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The pecking order
between jazz and American poetry completely reversed itself over the
course of the 20th Century. Jazz began as the primitive
handmaiden to the high art sublimity of poetry; ultimately, poetry was
the supplicant art, jazz the altar. To the poet, at the beginning, the
jazz musician was the anonymous Negro, the black buck, an occasion for
poetry more than its real subject. Ultimately, the musician would become
the reverently addressed Bird, or Lady, or Mingus, or dear John, dear
Coltrane. It's hard to say that the reverence was misplaced.
Jazz and blues-based music are America's art form, the cultural exports
that have won worldwide respect. It is equally pointless to criticize
the sensibility of an earlier era for being the sensibility of an
earlier era. Still, the white culture of the Twenties, the "Jazz Age"
youth chronicled by F. Scott Fitzgerald, knew little about jazz, and
less about the black culture that created it.
New York contained some exceptions to this pattern, as white
intellectuals like Carl Van Vechten sponsored black artists from James
Weldon Johnson to Bessie Smith, and New Yorkers George and Ira Gershwin
created Porgy and Bess. But the American arts establishment,
caught in the heady rush of modernism, failed to notice America's
foremost modernist without portfolio, who was (as they also failed to
notice) arguably America's greatest artist: Louis Armstrong. Armstrong
was tearing down old constructs and creating a new artistic vocabulary
to catch the temper of the times — and unlike many of the other
modernists, he was doing it in the vernacular of the people. Other
poets of the Twenties sought formal inspiration from the music. Vachel
Lindsay and Hart Crane, in very different ways, set out to write poetry
to the rhythms of jazz. They succeeded in being the first to prove what
later poets, many of them more sophisticated in the study of jazz, would
only prove over and over again: that one cannot write poetry to the
rhythms of jazz. Nonetheless, the music left its mark on Lindsay's
rhythmic drive (though Lindsay would both accept and angrily reject his
designation as as a "jazz poet") and Crane's jarring complexity.
Contemporary British critics like Clive Bell and Wyndham Lewis claimed
to see the rhythms of jazz as the basis for T. S. Eliot's "The Waste
Land," which suggests, more than anything else, the conflation of "jazz"
and "American" in the minds of many in the 1920s. Eliot's reference
to "that Shakespeherian rag" may connect to his youth in Missouri,
birthplace of ragtime, but he appears to be using it in the same way
that Loy used black music — as a metaphor for primitive spontaneity. In
"The Waste Land," Eliot has a lovely woman putting a record on the
gramophone — jazz? But Eliot doesn’t know what jazz is. His other American
musical reference in the poem, to the moon shining bright on Mrs.
Porter, is to a square dance tune, and perhaps his most famous song
lyric quote, the bamboo tree of "Sweeney Agonistes," comes from a
minstrel show. Among
white poets of the twenties, only Carl Sandburg really wrote
about the experience of listening to jazz. Sandburg was a folklorist and
a lover of Americana, and his "Jazz Fantasia" shows an understanding of
what jazz musicians actually do, and the range of emotions they can
summon. So already in the Twenties, the principal ways in which poets
were to use jazz had been established: jazz as metaphor, jazz as
rhythmic base, and poetry as voice to the jazz musician Hughes
used the blues form often in his poetry. One doesn't actually have to go
to a literary sophisticate like Hughes for great poetry in the blues
form (Robert Johnson or Chuck Berry will fill that order quite well),
but Hughes is a powerful bridge. Jazz and
poetry drifted apart in the Thirties and Forties. For the reasons why,
consider Eileen Simpson's anecdote in Poets in Their Youth
about a time when Robert Lowell caught Delmore Schwartz
listening to a Bessie Smith record, and castigated him for his
Philistinism. Poetry
belonged to the academy in those days, and jazz was a long way from
acceptance by the academy. As late as 1965, the Pulitzer Prize
committee, faced with the prospect of awarding a prize to Duke Ellington
for Such Sweet Thunder, his tribute to Shakespeare, chose to give
no prize at all in music that year. But by the
1950s, jazz and poetry had reunited with a vengeance. This was the era
of the culture wars between the academics and the Beats, and the Beats
embraced jazz as their music. Jazz as a
rhythmic base and inspiration for poetry became a central tenet of the
Beats' theoretical connection to their music of choice — curiously, in one
sense, because if the danceable rhythms of traditional jazz had proved
to be too subtle for poets of an earlier generation, what was to be made
of the complexities of Charlie Parker and the beboppers? Jazz and
jazz musicians were actually more important to the Beats as metaphor. As
Norman Mailer explained in his 1957 essay "The White Negro," black
Americans, and particularly black jazz musicians, were seen by white
hipsters as outlaws by the circumstance of racism, having no choice but
to be subversive, and therefore a role model for the white rebel who
chose to oppose the system. Allen Ginsberg, in Howl, referred to
jazz as a subject for contemplation by angelheaded hipsters — a symbol of
outlaw spirituality. But Ginsberg himself had no strong commitment to
jazz. When he became the eminence grise of the hippie movement of
the Sixties, he switched his allegiance to Bob Dylan and the protest
folk-rockers. In an interview not long before his death, Ginsberg
described the desire of the Beats to free themselves from the metronomic
cadences of formal verse, and to find new cadences based on bebop.
This is similar to Hart Crane's assertion to his patron Otto Kahn
that he wrote in the rhythms of jazz: metaphor and inspiration rather
than musicology. Other
Beats had a closer connection to jazz. Jack Kerouac is often dismissed
by jazz aficionados for describing George Shearing, who by then had
become a commercial cocktail pianist, as God, but Kerouac actually had a
history as a jazz aficionado. But it
didn't do much for his poetry. Kerouac described his writing style as
"spontaneous bop prosody," but bop was no more spontaneous than it was
unheeding of the metronome. Kerouac's volume of poetry, Mexico City
Blues, is more remembered for its having been written by the author
of On the Road than for its poetic merit. One of the most
jazz-knowledgeable of all the Beats was Ted Joans, himself a musician,
in a 1981 essay distinguished between the real jazz aficionados and the
fellow travelers. It turns out that the most sophisticated jazz
listeners are not necessarily the best poets; the best poets, even the
most rhythmically challenging ones, are not necessarily the real jazz
mavens. Interestingly, Joans includes the early Leroi Jones in the list
of jazz neophytes, although Jones, later Amiri Baraka, came to be a
considerable authority: his nonfiction book, Blues People, is
considered one of the classics in its field, and he has written
extensively about jazz. He was not one of the most prominent figures on
the Beat jazz/poetry performance scene, although in later years he did a
great deal of serious work combining poetry, drama and jazz, including
collaborations with musicians like Max Roach. Jazz and
poetry became a joint performance item in the Beat era. This was not a
new idea. Both Langston Hughes and Kenneth Rexroth had performed poetry
to jazz in earlier times, but it became a phenomenon in the Fifties.
Kenneth Patchen, a Beat precursor, was one of the first to record his
poetry with a jazz group, and perhaps the most dedicated to the hybrid
art. Reading poetry to jazz quickly became a staple of the San Francisco
club scene. Rexroth, Philip Lamantia, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and others
participated in the movement. In his introduction to A Coney Island
of the Mind, Ferlinghetti states that the poems are written for oral
presentation to jazz accompaniment, not for the printed page.
Composer/performer David Amram recalls participating in New York's first
poetry-and-jazz performance, in 1957 with Kerouac, Lamantia and Howard
Hart. Amram, more an orchestral and chamber composer than a jazzman,
also provided the improvised score for Robert Frank's film Pull My
Daisy. The
notoriety of the Beats helped to turn poetry and jazz into something of
a fad, and more ambitious performances were put together. Patchen
performed with Charles Mingus, Ferlinghetti with Stan Getz. Probably the
best-selling commercial collaboration was between Kerouac and Steve
Allen. During this same time period, perfomers who came from the
jazz/entertainment world rather than the literary world were doing
similar work. Lord Buckley and Ken Nordine incorporated doggerel,
performance poetry and word improvisations against a jazz background.
Buckley died in 1960; Nordine continued to perform "Word Jazz" into the
21st century. Poetry and
jazz was a fad, and it died out when the media lost its fascination with
the Beats. Patchen, the poet most seriously committed to the form, might
have carried it on longer, but for crippling ill health. The most
artistically successful marriage of poetry to the rhythms of jazz was
created by The Last Poets, a collective that arose during the Black
Power phase of the 1960s Civil Rights Era. While a number of people were
associated with this group, Jalal Nuriddin, Abiodun Oyewole and Umar Bin
Hassan, who wrote and performed the material on the group's first album,
are considered the key members. The Last Poets are often described as
the first rappers, but their best work, like Hassan's "Niggers Are
Scared of Revolution," will stand comparison with the canon of 20th
century poetry. In the
1960s, Frank O'Hara's poem "The Day Lady Died" was more about
O'Hara than it was about Billie Holiday, but it did use an individual
jazz icon as metaphor: in this case, her death as metaphor for an
irreparable rent in the cultural fabric of New York. O'Hara died in the
same year that Ellington was passed over for the Pulitzer.
Perhaps
most powerful during this era were the jazz poems of Robert Hayden,
which formed a part of his epic mosaic of black history and culture in
America. When Hayden wrote about an artist like Bessie Smith, he was not
writing about how she made him feel or using her as metaphor, he was
painting a portrait of Bessie herself, with her artistry and regal state
presence. In 1970,
Michael S. Harper, with Dear John, Dear Coltrane became the first
poet to give jazz, and jazz musicians, a real centrality in his work.
Harper wrote poems about, or addressed to, Coltrane, Billie Holiday,
Miles Davis, Elvin Jones, Bud Powell, Paul Chambers — these were the jazz
poems of a poet whose subject was jazz itself. One could write about
Billie Holiday as metaphor and expect an audience of general cultural
literacy to understand, just as one could expect a general audience to
follow the reference to a Negro in a bar on Lenox Avenue. Harper
demanded that his audience know jazz. Hayden,
like Hughes before him, and Baraka in a different way, had used poetry
to celebrate jazz as an expression of black consciousness. Harper had
traveled the complete distance from Loy and Lindsay, and used poetry to
celebrate the artistry of jazz and its performers. By the end
of the 20th Century, jazz was significant enough as a subject
for poetry that a successful and respected small magazine, Brilliant
Corners, edited by Sascha Feinstein, was devoted entirely to
jazz literature. Yusef
Komunyakaa and Feinstein edited two anthologies of jazz poetry.
Jazz has been a favorite
subject in the poetry of
Komunyakaa and William Matthews, and poets such as Quincy Troupe, Billy
Collins, Wanda Coleman, Hayden Carruth, Dana Gioia, Etheridge Knight and
Philip Levine have paid tribute in their work to jazz music and jazz
artists.
The
relationship of jazz to modernism is an interesting one. The development
of jazz was so rapid and so revolutionary that many critics think of
Charlie Parker's music as a repudiation of Louis Armstrong's — the earlier
music is called "traditional" jazz, the later "modern." But Armstrong
and Parker were not so far different aesthetically — both were moderns.
The mainstream (and basically white) artistic/cultural community,
including the poetry community, tended for a long time to see jazz as
something other than the major art form that it is. Jazz to the
mainstream modernists of the 20s and 30s symbolized the unsentimental
truth and honesty that they espoused,
but they also sentimentalized it, actually in much the same way
that Kerouac would later — jazz as spontaneous and primitive. The jazz
poets of the 1980s and 90s had a much greater understanding of the
totality and the artistry of jazz. They had no problem understanding
what was wrong with a critic like Bell — or even Eliot
himself — calling Eliot's minstrel-show reference "jazz." But
perhaps a postmodernist assessment might take a more tolerant view of
Eliot's paternalistic, racist, but not unobservant take on the minstrel
show rhythms of his St. Louis boyhood. The "Zip Coon" aspect of black
vaudeville reflects a painful chapter in the history of American racism,
but the artists who created it, from Bert Williams and Bill "Bojangles"
Robinson to unknown dancers and banjo players, were artists who played
an important role in developing the rhythms of American life, speech,
and poetry. Further Reading. Selected Sources:
Loy, Mina, Lunar
Baedeker & Time Tables (Highlands, NC:
Jonathan Williams, 1958);
Sandburg, Carl, Smoke and Steel (NY: Harcourt
Brace,1920); Lindsay, Vachel,
The Congo and Other
Poems (NY:
MacMillan, 1914); Crane, Hart, The Bridge (NY: Liveright, 1930);
Hughes, Langston, The Weary Blues (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926);
Baraka, Amiri, Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones
(NY: William Morrow, 1978);
Hayden, Robert, Selected Poems (NY: October House, 1966);
Harper, Michael S., Dear
John, Dear Coltrane (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1970);
Komunyakaa, Yusef, Pleasure Dome (Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001); Feinstein, Sascha and
Yusef Komunyakaa
eds., The Jazz Poetry
Anthology (Bloomington, IN, Indiana University
Press, 1991); Lange, Art and Nathan Mackey,
Moment's Notice:
Jazz in Poetry and Prose
(Minneapolis: Coffee
House Press, 1993).
Further Listening. Selected Sources:
Hughes, Langston, The Poetry of Langston Hughes (Caedmon, 1969);
Patchen, Kenneth, Kenneth Patchen Reads with Jazz in Canada
(Folkways, 1960); Kerouac, Jack, The Jack Kerouac Collection
(Rhino, 1995); Baraka, Amiri, New Music New Poetry (India
Navigation, 1992); The Last Poets, The Last Poets
(Douglas, 1970). |