Source of book: I own this
Over the last few years, with the kids getting old enough to look after themselves for an night or two, my wife and I have started attending some LA Phil concerts. In addition to playing classical music, I love to hear it live, without the pressure of performance. And, the LA Phil is a world class orchestra.
All this to say that they have an affiliated story there at Disney Hall, and my wife got me this slim Everyman’s Library edition last year for Christmas. I decided to read it this December.
The poems are selected by Kevin Young, who also selected the poems in the larger volume from the Library of America, African American Poetry. I wrote about the first section of that volume here.
For Jazz Poems, the unifying theme is, naturally, Jazz, the musical genre. The poems are by a wide variety of poets, both African American and otherwise (and that encompasses more than just white folks.) In genre, they span from Jazz lyrics to poems complaining about Jazz. (Looking at you, Vachel Lindsay…) With such a variety, there is no way to try to sum up the collection, or describe it. The best I could do is to select the ones that spoke to me the most this time through it.
Jazz occupies a strange place in my life. It kind of fell through the cracks in my early years. Neither of my parents liked it - my mom abhorred it, along with any other music that sounded obviously “Black.” I didn’t fully understand this until my teens: the fact that she hated saxophones, Gershwin, most Motown, and definitely the kind of melisma you find in Gospel (but she liked the melisma of Handel and bel canto, so…) If it sounded “Black,” she disliked it. My dad was always more broad in taste, but never got into Jazz.
And then, of course, there was our Gothard years, when anything with “Black” roots was considered demonic. Pop, Rock, Jazz, and certainly Hip Hop.
As a violinist, I didn’t learn on the stuff. Really, my big exposure (unless you count Kenny G on the radio at the local department store) was when I started playing with our local college orchestra, and we did combined concerts with the concert band and jazz band. It was…a learning curve. I still remember some of the licks from Chuck Mangione’s classic Land of Make Believe, though, so there is that.
After that, though, there was a lot more. A group of musician friends had a seven piece Dixieland group, the Southside Chicago Seven. (Alas, I cannot find any of their stuff online, but I do have their CDs in regular rotation.) And, my then girlfriend (now wife of 22 years) got me into Ella Fitzgerald. Between the local Jazz scene, that gateway into classic big band stuff, and my own exploration of music after I moved out and no longer had to explain myself (or lie to) my mom about music.
I won’t say I am as well educated about Jazz as I am about Classical, for obvious reasons. And I still struggle to sight read Jazz rhythms. But I have come to appreciate the genre a lot more, and certainly it is true that any musician who is truly excellent at Jazz can pretty much excel at any form of music. The rhythmic training and skill needed, the expanded vocabulary of chords, and the ability to spin any element of a tune into an extended exploration of sonic space - these are things Beethoven and Brahms would recognize.
For combining poetry and music in any form, there is the need for a common set of building blocks. Those of us raised on hymns (white people music from the 17th through 19th centuries…) know that you can sing a lot of things to the same tune. (Um, Gilligan’s Island?) The vocabulary, both of the language and of the rhythm, are the same.
Likewise for other genres, though. Hip Hop has its own poetic style, of course, and a poem that fits that genre will be instantly recognizable even without the music. Blues likewise - Langston Hughes wrote some incredible Blues lyrics that any musician can set to a 12 bar song without difficulty.
Jazz too. If there is one unifying style in this anthology, it is that the vocabulary of the poems - the words and the rhythms - is that of Jazz. (Except for you, Vachel Lindsay - you sound so white and square.) One might even say - and I do - that much of the best of modern poetry draws from the sound and feel of Jazz. And Hip Hop too. Just as with music, the way forward in the 20th Century for art was, as it has always been, a fusion with neglected and marginalized voices.
With nearly 250 pages of poems, it was difficult to select the ones to feature. There were so many great ones that I won’t mention. I will likely see different highlights next time I read this. But here are the ones that particularly spoke to me.
Let’s start with good old Vachel Lindsay - not that he was a bad poet, but that he was a bad critic - and the backlash that has always been there against all African American genres of music, and continues to this day. The introduction by Kevin Young is wonderful in every way, but his description of this backlash is just outstanding.
This is not to say that jazz, even early on, is without controversy - rather, Vachel Lindsay’s “The Jazz of this Hotel” stands in for a number of poems (and many more editorials) questioning the music’s seeming atonality, disharmony, amorality, and downright noise - opinions that crop up perennially. But jazz can take it.
On that note, here is Lindsay’s dour response to Jazz:
The Jazz of This Hotel
Why do I curse the jazz of this hotel?
I like the slower tom-toms of the sea;
I like the slower tom-toms of the thunder;
I like the more deliberate dancing knee
Of outdoor love, of outdoor talk and wonder.
I like the slower, deeper violin
Of the wind across the fields of Indian corn;
I like the far more ancient violoncello
Of whittling loafers telling stories mellow
Down at the village grocery in the sun;
I like the slower bells that ring for church
Across the Indiana landscape old.
Therefore I curse the jazz of this hotel
That seems so hot, but is so hard and cold.
I probably would not have noticed all the dog whistles earlier in my life. But feel free to substitute “white” for “slower.” And notice the belief that Jazz is “new” while white genres are “old.” So, certainly, the old man shaking his cane, but also a misunderstanding of rootedness. White America likes to claim descent from ancient Europe, but this is no more (or less) true than the idea that Jazz and other African American art forms descend from ancient Africa. I’ll also note his feeling that Jazz is “hard and cold” compared to what he likes better. All this shows is that he prefers what is familiar - and cannot see how Jazz resonated for his fellow humans with darker skin.
By the way, this is not intended as a general diss against Lindsay. Some of his poems are transcendently good. But he had a definite issue with African Americans and other people of color, and never did figure out how to understand their lives and art without imposing his own supremacist blind spots. I’ll leave it to W.E.B. DuBois to give the epic smackdown:
“Mr. Vachel Lindsay knows two things, and two things only, about Negroes: The beautiful rhythm of their music and the ugly side of their drunkards and outcasts. From this poverty of material he tries now and then to make a contribution to Negro literature. It goes without saying that he only partly succeeds.”
I guess I just spent far too much of this post on Lindsay, but I think I did so because of my family history - it is still a trauma to me that I had to lie to my mom about how I played drums, because she had zero interest in actually listening to me about the issue: that would have required that she acknowledge that the charlatans that she believed were so full of shit that they didn’t even understand elementary musical theory. They were just straight up fucking racists.
Okay, let’s move on past Lindsay and the white supremacists who still rail against music and art by people of color. It’s time for some Langston Hughes, arguably one of the finest and most truly American voices of the 20th Century.
Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret
Play that thing.
Jazz band!
Play it for the lords and ladies,
For the dukes and counts,
For the whores and gigolos,
For the American millionaires,
And for the school teachers
Out for a spree.
Play it,
Jazz band!
You know that tune
That laughs and cries at the same time.
You know it.
May I?
Mais oui.
Mein Gott!
Parece una rumba.
Play it, jazz band!
You’ve got seven languages to speak in
And then some,
Even if you do come from Georgia.
Can I go home wid yuh, sweetie?
Sure.
And THAT, readers, is the difference between Lindsay’s deafness, and what Jazz (and other genres) mean to those who are part of the scene.
Also, damn if Langston Hughes wasn’t a freaking genius. One of my favorite poets since I discovered him in high school.
The next poem really needs some background. Maxwell Bodenheim was one of the “Beat” poets - so think Jack Kerouac. Bodenheim was quite the figure of the Jazz Age, but between alcohol, mental illness, homelessness, and general difficulty functioning in the modern world. He and his third wife were brutally murdered by a man who had slept with Bodenheim’s wife, possibly as part of a monetary transaction to keep her and him from starving. It’s a pretty lurid story. That said, this is an interesting poem. According to the original text, the odd-numbered lines are to be spoken slowly, and the even ones quickly. Give it a try, and see how the speed affects the meaning. It’s brilliant.
Bringing Jazz
Last night I had an oboe dream -
Whistlers in a box-car madness bringing jazz.
Their faces stormed in a hobo-gleam,
Blinding all the grinding wheels and singing jazz.
The box-car gloried in its dirt -
Just a hallelujah made of changing mud.
And one old bum opened up his shirt,
Showing wounds of music in his ranting blood.
The hoboes sang with scorching notes
Burning up the pain into a gale of jazz,
While sadness poured in their shaking throats.
Like a molten bugle in a wail of jazz.
The rails were jails for death and rust -
Holding up the cruel, dark blue speed of jazz -
But life still stirred underneath their crust -
Little hums and clicks brought by the need of jazz.
Within the box-car, hoboes leaped -
Fatalists and pagans in a carefree trap -
And when they sang of hungers reaped,
Bread and wine of sound came from a dark god’s lap!
The hoboes made a fox-trot blaze -
Scorning women, gliding in a sexless dance -
And on their coats of ragged baize
Ghosts of orchids fluttered down and looked askance!
The jungle sent a moan of sound -
Made it blend into an oath of northern grime.
A music came, flaring and profound,
Flayed with rapture half repelled and half sublime.
And then I saw the dream’s dark spring -
Hurricanes of jazz born from the underworld.
“Saint Louie Gal with a diamond ring”
Danced with mobs of hoboes while the thunder swirled!
A bit of difference between Bodenheim and Lindsay? Maybe the harder life meant a bit more empathy…and understanding of other art forms. Next up is Gwendoly Brooks, another African-American luminary of the 20th Century. I feel like I read this somewhere long ago, but it can’t have been in my school curriculum given its horror of alcohol…
We Real Cool
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
So much in so short of a poem.
I also wanted to mention a few lines from a poem by Frank Marshall Davis, another African-American poet who met the teenaged Barak Obama, and was apparently a significant influence. There are a couple of lines from his longer poem, “Jazz Band,” that I thought were so great they were worth mentioning. You can (and should) read the whole thing.
In describing Jazz, Davis describes the “short tan notes from the piano” and “Make ‘em shout a crazy jargon of hot hosannas to a fiddle-faced jazz god.” Just great lines.
There are a number of Jazz lyrics in the collection. One of the best, in my opinion, is this Fats Waller song:
Black and Blue
Out in the street, shufflin' feet
Couples passin' two by two
While here am I, left high and dry
Black, and 'cause I'm black I'm blue
Browns and yellers, all have fellers
Gentlemen prefer them light
Wish I could fade, can't make the grade
Nothing but dark days in sight
Cold, empty bed, springs hard as lead
Pains in my head, feel like old Ned
What did I do to be so black and blue?
No joys for me, no company
Even the mouse ran from my house
All my life through I've been so black and blue
I'm white inside, it don't help my case
'Cause I can't hide, what is on my face, oh!
I'm so forlorn, life's just a thorn
My heart is torn, why was I born?
What did I do to be so black and blue?
'Cause you're black, folks think you lack
They laugh at you, and scorn you too
What did I do to be so black and blue?
On the subject of prejudice and colorism, First Lady Jill Biden pretty much freaked out the Right Wing by posting a tap dance video featuring the classic Jazz version of the Nutcracker Suite by Duke Ellington. Unsurprisingly, our modern Right Wing got their KKK hoods in a knot over black people dancing, because anything truly American (meaning NOT WHITE) is making them lose their shit these days.
I love Duke Ellington, not least because of his small-ensemble recordings featuring an earthy and imaginative fiddle part that has inspired some of my own improvisational playing over the years. Ellington’s collaborator, Billy Strayhorn, wrote many of the lyrics the band recorded. As a black and gay American, Strayhorn is doubly hated by the Right these days. I present one of his best lyrics from this anthology. You can interpret the lyrics as either the elegance of Jazz and the artistic lifestyle, or as the degeneracy and despair of alcoholism. The bivalency is inherent in the poetry.
Lush Life
I used to visit all the very gay places,
Those come-what-may places,
Where one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life
To get the feel of life
From jazz and cocktails.
The girls I knew had sad and sullen gray faces
With distingue traces
That used to be there.
You could see where
They'd been washed away
By too many through the day
Twelve o'clock tales.
Then you came along
With your siren of song
To tempt me to madness.
I thought for a while
That your poignant smile
Was tinged with the sadness
Of a great love for me.
Ah yes! I was wrong
Again, I was wrong!
Life is lonely again,
And only last year
Everything seemed so sure.
Now life is awful again,
A troughful of hearts could only be a bore.
A week in Paris will ease the bite of it,
All I care is to smile in spite of it.
I'll forget you, I will
While yet you are still
Burning inside my brain.
Romance is mush, stifling those who strive.
I'll live a lush life in some small dive
And there I'll be, while I rot with the rest
Of those whose lives are lonely, too.
Another nod to Ellington and Strayhorn is this lovely poem by Ntozake Shange.
Mood Indigo
it hasn’t always been this way
ellington was not a street
robeson no mere memory
du bois walked up my father’s stairs
hummed some tune over me
sleeping in the company of men
who changed the world
it wasn’t always like this
why ray barretto used to be a side-man
& dizzy’s hair was not always grey
i remember i was there
i listened in the company of men
politics as necessary as collards
music even in our dreams
our house was filled with all kinda folks
our windows were not cement or steel
our doors opened like our daddy’s arms
held us safe & loved
children growing in the company of men
old southern men & young slick ones
sonny til was not a boy
the clovers no rag-tag orphans
our crooners/ we belonged to a whole world
nkrumah was no foreigner
virgil aikens was not the only fighter
it hasn’t always been this way
ellington was not a street
I also want to include this one by Bob Kaufman, another of the Beat poets - in this case African American - who had a difficult life, struggling with incarceration, drug addiction, and mental illuness. He took a vow of silence after Kennedy’s assassination, and didn’t speak until the end of the Vietnam war. Wow. Also, this poem is thoroughly badass.
War Memoir
Jazz - listen to it at your own risk.
At the beginning, a warm dark place.
(Her screams were trumpet laughter,
Not quite blues, but almost sinful.)
Crying above the pain, we forgave ourselves;
Original sin seemed a broken record.
God-played blues to kill time, all the time.
Red-waved rivers floated us into life.
(So much laughter, concealed by blood and faith;
Life is a saxophone played by death.)
Greedy to please, we learned to cry;
Hungry to life, we learned to die.
The heart is a sad musician,
Forever playing the blues.
The blues blow life, as life blows fright;
Death begins, jazz blows soft in the night,
Too soft for ears of men whose minds
Hear only the sound of death, of war,
Of flagwrapped cremation in bitter lands.
No chords of jazz as mud is shoveled
Into the mouths of men; even the blues shy
At cries of children dying on deserted corners.
Jazz deserted, leaving us to our burning.
(Jazz is an African traitor.)
What one-hundred-percent redblooded savage
Wastes precious time listening to jazz
With so much important killing to do?
Silence the drums, that we may hear the burning
Of Japanese in atomic colorcinemascope,
And remember the stereophonic screaming.
Both as an anti-war poem and as a paean to the power of music, it is powerful. I particularly love the line about wasting time on music when there is all that important killing to do. Fucking nailed it.
Next up is another poem with colors in the title, this one by Darrell Burton, who tragically died in a house fire just before his poetry collection was published. I absolutely LOVE this poem, which is so evocative of a mood, an feeling, a seminal event in a life.
Blue in Green
Miles' muted horn penetrates
like liquid, melancholy medicine
to the pinched nerve
of an old miser. I'd hit
the winning shot at State that night;
teary-eyed, Tina kissed me -
way past any doubt, then
wore distance like
a torn red dress the next day.
I feel the rend again - in the piano,
I hear her long, practiced excuses
in Coltrane's troubling tenor -
mixed with this loneliness
I'd felt at seventeen, standing
between rusted railroad tracks
in July.
I turn the lights off -
they go black.
Spare, midnight tones tug at me,
I lean back hard into the past:
I see that winning shot go in,
I see her run at me, again,
and for a moment - she's there
mingled in Coltrane's tenor.
What if
I never get past this pain,
just then Miles wavers back in
with an antidote -
traying eights behind
the ivorys. It works
this time, if I only knew
how it means.
Man, that’s just straight-up excellent. Next up is one by Kamau Brathwaite, a poet from Barbados.
Trane
Propped against the crowded bar
he pours into the curved and silver horn
his old unhappy longing for a home
the dancers twist and turn
he leans and wishes he could burn
his memories to ashes like some old notorious emperor
of rome, but no stars blazed across the sky when he was born
no wise men found his hovel; this crowded bar
where dancers twist and turn,
holds all the fame and recognition he will ever earn
on earth or heaven. he leans against the bar
and pours his old unhappy longing in the saxophone
This ambivalent approach to music, jazz, and life is one of the most beautiful tensions in this anthology. Music is an expression of all of that sadness, longing, and even despair. Again, let’s return to Langston Hughes.
Lenox Avenue: Midnight
The rhythm of life
Is a jazz rhythm,
Honey.
The gods are laughing at us.
The broken heart of love,
The weary, weary heart of pain,—
Overtones,
Undertones,
To the rumble of street cars,
To the swish of rain.
Lenox Avenue,
Honey.
Midnight,
And the gods are laughing at us.
Next up is one from William Matthews, with a rather wry look at youth and its angst.
Mingus at the Showplace
I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen,
and so I swung into action and wrote a poem,
and it was miserable, for that was how I thought
poetry worked: you digested experience and shat
literature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long since
defunct, on West 4th St., and I sat at the bar,
casting beer money from a thin reel of ones,
the kid in the city, big ears like a puppy.
And I knew that Mingus was a genius. I knew twoo
other things but as it happened they were wrong.
So I made him look at the poem.
‘There’s a lot of that going around,’ he said.
and Sweet Baby Jesus he was right. He glowered
at me but he didn’t look as if he thought
bad poems were dangerous, the way some poets do.
If they were baseball executives they’d plot
to destroy sandlots everywhere so that the game
could be saved from children. Of course later
that night he fired his pianist in mid-number
and flurried him from the stand.
‘We’ve suffered a diminuendo in personnel,’
he explained, and the band played on.
Here is another one by a white poet, Paul Zimmer, but one that understands the universality of Jazz, and also the reasons for the backlash.
One O’Clock Jump
Still tingling with Basie’s hard cooking,
between sets I stood at the bar
when the man next to me ordered
scotch and milk. I looked to see who had
this stray taste and almost swooned
when I saw it was the master.
Basie knocked his shot back,
then, when he saw me gaping,
raised his milk to my peachy face
and rolled out his complete smile
before going off with friends
to leave me in that state of grace.
A year later I was renting rooms
from a woman named Tillie who wanted
no jazz in her dank, unhallowed house.
Objecting even to the lowest volume of solo piano,
she’d puff upstairs to bang on my door.
I grew opaque, unwell,
slouched to other apartments,
begging to play records.
Duked, dePrezed, and unBased,
longing for Billy, Monk, Brute, or Zoot,
I lived in silence through
that whole lost summer.
Still, aware of divine favor, I bided time
and waited for the day of reckoning.
My last night in Tillie’s godless house,
late - when I knew she was hard asleep -
I gave her the full One O’Clock Jump,
having Basie ride his horse of perfect time
like an avenging angel over top volume,
hoisting his scotch and milk as he galloped
into Tillie’s ear, headlong down her throat
to roar all night in her sulfurous organs.
I’ll end with (who else?) Langston Hughes once more. There are many poems here about or dedicated to Billie Holiday. Perhaps no other singer of her era did more to express the true feelings of Black Americans. Feelings about lynchings, prejudice, despair, hate, and oppression.
Song For Billie Holiday
What can purge my heart
Of the song
And the sadness?
What can purge my heart
But the song
Of the sadness?
What can purge my heart
Of the sadness
Of the song?
Do not speak of sorrow
With dust in her hair
Or bits of dust in eyes
A chance wind blows there.
The sorrow that I speak of
Is dusted with despair.
Voice of muted trumpet,
Cold brass in warm air.
Bitter television blurred
By sound that shimmers -
Where?
Those are my favorites - the poems that spoke most deeply to me. This is a compact, inexpensive volume, but it contains multitudes. It is a good addition to any collection of poetry.
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