Poets.com gives this short definition of jazz poetry:
Jazz poetry is a literary style outlined as poetry essentially knowledgeable by jazz music—that’s, poetry wherein the poet responds to and writes about jazz. Jazz poetry, just like the music itself, encompasses a wide range of kinds, rhythms, and sounds. Starting with the delivery of blues and jazz firstly of the 20th century, jazz poetry is may be seen as a thread that runs by means of the Harlem Renaissance, the Beat movement, and the Black Arts Movement—and it’s nonetheless vibrant in the present day. From early blues to free jazz to experimental music, jazz poets use their appreciation for the music as poetic inspiration.
Jazz artists make appearances in jazz poems as properly: Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Vacation, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Bessie Smith, and Lester Younger are simply among the muses for jazz poetry.
And as Rebecca Gross wrote for the National Endowment for the Arts blog in 2014:
Langston Hughes was by no means removed from jazz. He listened to it at nightclubs, collaborated with musicians from Monk to Mingus, typically held readings accompanied by jazz combos, and even wrote a kids’s ebook known as The First Ebook of Jazz. For Hughes, jazz was a lifestyle.
He was, in fact, not an atypical jazz fan merely enamored with the sound. A vocal proponent of racial consciousness, the poet thought-about jazz and the blues to be uniquely African-American artwork kinds, each of which spurned the will for assimilation and acceptance by white tradition, and as a substitute rejoiced in black heritage and creativity. Quite than want away each day hardship, the blues as a substitute elevated the troubles of the workaday African American into artwork. As he wrote in his 1926 story “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”:“However jazz to me is likely one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America; the everlasting tom-tom beating within the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt towards weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of pleasure and laughter, and ache swallowed in a smile.”
Scroll by means of the slideshow under for a style of Hughes’ kids’s ebook, The First Ebook of Jazz.
For these unfamiliar with Hughes, right here’s a quick biographical documentary from Biography, who notes that “Hughes was the main voice of the Harlem Renaissance, whose poetry showcased the dignity and sweetness in atypical black life. The hours he spent in Harlem golf equipment affected his work, making him one of many innovators of Jazz Poetry.”
The 4sp Movie Channel on YouTube makes poetry movies that mix previous movie footage with poetry readings. They crafted an ideal setting for Hughes “The Weary Blues,” recited by Allen Dwight Callahan.
Right here’s the poem:
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking forwards and backwards to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the opposite evening
By the pale boring pallor of an previous fuel mild
He did a lazy sway . . .
He did a lazy sway . . .
To the tune o’ these Weary Blues.
Together with his ebony palms on every ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying from side to side on his rickety stool
He performed that unhappy raggy tune like a musical idiot.
Candy Blues!
Coming from a black man’s soul.
O Blues!
In a deep tune voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that previous piano moan—
“Ain’t received no person in all this world,
Ain’t received no person however ma self.
I’s gwine to stop ma frownin’
And put ma troubles on the shelf.”
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the ground.
He performed a number of chords then he sang some extra—
“I received the Weary Blues
And I can’t be happy.
Obtained the Weary Blues
And may’t be happy—
I ain’t completely satisfied no mo’
And I want that I had died.”
And much into the evening he crooned that tune.
The celebrities went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped enjoying and went to mattress
Whereas the Weary Blues echoed by means of his head.
He slept like a rock or a person that’s lifeless.
Hughes additionally recorded an album of his poetry with a jazz accompaniment in 1958; additionally named The Weary Blues, it was composed and organized by Leonard Feather and Charlie Mingus. Mingus was featured in a 2020 installment of Black Music Sunday.
Right here’s that poem:
You’ve got taken my blues and gone —
You sing ’em on Broadway
And also you sing ’em in Hollywood Bowl,
And also you blended ’em up with symphonies
And also you mounted ’em
So they do not sound like me.
Yep, you completed taken my blues and gone.You additionally took my spirituals and gone.
You place me in Macbeth and Carmen Jones
And every kind of Swing Mikados
And in the whole lot however what’s about me —
However sometime someone’ll
Arise and speak about me,
And write about me —
Black and delightful —
And sing about me,
And placed on performs about me!
I reckon it will be
Me myself!Sure, it will be me.
Writing for JSTOR in 2021, Ashawnta Jackson’s “What Is Jazz Poetry?” introduces Charlie Mingus’ “Scenes within the Metropolis.”
Jazz poetry may be poetry that’s strictly about jazz, or it might probably take its construction from the rhythms of the music. As a result of the definition of the shape is so different, explains musician and musicologist Hao Huang, poets as totally different as “Jack Kerouac and Maya Angelou have tried their hand at writing jazz poetry, typically experimenting with jazz music backgrounds to their very own poetry readings, with various levels of literary integrity and success.”
It’s this mingling of kinds that gave us items like Charles Mingus’s “Scenes in the City” (1959), an almost twelve-minute piece the place Mingus’s band backs narrator Melvin Stuart as he recites a Lonnie Elders and Langston Hughes poem about life and music and trendy metropolis life.
I really like these lines:
I assume I’m the one man on this planet who wakes up too Jazz music within the morning
I assume, i cant say precisely why
I assume I discover it solemn…
Like a hymn
Ya know I needed to show that to my mom once I was dwelling again residence
I’d get up to them sounds
Mother didnt dig, she simply didnt go for it
Chook, Miles, Max… she simply couldnt see it
Morning, afternoon, evening or anytime
That’s till I performed her some monk one evening,late
Spherical Midnight
I performed her some monk
Thelonious that’s
Now Mother spends a lot of her nights in tunisia
Benefit from the over 11-minute journey under.
When jazz poet Jayne Cortez handed away in December 2012. Margaret Busby penned her obituary for The Guardian.
Born Sallie Jayne Richardson in Arizona, she moved on the age of seven to Los Angeles, the place she grew up within the Watts district, enthralled by her mother and father’ jazz and blues file assortment. She performed bass in school. In 1954, she married the avant-garde saxophonist Ornette Coleman (a monitor on his first album is entitled Jayne). Their son, Denardo, was born in 1956; as a baby he started drumming along with his father and he later collaborated with each mother and father of their separate careers. They divorced in 1964.
Assuming her maternal grandmother’s maiden title, Cortez started writing down ideas that became poems. She additionally grew to become concerned within the civil rights motion, working in Mississippi and elevating cash for the Pupil Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee. “I wrote extra political sorts of works, works that might be learn at rallies. I grew to become extra energetic, not simply in writing however as an organiser,” she advised the journalist Val Wilmer in 1985. […]
In 1975 she married the sculptor and visible artist Melvin Edwards, whose work appeared on a few of her ebook covers. Her band, the Firespitters, which featured Denardo, supplied a complementary jazz-funk-blues response to Cortez’s rhythmic, typically incantatory supply, her temper starting from militancy to lyricism, dynamic surrealism to uncooked emotion. She spoke compellingly of social and environmental points in a worldwide context; fought injustice wherever she discovered it; was within the frontline wrestle for racial and gender equality; and celebrated the all-pervading energy of music.
For The New York Occasions, Margalit Fox wrote:
Ms. Cortez’s work was past class by advantage of embodying so many classes concurrently: written verse, African and African-American oral custom, the discourse of political protest, and jazz and blues. Meant for the ear much more than for the attention, her phrases mix a hurtling immediacy with an incantatory orality. […]
It was as if her verse, which regularly took on giant, painful topics like racism and misogyny, had turn out to be an instrument itself — an instrument, Ms. Cortez felt strongly, to be wielded within the service of social change.
In considered one of her best-known works, “If the Drum Is a Girl,” as an example, she indicts violence towards ladies. (The title invokes Duke Ellington’s 1956 composition “A Drum Is a Girl”)
Cortez’s work actually is highly effective. Have a pay attention.
Right here is the poem:
If the drum is a lady
why are you pounding your drum into an insane
babble
why are you pistol whipping your drum at daybreak
why are you taking pictures by means of the top of your drum
and making a drum tragedy of drums
if the drum is a lady
don’t abuse your drum don’t abuse your drum
don’t abuse your drum
I do know the evening is filled with displaced individuals
I see skins striped with flames
I do know the ugly disposition of underpaid clerks they continuously menstruate by means of the eyes
I do know bitterness embedded in flesh
the itching alone can drive you loopy
I do know that that is America and hen are coming residence to roost
on the MX missile
But when the drum is a lady
why are you choking your drum
why are you raping your drum
why are you saying disrespectful issues
to your mom drum your sister drum
your spouse drum and your toddler daughter drum
If the drum is a lady
then perceive your drum
your drum shouldn’t be docile
your drum shouldn’t be invisible
your drum shouldn’t be inferior to you
your drum is a lady
so don’t reject your drum don’t attempt to dominate your drum
don’t turn out to be weak and chilly and desert your drum
don’t be pressured into the place
as an oppressor of drums and make a drum tragedy of drums
if the drum is a lady
don’t abuse your drum don’t abuse your drum
don’t abuse our drum…….
I discover Cortez’s level as highly effective in the present day because it was when she wrote it almost 75 years in the past.
Olivia Bates writes about Cortez’s tribute to John Coltrane, and its layers of that means, on her Black Arts Movement blog.
Jayne Cortez’s poem, How Lengthy Has This Trane Been Gone, is a tribute to a lifeless Black artist, but in addition a strong name to maintain the Black Arts Motion within the hearts and minds of the Black Individuals. It’s a stunning, lyrical tribute to John Coltrane and the highly effective Blackness of his craft. Her phrases additionally chastise the listener to not neglect the origins of Blues and Jazz, and the hardships the early artists needed to overcome. It’s a poem about embracing the historical past and going ahead with out cultural dilution.
Take heed to her tribute, over the potent bass of Richard Davis.
Once I take into consideration jazz poets, I consider Sonia Sanchez as our Queen Mom.
From her Poetry Foundation bio:
Poet, playwright, professor, activist and one of many foremost leaders of the Black Research motion, Sonia Sanchez was born Wilsonia Benita Driver on September 9, 1934, in Birmingham, Alabama. Her mom died when she was very younger and Sanchez was raised by her grandmother, till she too died when the writer was six years previous. Sanchez finally moved to Harlem along with her father, a schoolteacher, in 1943. She earned a BA from Hunter School in 1955 and attended graduate college at New York College, the place she studied with the poet Louise Bogan. Sanchez additionally attended workshops in Greenwich Village, the place she met poets comparable to Amiri Baraka, Haki R. Madhubuti, and Etheridge Knight, whom she later married. In the course of the early Nineteen Sixties Sanchez was an integrationist, supporting the concepts of the Congress of Racial Equality. However after listening to the concepts of Malcolm X, her work and concepts took on a separationist slant. She started instructing in 1965, first on the employees of the Downtown Group Faculty in New York and later at San Francisco State School (now College). There she was a pioneer in growing Black Research programs, together with a category in African American ladies’s literature.
[…]
Summing up the significance of Sanchez’s work, Kalamu ya Salaam concluded in Dictionary of Literary Biography: “Sanchez is likely one of the few inventive artists who’ve considerably influenced the course of black American literature and tradition.” In an interview with Susan Kelly for African American Evaluate, Sanchez concluded, “It’s that love of language that has propelled me, that love of language that got here from listening to my grandmother communicate black English… It’s that love of language that claims, merely, to the ancestors who’ve completed this earlier than you, ‘I’m retaining the love of life alive, the love of language alive. I’m retaining phrases which might be spinning on my tongue and getting them transferred on paper. I’m retaining this nice custom of American poetry alive.’”
Take heed to Sanchez on this video from the Pew Middle for Arts and Heritage. She evokes Max Roach’s drumming on this studying of “10 Haikus for Max Roach.” Sanchez penned the haiku to mark the passing of her good friend and jazz drummer Max Roach. The work is included within the assortment, Morning Haiku, printed in 2010.
Be part of me within the feedback for much more jazz poetry—from each our poet elders and from younger people who find themselves carrying on the custom.
