While the blog covers improvised music, I am keen to acknowledge poets, writers and artists that reference Jazz. I will add posts from time to time about, Jazz literature, Jazz photography, Jazz poetry and Jazz film.

On the Home page read a review of Komeda: a Private Life In Jazz and Tomasz Stanko: an autobiography

Jazz and spoken word poetry have been inextricably linked since the famous African-American poet Langston Hughes recorded ‘Weary Man Blues’ in 1926. The best known example is ‘On The Road’ by Jack Kerouac. Kerouac was so taken with the rhythms of Bebop that he adjusted his prose style and poems to capture the frenetic rhytms of mid twentieth century Jazz (the raw beat of the streets).  You can hear it when Kerouac recites his own prose. He later recorded his poems and prose accompanied by Jazz musicians, including Zoot Sims, Al Cohn and Steve Allan.

Another Beat Poet Alan Ginsburg wrote this in his ‘Footnote to Howl’;

“Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace…..”

A favourite poet of mine is Bob Kaufman (another San Franciscan). He was the most Jazz focussed of all the Beat poets and like Kerouac wrote the idioms of Jazz into poems. He would frequently walk into bars and jazz clubs and perform his poems. Whether they were famous musicians like Charles Lloyd or little known back street players mattered little. He saw himself as an improvisor and often composed his poems just before reading them and then threw them in the trash afterwards. They only survive because his wife and friends would retrieve them. He was arrested over 90 times during his lifetime and 56 of the arrests were for reciting poetry in the street. He was even the cause a poetry riot outside City Lights Books when his fellow Beat poets held a poetry-reading street protest after his latest beating by the police,  blocking the main thoroughfare until the riot squad turned up. After a while he ceased all idle chatter, only communicating through poetry.  He has been belatedly recognised as a major mid twentieth century west coast poet. 

A poem that uses Jazz as a theme can co-opt a tune or the merest hint of a tune. It can be blunt or as funny as hell. Modern American Poet, Laureate Billy Collins wrote ‘ I chop some parsley while listening to Art Blakey’s Version of Three Blind Mice’ – From ‘Taking Off Emily Dickens Clothes’. My good friend Iain Sharp wrote a terrific poem called ‘Chet Bakers teeth‘ – published in a collection titled – ‘The Singing Harp’. Both highly recommended for their humour and the insights which lurk beneath the words.  

I have an anthology of my own jazz-referencing verse out.

Jazz can be co-opted by a poem, a painting, a piece of sculpture, a photograph or an essay. It is a mirror held up to the human condition. Behind the pretty or discordant tunes, there is humour, allusion and compassion. These are slippery notes, falling off the edge of reason and then mysteriously landing on their feet again, honest in-the-moment stories searching for a receptive audience with ears open.

John Fenton   – JazzLocal32.com. and  johnfentonpoetry.com

#You may quote freely from this blog, but please acknowledge the source and respect my intellectual property

Member of JJA  (Jazz Journalists Association)

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Posted for all who love Bob Kaufman 

Walking Parker Home

Sweet beats of Jazz impaled on slivers of wind / Kansas black morning/ First Horn Eyes/ Historical sound pictures on New Birdwings / People shouts/ Boy alto dreams/ Tomorrows / Gold bellied pipe of stops and future Blues Times / Lurking Hawkins/ shadows of Lester/realisation / Bronze fingers-brain extensions seeking trapped sounds / Ghetto thoughts/bandstand courage/solo flight / Nerve-wracked suspicions of newer songs and doubts / New York altar city/black tears/secret disciples Hammer horn pounding soul marks on unswerving gates / Culture gods/mob sounds/ visions of spikes /Panic excursions to tribal Jazz wombs and transfusions / Heroin nights of birth/and soaring/over boppy new ground / Smothered rage covering pyramids of notes spontaneously exploding /Cool revelations/shrill hopes/beauty speared on greedy ears Birdland /nights on bop mountains, windy saxophone revolutions /Daydreams of junk/and melting walls and circling vultures/ Money cancer/remembered pain/terror flights/ Death and indestructible existence / In that Jazz corner of life /wrapped in a mist of sound / His legacy, our Jazz tinted dawn / wailing his triumphs of oddly forgotten dreams / inviting the nerveless to feel once more / The fierce dying of humans consumed / In raging fires of love

Bob Kaufman (Beat poet) From ‘Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness’

Note: There is a new page of my own poetry in this blog titled ‘John Fenton poetry’