spirit. He often described immediately falling in love with the place. He developed a deep friendship through music with Ben Taylor and Simon, and about a decade later, he chose to settle here. In the end, it seemed Forté had so much more distance to travel as he was going through what he felt was one of the most creative and productive periods of his life as a musician and recording artist.

Forté ran out of road far too suddenly this week. And those of us on the Island who counted him as a friend are left devastated, and are looking back over his extraordinary life. He was 50 years old, and would have turned 51 at the end of this month. What he accomplished is nothing short of amazing. The loss just feels unbearable, and it is hard to imagine this Island without him on it. 

Those who did not know Forté are learning that a truly extraordinary man lived quietly here among us in a small home with weathered clapboards and a bowed roof in the woods off Hewing Field. He lived there for many years with his former wife Lara Fuller, a freelance photographer, and when they separated, he stayed in the house and made it a home as a loving and devoted father to his two young children: Wren, 8, whom everyone knows as Zazi, and Haile, who is 5. 

One of Forté’s favorite ways to spend time was kicking a soccer ball with his kids in a nearby field or chasing them around the woods behind their home. They loved to walk those woods, through which the Tiasquam River passes. And they would explore its meandering streambeds, which trickle through Chilmark’s stone walls, across Middle Road, and ultimately feed Tisbury Great Pond. Forté was a dedicated father, who attended soccer games and dance recitals and who loved to create magic for his kids. He was fiercely proud of both of them. When The Martha’s Vineyard Times featured an article about a Chilmark Preschool art class, a picture of his son Haile with his artwork appeared on the cover. Forté came over that same day to the newsroom to see if he could get an extra bundle of papers to mail to his mom and sister, and to share with friends.

The fuel that carried him along through all of his life was music, as well as his love for his family and friends, his clarity of thinking, his curiosity about all things, and his incredible generosity of spirit. Forté never forgot where he came from even as he garnered awards, accolades, and fame. He kept his Island friends close while he developed a relationship with former President Barack Obama, and he worked alongside a commander in chief of the jazz world, Herbie Hancock. But there are also some quieter things about Forté’s life on the Island that are perhaps less well-known:

• He was incredibly tidy. I recently went over to spend time with him to go through some of his writing and letters from his days in prison, and I was struck by how incredibly organized he was in the way he kept his letters, and the discipline of his penmanship. Everything had a place. Everything was folded. The floors were swept clean. 
• He was passionate about applied artificial intelligence, and all of the potential it brought to innovation in music. He loved to demonstrate how he could weave AI into his work flow, and one of my favorite afternoons with Forté was him walking me through what AI made possible for him as a musician. He meditated on AI and music in detail in a lengthy interview for the Arts & Ideas magazine, published by The Martha’s Vineyard Times.
• He became a gifted gardener, who painstakingly cared for his plants, particularly certain hemp plants that he was growing for medicinal marijuana. His workday included steady sampling of the product, and the sweet smell of the large blunts he rolled is now an olfactory memory that is unforgettable. I made the mistake of smoking with Forté, and ended up horizontal on lawn furniture looking up at the stars for the entire night while I tried to re-enter my own galaxy.
• He played cards with “gumption.” Forté enjoyed gathering for Texas hold’em at the dining room table with friends, or in a more spirited competition with members of a men’s group he was part of. Yes, our wives roll their eyes at the idea of a men’s group, but we members will cherish it even more with its memories of Forté. On Friday night, just three days before he died, Forté was playing low-stakes poker with the men’s group at the home of mutual friend John Battelle. Forté kept being dealt one bad hand after another. He would curse, he would fume, but then he would laugh and offer a despairing shrug of the shoulders, and end up quite content to turn his attention to the NFL’s AFC Championship, which was playing in the background. At one point, Forté admonished the table, “When you have no cards, you have to play with gumption.” The word stuck with us: gumption. From one deal to the next, we returned to his lesson on bad cards with a chuckle: “Gumption!”
• He was exceptional at riding an electric unicycle. It was not uncommon to see Forté moving gracefully at a good clip and with perfect balance on his e-unicycle down the dirt road of Hewing Field between his home and that of his neighbors, Gogo Ferguson and Dave Sayre.

Ferguson and Sayre were close friends, and he was in and out of their home all day long to commute down the basement stairs to his elaborate music studio, where he meticulously worked and reworked mixes with many artists, from Harry Belafonte to Ben Taylor. This was where he practiced his art, and the sounds of remixing, the smooth sounds of a steady beat and discordant edits as one note was played backward and forward, were ceaseless until Forté found just the right spot, and had it polished just the way it needed to be.

This week, as friends clustered in grief at her home, Ferguson said, “We feel so lucky to have had him woven into our lives and with us every day. He was always there at the center of so many musical gatherings that brought together people across different generations and across all genres and cultures. John could mesmerize an audience that included all ages, from 97-year-old Rose Styron to [5]-year-old Haile. All felt included, and all felt welcomed by John.”

Those of us who got to know Forté owe Ferguson and Sayre deep gratitude for hosting so many gatherings and giving Forté the space he needed to create and to share his music. The musicians who came to their welcoming home found an expansive deck with a hillside for audience seating, and a set of stairs that were usually the best seats in the house, provided an informal, classically Vineyard way to hear music on a back porch. The audience stretched across generations, and on many memorable nights included my wife and our four sons, who are all in their 20s. The artists closest to Forté, such as Simon, Ben Taylor, and the Austin-based songwriter Peter More, were just not able to summon quotable sentences this week that could explain their feelings about this loss. Ben Taylor, when he learned of Forté’s death, simply walked down to the basement studio and screamed. That spoke to the moment more than words. 

When I called More in Austin, he was despondent, and his sentences would trail off into an inarticulate speech of the heart, ramblings punctuated by certain key words like notes in a song in the making –– “brother” and “loved him” and “teacher,” and one unanswerable question: “How are we going to live without him?”

Wyclef Jean, who was Forté’s longtime friend and musical collaborator as a founding member of the Fugees, posted his attempt to express his sadness on Instagram with a memory captured on video of the two performing together. And he wrote just three words: “This one hurts.”

This is “Ready on the One” by John Forté and was filmed at his home in Chilmark.

Charles Sennott is publisher and editor of The Martha’s Vineyard Times, and lives in Chilmark.

Editor’s note: This story was revised for accuracy and now includes the correct ages of Forté’s children.