The O'Zone | Poetry Month & Jazz Appreciation Month: Pt 1
It was a late night in 1973. KFML was doing their Underground Radio vibe: Playing what they felt like playing… eventually what was known as Free Form Radio.
Then, over the air came something different, something that would change me forever. It was Gary Bartz and his exploration of Poetry and Jazz. The Ntu Troop “I’ve Known Rivers And Rivers And Other Bodies”. I became AWARE of Bartz and of a poet named Langston Hughes.
I realized I could be a jazz poet or something like that. This piece really got my attention. It still gets me thinking. Here it is for your edification.
Here’s a later version by Courtney Pine with Cassandra Wilson…
Eyes and ears open, realizing possibilities! I have been a musician since 1965 (a bassist and guitarist), and I have been writing poetry since I could write. Although sometimes those words would become lyrics, I suddenly realized I liked all the variations that could be combined.
Then in 1975 on KADX, a profound recording reached me in a way that made me realize I was a “Journey Agent” a “Eulipion”. It was Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s masterpiece, The Return Of The 5,000 Lb. Man, an ingenious album, but in particular, “Theme for the Eulipions”.
I played the piece during my first airshift at KUVO and people were enthusiastic about it. My boss Carlos Lando called me from his cell phone while driving home and said I was making good radio. That turned out to be my first call from a cell phone and a nice attaboy from Carlos too.
I soon realized that poetry holds an intrinsic spot in the jazz world. It was a coincidence that both art forms grabbed April to celebrate (as in Jazz Appreciation Month and National Poetry Month), but it was no coincidence that I took to both art forms so deeply.
Jazz and poetry coexist as art forms that share deep reliance on rhythm, improvisation and emotional resonance. While poetry frequently deals in “the best words in the best order” and a sense of finality, jazz thrives on spontaneous creation. Their historical and structural intersection has birthed the fusion genre of jazz poetry, which translates the musical energy of jazz into the written or spoken word.
The shared history of poetry and jazz reaches from the Harlem Renaissance of Langston Hughes to the Beat Poetry of Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg, to the post Beat and pre hip hop era featuring Gil Scott Heron, Nikki Giovanni and The Last Poets to name a few, to the current era of hip hop and poetry with jazz.
Don’t You Know Jack?
Excerpt from On the Road by Jack Kerouac: “They ate voraciously as Dean, sandwich in hand, stood bowed and jumping before the big phonograph, listening to a wild bop record I had just bought called ‘The Hunt’, with Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray blowing their tops before a screaming audience that gave the record fantastic frenzied volume.”
Kerouac cited this 1947 blowing session as the primary inspiration for the rhythmic drive for his novel On the Road.
Excerpt from “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes…”
This landmark poem was directly influenced by Lester Young’s solo on “Lester Leaps In”. He later performed poetry with jazz accompaniment at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, eventually playing at The Green Spider in Denver on 17th Avenue, a prominent coffeehouse and nightclub that served as a beatnik era venue. We literally lived next door.
GINSBERG AT THE GREEN SPIDER
The espresso machine hisses,
a steam-whistle cutting through
the low-slung ceiling of East 17th Avenue.
Atmosphere thick with smells,
reefer, clove, and Chesterfields,
cheap dark beans and vodka mules.
The ghosts of Beatnik cafes
are wide awake tonight.
There is Ginsberg,
a frantic, bearded prophet
with glasses reflecting the tawny glow
of the Green Spider,
his voice a rhythmic freight train
Howling against the Denver night,
tearing at the seams of the mid-century.
And there is Tommy Lear
out of the College of the Pacific
cradling his alto saxophone,
not quite Desmond’s cool glass,
not quite Getz’s honeyed drift,
but something tougher–
a high-altitude, Denver-flavored Bossa Nova
plunging headlong into “Lester Leaps In,”
fingers flying over the pearl keys
in a frantic joyful chase
that keeps pace with the poet’s pulse.
On the dusky brick walls, Bob Ragland’s canvases
watch from beat shadows of the sixties–
Bold strokes of color, figures taking shape
in the first light of their public life.
They play between the stanzas,
the cry of the sax and the shout of the verse
echoing off the art and the grit,
until the last note hangs
in the thin, cold air outside,
drifting past the neon signs
and the sleeping Rockies,
a home in a coffeehouse
that refused to be quiet
long before the lights went out
on the American dream.
I saw the Beatnik life from my post toddler childhood, me being more mature than I should have been. It was the soap opera of my youth.
Beat poets borrowed heavily from all things jazz. Allen Ginsberg and Charles Olsen believed the length of a line in a poem should be determined from a single breath, not unlike a horn player’s phrase based on that same breath drawn in then out.
Kerouac worked the fast roller coaster of words-as-notes like a bebop solo. They all liked spontaneous prose equating to notes in staves. Poet Ken Nordine coined the term Word Jazz for his improvised stream-of-consciousness storytelling, which heavily influenced later artists like Tom Waits.
Amiri Baraka used scat syllables to give jazz authenticity to his word transformations. The hippest music of the time was jazz and so the two vibes worked hand in hand, not unlike today’s hip hop/rap configurations…the music that speaks to the people is the music incorporated with poetry.
Here’s Kerouac assisted by saxophonists Al Cohn and Zoot Sims for on “American Haikus” from his 1959 album Blues And Haikus:
And here’s an example of Nordine’s Word Jazz:
In next week’s column, we will move from Beat America into the turn of the century.
In the meantime, check out this take on Kenneth Rexroth’s “Married Blues”, performed by Kurt Elling on his debut album.
Stay connected to KUVO’s programs and our community! Sign up for the Oasis E-News today!
