Collaborations: Jazz and Poetry

00:00:03 uh welcome to this first of the poetry and music series I'm edner sessan director of the center um David Paul David pollins will uh David pollin who is in charge of the Poetry program for the Helix Center will introduce today's program and maybe he'll tell you something about what else he has planned I don't know he hasn't uh given me his uh copy of his comments uh as I said yesterday uh we

00:00:35 are having a benefit at the end of the month but those of you who can't come any donation of any size is welcome so with that Dave thank thanks Ed well as as Ed mentioned this is the first of our poetry events at Helix and I'm David pollins and we have a committee of people who have been helping and providing suggestions I'll mention their names um Heather dubna Rachel hattis andry LaVine and Polly Rosen wake are all in the Poetry

00:01:05 committee and are all helping to organize the events we're hoping to have um three possibly four more events between now and the summer uh the next thing that'll be coming up in the winter is going to be a round table on classical U poetry and galib um and then a little bit later on in the spring we're going to have a round table on ancient Mayan poetry in the popal v and there are some other roundtables in the works and you know we'll let you know about them as they

00:01:37 develop so we have two very special artists with us today Sean singer who won the Y younger poets prize and the Norma Farber award from the Poetry Society of America for first book of poems and Lewis Porter wonderful wonderful jazz musician and preeminent Jazz musicologist uh did you bring CDs with you today or oh no I have some my car okay well U the cult train biography I could go I could go get okay the C train biography is on sale outside and so is

00:02:07 Sean singer's book of poems uh so if you're interested please please buy them um so I'll I'll segue poetically uh to their collaboration today um I wonder if they'll help us to answer a question posed by Shawn in his poem inside the Keith Jared Trio he asks how does a hollow bone in your head Trace clear purple wavelets from waves of pain so we're going to go for about an hour and 15 minutes and we'll stop and

00:02:39 we'll have participation uh questions comments from the audience thank you very much okay thanks for coming nice to see you um let just [Music] start the old record r red out of the hot machine the Scully automated lathe covered in oil rigged to the metal ends dying of spin metal on black backto back

00:03:09 thimble weights diamond and rinse to a new shine lunge and pull into circles 100 grooves to the centimeter calling it vinyl midnight candle drops onto the place with the push of the nigus chirping needle a bellcrank lead plant resting in a red scissor over the lumps of Steel then Rising with throtle smoke jazzed rumbly with the blues the old rumormonger taking us to the Juke the Bambara word that is wicked bouncing resin polymer lost to

00:03:40 the racy stff baby she got a phonograph it won't say a lonesome word she got a photograph and it won't say a lonesome word what evil have I done what evil has the poor girl [Music] heard [Music] louder

00:04:16 okay okay that's fine we should yell I should yell [Music] okay okay got

00:04:49 it photo of col train 1963 otherworldly and outreaching a Parnes of Noise with a serious glint of inestimable worry on his face oh cold train what will ring from your Pious gleaming entian euphonia so capable Swift with no Trace no trace of Stillness the blur of the gray gray and GRE gree flows horward to the black Bell of the saxophone a cylinder of joy and imp purpled Sea Of Heaven eving into

00:05:28 hell [Music] okay I'll I'll try to do that it's a small place here okay you can maybe even not amplify the just use the natural sound at right oh you don't want to hear the piano no natur

00:06:06 [Music] I okay sound check before the next po this is clearer yes okay do it with me don't turn away put your behind the microphone [Music] okay [Music] Billy later wounds etch themselves above

00:06:36 and below drink sober lungfuls of hush blood soap and will the threadbear noises of an Amber tube and a bird welcome to the district of snow loneliness my list a towel for redness taboos for my doll spasms of Amen something emerges from a cord a pigeon egg snow silent resilient Secret holding its hand toward you holding its pink Spotlight finding a Rosevelt dime I wake up to a new Sun a clear and tender quiet

00:07:07 in each [Music] bone Billy blew his mama's China Berry Tree ain't greased since the big be CL not in the early black back of the club so thick with smoke and lady up front blowing Blues till my hair heard spurts of shying sometimey trouble you know in the black fracture of night cheese back hot dog cutie killer Diller face like a brown egg begging the black like Jack the bear there lady baby color of a chocolate dress Juicy Lucy the Shazam Dua bang bang outflow sensation called

00:07:39 yes I had too many husbands last one beat me black and blue and he was out the door he said baby better me than you I got good and drunk I couldn't even see no matter how much money I make I've never been free he used to stay out late now he don't come home at all I know by that there's another mule kicking in my all if you don't like my ocean don't fish in my sea stay out of my valley and let my mountain be let me be your rag doll until your China comes if you beat

00:08:11 me ragged I've got to beat you some if he walks out the door he won't be gone long I'll be up on the stage in my needle of [Music] song [Music] you play a

00:08:48 [Music] littleit [Music]

00:09:27 Scott joffin son of a slave your birth is no more exact than a petal sunflower you have no need to worry your piano roles have played in middle and upper class homes Maple Leaf across the plains where it is gold we worry neither improvise nor play Blues but compose chrysanthemum our ways of living differ like worry the weaponized invisible boundaries of America keep you Eugenia there is a

00:09:58 reason to worry you were composing but not recording only rolls with holes Lily Queen others have been pieces of worry the reason you asked and the reason I don't have the answer is the same helot Trope let's just not worry syphus with its attendant dementia paranoia paralysis pineapple your leaves each fear and heave toward

00:10:28 worry

00:11:29 [Music]

00:12:03 [Music] [Music] trumbone Magic the exigencies of an interval Igor Stravinsky or's gooey nasty bone Style

00:12:36 with its slurs gloss and muskrat dust reveals a muskrat in aquatic rodent and its fur all Louisiana industry before ory relocated to Los Angeles thorough described their nests not as things but as dwellings the border of habitat and town the theme beneath the solai on dropping Shucks with corn Shucks and their outside maze used for toilet paper Lil Harden's feelings of Revenge during their divorce dropping them on Lewis's head the raw um of marrow a bone facing

00:13:09 backwards on a h drawn cart when the sun sets there is not to do I saw you with your sweet man last night and I know you wasn't true

00:13:48 just for you blow powdered color through a straw from the caves Vantage feel the trestles and Palms be the flashlab see a ball slow above of the plate be the flesh lab too the cream of your neck the portion near the ear use your stylus have no direct hand contact recall that Utopia literally means not a place punishment WR I will not write this poem a thousand times on a wall then hinge that wall or singe it I think

00:14:20 of Maxine sometimes her inky Bob Ramon's tea and negative definitions we would ride her blue Toyota Bey the dunes clear cell cancer killed her years ago she would take my hand in the mid-grade mall and we saw our liquid happiness Rising through [Music]

00:14:58 bodies [Music]

00:15:38 [Music] s [Music]

00:16:20 [Music] mountainous black garden what good is intelligence if you cannot discover a useful Melancholy reading grapefruit pray and fake grief put on floret African and her arm drapes onto steel fibers along nerves her love fills the zinc bottle of its own body peel me a woody base Wick the piano away from the sweet peak of Duke's

00:16:54 Pomade black can be quiet and contain the whole thing what is a part what is a part and not hard and hard and not aart Welden Irvine 1943 to 2002 please forgive the long silence in

00:17:24 my gut which is the blue flame of the stov toop the broken Lance of fear Quakes my liver and my name means not celebration and critique but concealment with the Doan called OA and so I take myself into myself that long ribbon folded inside the cowy shell I'm a massive animal the torsion and the muscles of my neck serve up the image of a malcontented demon and I suck my own grave through my sinuous mantle

00:17:57 Groove oh

00:18:57 3 [Applause] [Applause]

00:19:27 l a

00:20:02 [Music]

00:20:48 apotheosis of Sunny Clark first tars vinegar warmth Euphoria and nodding off followed by Auto matte cheeseburgers and vanilla milkshake shake the only black kid in the school picture far away swim look in the thread of his eye Japanese love cool Strutton white legs black aine Fifth Avenue as de D demons douse metallic nodules a stylus pins Co Porter in a Pullman quarter what seems like a right hand

00:21:19 with blue tabula is actually Sunny Clark waking up from his vomit when he sees what he's leaving behind only the right cord is perfect labor everything with sunny Clark is weakness he's a city in a forest in folded quill tranquilized with the black lung and tar black the most aristocratic color of

00:21:57 all [Music] Ken Burns Ken Burns nobody can hear it it's off okay Ken Burns there's no such thing

00:22:30 as Bop music but there's such a thing as progress Coleman Hawkins although Jazz's sepia acetates and lacquers have dipped the black into silver nitrate and are faded little faders they inflate like lungs the pink lung with its tortoise shell shellac appears to bulge and its inseam exhales Purity and inhale spoonfuls of tempo Purity and Jazz sir is thwarted and unutilized 200 years of menstruals snapping their

00:23:01 red suspenders corrode and oxidize the air Mr Tambo what kind of a girl was she zip she was highly polished yes indeed her father was a varnish maker you see that rubber pork chop became something it's supposed to be funny by the way B shimi shable from its mold has been heated and mounted face to face with a hinge so that the machine opens up facing you it is not lighter or inter metso Frozen like trout beneath the flux and racing of ice is it is not

00:23:34 Alpine and schof off Al through the cracked photos breaking into creot superlatives dowe the monoliths virtuoso genius but there is a siphoning off of linking licking pink Jam from the knife negativities the integrated bands for example of Alcoholics Benz heads and junkies or the deranged catastrophe of Buddy Balden feeding his hand to a ceiling fan or the

00:24:05 wick saturated with amphetamines or Buddy Rich telling the trumpet section of faces that he'd plink them every seven bars like a neutered werewolf when Coleman Hawkins stood half Ned like a mango in freedlander photo 1956 with his curved man breast sweating from it may not be true he appears modern he is not a man nostalgic item logist he lung of air rate propulsive tub urgently pumping ninth as the living Demona fuge ripping through a blanket of

00:24:36 vanilla radio racial animus intractable sources faded scriptures the Pinstripes of The storyville mudheads Midwives and the peach tin types fitted into ladies bres are not Jazz this strategy does not Puff the uula blowpipe or bring an axe to the Vanguard rather it shuffle bucks pantomimes and dab slop with a hand in meanwhile as the Onyx rattlesnake of the century slid by 1960 the year the Fedora went up the flu Jazz 2 opened

00:25:07 like a fire in a woman's ceremony it did not end eer had yet to drag the Black River of RI into rivulets of need unkempt skinny dips red vinyl seats of the Southern buses and the vinegar cloud of the trees harpors were made too of a jazz as the bus ate the road's tape measure the ballrooms closed the Hickory House sewed 52nd Street into a fly trep and mesh with liquid static the Green River you ignore is realized by the Black River growing wings beneath the

00:25:38 shoulder blades of the hatchling Coleman Hawkins who morphs with alular quills into a hawk dark patagial marks on under wings present on all ages and races conjured Shadows beyond the last section of the long film you're afraid of listening to this lady he too with Parade float head eyes like flashing Lindy ERS lunging with the lumpy fabric of the past pushing a gauge aduc of blips bloodstream lushes of vipers more righteous than scump

00:26:08 codification in closing sir the Reed was always remoistened while you were in the booth cutting the Montage sequence but the pink sequins of Bessie Smith quenched with yielding Limelight disappear into dust like eighth notes my button ejects and the tongue spits out the disc's rainbow [Music]

00:26:57 for [Music]

00:27:57 s [Music]

00:28:27 e is

00:29:22 [Music] empowered kadav yes leis Porter absolutely he who travels learns Roma proverb D Jango means I awake this

00:29:55 Verdon Wheels its wood spokes through through squirrel work indigos and a transparent red stove glows by the blanket when a horse clops through the center of the Moon where Belgium is Born the manou the mechon to wake up in a caravan with a plower viola canvas covered hatch means to exist but if we exist at the frontier robbing chickens perhaps flirting with fola violet or draa grape and slashing around in purple liquid a hedgehog has Barbed arter choke

00:30:27 skin and high under its anointed Bush stuff him with rosemary thyme and wild garlic over a roasting pit through the clay with lcho Robin and a Savory liver to awake to see the window and the H drawn air to awake to the dark musette and the purple vs a hedgehog winds his piston by the chimney and grapelli and Reinhardt screaming fragrant honey under the sky's purple canvas the sound gets to be part of your body Lester Young sleeping with his horns when Billy

00:30:58 wasn't there black faucet black suede D Jango Reinhardt guitar Superman his black mustaches sip the milk foam no one listening to him turn a girl into a puddle has ever complained look to the side and he'll be there

00:31:28 [Music] I

00:31:59 [Music]

00:33:51 just a sybl parts of a base clarinet one aerophone overblow granadel cylindrical boar sassafras Contra base orange tiger roar Harry Carney half hole Brew resin cousin Mary Eric doy grapefruit stew Rosen neither a dry sound nor the white rice paper mask but swallowing the moon the notes drink like grapes the new Yark photographer says that when he was a kid

00:34:21 there were 12 or 13 movie theaters downtown now only a tiny porn theater a spits distance from the music Museum shows octaves of skin part of the lip stretches behind the knee smooth as a Mercury reissue and the precipice glistening like a Rolls glaze has been pushed up and down across sorn's uh noise at 235 in Body and Soul the Doan wear purple fringes and their Pearl Millet sing vessels of donkeys bearing carrot ited like the Sandstone bigara all rect

00:34:55 linear with mass secured by the teeth four flutes roll off their Center the cakes filling plastered not a sigh exactly longer our references to barbecued peaches wet and right Al white and red altars catch clouds is that what Braxton means I shook hands with Elvin Jones and with Lawrence D Butch Morris the cavernous filaments of the downtown room like a limb soaking in a barrel an article an article said the amount of female greeneries is an indication for

00:35:27 the amount of women living in guinia Little Richard with his nougat like Pomade yelled The Girl Can't Help It col train likewise said whatever he'd say about Eric dolphy would be understatement newark's dry rot and magnesium flares show litter and the bare branches of a maple some looters return with armfuls of candy Kool-Aid and water guns the late photo of Sarah Von shows black triangles arranged like a Batman villainous years ago her Carefree

00:35:57 loafers and red Parisian mime Stripes swung easy the liner notes reveal that she could have succeeded in the classical field Wayne shorter would say what's happening and she'd say Newark and that was enough cuz you know what Newark does to people Mel touret reports that she kind of got Huffy when he said operatic and then she said do you mean Jazz isn't legit you might say that powders are being crushed in the mor where some of the purple spays like limbs the embracing limbs for a while poetry did not

00:36:28 interest me with its flailing corruption boredom obsequiousness and general green color it was a cloak used for taunting by everyone all flbe thought the same thing about the Bourgeois nothing is ever the same as they said it was blue lights of her hair vertical the gray Pearls of her neck delightful to the place better or worse where eyes penetrate bare Forks glitter Swan glasses hiding among the bushes sort of feeling your way

00:36:59 Arbus said the hand is The Cutting Edge of the Mind flawed animals meat and buns and sloth she sort of lifted up her hips so the rims of the bones were elevated a sort of hand clasp of braided Chestnut then a wordless moan like the pink tent you Traverse rather than nonvocal to the Bone she pulled his shoulders forward hovering during rehearsal the wordless word was Loosely creased where the lowest part of the hip is hooked to the curve Roland Kirk's no tonic pre has a double meaning the first note in the

00:37:30 scale and the double Jin Lester Young was drinking without quinine water circumference of lemon like the brim of the Hat blooming into focus in the film I gather dry kindling on the snowy mountain slope white were the branches gathered in my hand wood has dropped its pieces with trees along the way where the couple walks the trail inside the creamy sand the basist said the action on the base was high vertically so so that the elastic boom made for instant Decay threadgill says tubas can control

00:38:02 the Decay and attack tubas blend with everything whereas the base doesn't blend brass will cut through anything you have to wait on the base a tuba player he says can shut it down cuz it's wind the bass player said during a long Jam he never gets a break the glass of Pepsi has water already dripping down the side of the glass from the ice skating in the armful of warm air a woman bends to Pat a multi striped cat liquid gray who prances between the aisles listless and revolting with

00:38:32 mystery she loves the horrendous creature whose eyes glow yellow like a vial of perau its tail upright plucking an E minor because the story has become more complicated than when we left the house miles played in Tokyo and then Berlin former Scorch sectors all lighted in the terror bot Scopes in Tokyo March 9th 1945 we Americans burned to death 100,000 people in a single night men women and children on July 14th 1964 Sam Rivers channeled

00:39:04 T-Bone Walker Among The Velvet Echoes a coine anen hall the Doan say that we should remember God has no external ears she cuss she cups her hands babies are like water flowers who cool leaves from the tubs of their eyes our ways of living differ two think of Swagger's onoff switch Wen Irvine said many of the young rappers got disconnected from a tradition of

00:39:36 protest and decided to wrap about Mayhem in order to get paid you can tell the political orientation of the bus driver by whether he says Lennox Avenue or Malcolm X Boulevard when he announces the stop the large blue and white Wheels slap the painted curb covered with slush November 80 I walked to school not knowing how to play with I decided not unlike John Gilmore at Birdland 1956 to play Contra we play against everything in the blaze of the Hearth we got the

00:40:07 concept we got the concept we got conceptual I'm on East 80th Street the were of pigeons have delicate lavender Pockets around their eyes they ground themselves in a spring of City dust as a pillowy of plom among the Air's granules of a city and its puzzle pieces many tonged embraceable two men are are dancing in a bar it's 11:30 according to the walls Cold age genesy beer clock they're dressed in 1980 Styles velour and floppy existential caps the Shadows of the

00:40:39 men's bodies are cast on the jukebox behind and their Joy what do you know about the Forgotten ones try to understand the Beautiful Bodies peeling paint and upturned peaches from a Marxist perspective why this city dtis denotations and detonations why the snail shell uncomfortable water the caramel tone of craon and the air is punctuated by Wings instead of Limbs Wings sliced through at 80° assaulting through the sky's catapult salted and

00:41:11 polychrome I'd like to be away from 1980 for a while and see its chemical pink dripping from the unfeeling dinosaur eye of the iridescent pigeons another time from above or below I will not take My Father's Footsteps a minor helmet with its bulb peers through the tack and Driftwood around a wall the light bounces on a mirror with its white cotton you are encased in the city steel tub washboard scrap empty grape drink bottle frail fall literal burnished do you feel the

00:41:43 calm chewing the marrow from the gains the city has [Music] made a have City moves along the mouth of a canal you are living inside its corridors breathing the air shaft smell of a fishbone your limbs reach Across the Threshold down the hallway of metal doors it is that multie Avenue that comes at the Park's Edge after a mollusk snow drift away from the window model

00:42:14 jams coated inconceivable rust the pigeons peppery throats blush like the sorcerers bending the tab rings of their cans and all Echoes it is not only pushers and Gathering places storefront churches crates of apples we should not be east of the park but no one knows we're here if it is the paradise or the omy swing Along The Velvet curtain of the sky beyond the rooftops I see the families create a Father's Day picnic out of a card table boom box a ginger ale boxes of chicken a Domino's game

00:42:47 clamped to a dude's lecture I would run from the 125th Street Station down the sustained line of the sidewalk and wait for the elevator that stops to raise its pulley and fly fly wheeel and drop my trapezoid body and raise to the apartment to caress your hair or to let up or simply hold on it is a familiar curvature the place is a valley the cathedrals East the same streets reach out in the same places to open the same mirrored lobbies we arrive at the place where the wife relaxes and folds her

00:43:18 legs on the floor in conjecture at all the sidewalks traversed she has me a partner who knows that her memories are bubbles that we see a far farfetched Capital lift and break through tenaments and wish like a Creed we would travel along riffs and octaves to hear the doorbells and bird CS or feel the extraordinary orange of the Florida Sun a woman clutching an orange pill bottle and we go along the snake like namesakes and the Keratin Hooves of the city can always relieve us we have people sitting

00:43:48 around understanding the bubbles gloss anywhere The Fragile numb inheritances answer the launching Terrors her axes and closet doors she remembers we will burst them all [Music]

00:44:26 along [Music]

00:45:55 David S wear Cortez that a calm despair is the essence of wisdom this string she's moved over an air current now they rewind a latex balloon in Newark like a vacated building the place rebre for chump dimes it's thrity slicing Hammer these strings preach at a husting pluck your needs from their housings dive with your funnel to the back of the land and deep and Fracture the unbodied air spout thick blood for a

00:46:28 ghost in Hues of sickle-shaped jets listening to cat Edmonson with r Port his head in the car with n but this quartet brings them back when the tenor's potato masher explodes above the [Music] trench

00:47:12 the clarinet all the kmer bands used it when they eased themselves down from dark down down down down Prospero broke his black staff and vain glorious light beamed out the fairy light slave light shomo blue music foot flatted the New Englander Barn Moon thin and rumbled Bas yeses and linit and sounded out vanilla sugar Quavers of coloraturas made tint tabulation and Aller gondo as the valve trombone and guitar Hush Hush in the

00:47:44 background and got cool quiet and waked the blues listen listen and the light come [Music] through [Music]

00:49:25 I [Music]

00:50:40 the sweet Obsession bleeds from singer singer is dead today and in the ground forever how astonishing his blue vapor is seeping not consuming itself outward from his honey and body he is buried in fine linen in the old style and his saxophone is engraved as a Tiger Lily there was love in him his love was not a wild stag nor fragrant oils nor Hills of cinnamon it was a light through the ocean cool and content he handed this poem to me and was Bond sifting up

00:51:10 to the surface all the passions of my organs are soft doorways the garden turns inside out one dream is white as a sky one black and crowded as trees each with a door a rude odor a reed remember him darkest eyes playing like hell in the mountains love like that blue making up in depth for what it lacked in brightness we will not speak of love with him [Music]

00:51:55 again

00:52:51 [Music]

00:53:49 elonia in the lamp caught fire after he put a blue cashmir sweater over it subtle as a nance obligado and filmy violin two brown curves and pant purflings ease sound out of the stank of violin Parts belly waist chin rest ribs Sound Hole Peg box tail piece rounded shoulder Ellington was an expert on them all Billy storn would wake up composed for 4 hours would wake Duke blood count or ballad for very tired and very sad

00:54:19 Lotus Eaters for example and he'd bring his golden torso up and finish off the rest of the composition in the morning after composing all night Duke would open the closet full of blue Kashmir sweaters and his orchestra was playing the next morning Plucky plug ugly pelana porous and perfect Blues daone Dil aoan dutu ear damsel fish acto Genesis Dell's Edge dark smiter down demon act lips desirous Empire do Bello hippus Dove Tellis

00:54:52 spaller sary e drop mozar playing a word sex game just then the creamy squeezing OBO exalted unbolted Kima umela Plum beautiful music the color of blonde night red plum jam on pumper nickel a Puerto Rican hermaphrodite putting on pink lip gloss Wednesday night Ellington who could for feel the slightest discolored sax of frage leaf easing between two rocks heard through a catnap and half dozen chewed pencil tips the baby green

00:55:23 sweet pea Billy exhale blue through blue dukedoms passed on to accept that place which comes to each of us [Music]

00:55:55 alone [Music]

00:56:25 I [Music]

00:58:25 la [Music]

00:59:19 thank you very [Applause] much thank [Applause] you um in the remaining time I'd be happy to address any questions you have or we would if there are any a poem well it it it's a it's a work of

00:59:50 fiction so it's a character but similar to the writer but sometimes something uh not a tribute per se but sometimes in literature rather than uh confront unstable or unsavory or unpleasant topics you could do it through a character or a mask or some type of device to increase the psychic distance between the writer and the subject matter so this character can be killed

01:00:24 off he can do things that I wouldn't do right and also the double play on the meaning of the word singer was just a useful device so that's what that was it's like Woody Allen they always ask him that is that based on your alv singer from singer but I mean even more recent films like his films from the 80s and 90s they always says that based on your life he says no you could say that but it's just based on somebody who happens to go out with younger women one of them happens to be a

01:00:55 student of his or maybe a stepdaughter or something but you could say it's a little like me but it's not really you know but you please use the microphone if you want to ask a question or comment so we can get you on question standing yes I want I just want to say that I enjoy the music and the Poetry done together but this is a question for the candas is it is the music original composition

01:01:26 trying to hear if there were any other things picked up from other songs which I didn't hear but I want to know all the compositions were your own I I made up all of them just now except for a few things this one is kind of like a New Orleans Blues so even though I made it up it's within a very set format yeah and this was body and [Music] soul and uh

01:01:57 this is really based on all of me but I didn't really play it much it really goes uh where does it go why not take all of me can't you see I'm no good but I didn't really play that so um it was all improvised but for those three I used uh uh song forms that I'm familiar with the rest I just made up and people sometimes tell me they say you should some of those were pretty good you should try and remember them and use them again so

01:02:27 maybe I'll listen back and see you have a few other question down um I mean I I do a lot of composing in fact I've I've done everything from short jazz tunes to Symphony Orchestra works so I do a lot of composing it depends whether if I think it was good enough to save then I'll I'll work on it and write it down yeah rob you had a question yeah are are there precedents for this kind of collaboration of a poet and a pist like this working together Rec well there have been Jazz poetry

01:02:58 collaborations since at least the 20s U Langston Hughes Hart Crane Kenneth rexroth uh Kenneth patchin uh kowak and so on and so forth but the two of us have done this a few times at various places Cornelia Street once and I think at ruter once so there's a precedent there's more and more of it my my friend VJ a who's a lately a very successful jazz pianist he

01:03:30 used to do a lot of that in the 90s he doesn't do that much anymore I don't think he's getting a lot of gigs with his own band now but uh the first time I saw him he was playing with Mary Baraka exactly but I will say this that uh the the thing about the earlier days through the 50s a lot of times what the Jazz musicians did with the poets is just played tunes that they had already rehearsed so it's only more recently that you see people doing what we're doing where I'm just kind of listening

01:04:00 and trying to see what will go with that you know some of the older collaborations are really just preset tunes that they just say okay here's a tune that we already play so that might go well with this poem of yours you know so to actually improvise at all all is uh not that common maybe I like the conversation the problem was that um was frustra not to all the words so there there's something about the uh the

01:04:31 balance between the piano and the recitation yeah that's why I kept asking you if we had it we could an imperfect system we could still work on that you know definitely yeah you have to scream more when you're reading your poems well I would suggest something that you might not approve of and that is reading the poems before having the a comp the improvisation you mean read it once and then once with the piano what do you

01:05:01 think of that idea that's we could do that some of them don't want to hear the poem twice though how many people would like that idea of hearing the poem twice some people would like that how many people are too busy this life is too short they don't need to hear it twice come on you're busy right I understand another option might be to put the piano further away from the poet and then you know Spotlight on you solo well the only I had a really hard time hearing well in

01:05:33 addition to that the just the logistics of the thing I mean they're very clearly dense uh complex things that I've written so even if I read it twice I don't know it might improve it a little but I don't know how much that would do for poems are very arod you know they reflect a lot of knowledge and a lot of knowledge of the history of poetry so there is there's a a lot of detail in them it's not like poetry slam where they just kind of you know you can you can understand that the minute you hear it

01:06:03 you know I have a question for each of you though CU that wasn't a question um in terms of um you when you uh play the when you're playing the piano um are you are you improvising as you go along or have you already read the poems prior to is this the first time you're hearing the poems yeah it's a good uh question we actually talked about that because you know I have I have the book which won all the prizes and I have a that what is that a chap book that other thing of yours and so I have some of his

01:06:36 poems I've read them and enjoy them I feel like I know something about poetry I know something about the way poetry is structured and all this but we actually talked about whether I should have the poems in front of me because I certainly don't know any of the poems well enough that I would know them by heart you know so uh and we decided that could actually be distracting for me so we decided not to do it that way and essentially I'm hearing the poems for the first time CU you know I've read them once or twice but it's not like I really know them you know and a question for Mr singer um I read in your bio your

01:07:08 process of uh creating your poetry oh all right I read about I'll accompany her when she when she says the questions okay I read in your bio the process of you of your uh writing poetry um so as you take you write down little Snippets of observations for a period of time and then it comes to you with that process how many poems do you generate per year would you say um well re the past several years not as much because I've

01:07:38 been writing a dissertation and doing other things but I mean I ideally I would write as much as possible but in my opinion there are too many already too many poems or too many of your poems well in general but I'd rather um just be open to it and then have it come uh when it comes but I theoretically I mean this is not existed but I would write every day but in

01:08:11 reality I try to just do it as much as possible I think maybe built into her question is the question is that a is that a slow process is yeah oh yes it takes years sometimes for a single poem wow work on it and you'll come back to it yeah I I wanted to make a comment about the difficulty understanding some of the words as you were reading I read your book of poems twice and enjoyed the poems and found myself enjoying the poems in a different way hearing them

01:08:41 presented in this format and I felt that missing out on some of the words that you can get when you're reading and there's silence around you this was a different experience in which in a sense getting all the words wasn't that important and the sound of your voice was a kind of a music and it was more notes than than semantic units I think if you the verdict is still out on what I'm about to say it's my opinion but I think if you've missed the Rhythm

01:09:12 in a poem you've missed the whole ship I mean the sound is what it the pleasure for the ear is really what I'm there for a lot of the times so i' like that but I mean not in all cases in all times I guess doesn't want to see problem what about givt to the audience yeah that's one idea everyone in the audience has to has to buy the

01:09:44 poems yeah good one huh what do you think good good I think the and one of my CDs and then you play together when you get home what the hell don't even stay for the performance that's it I'm going home I mean ideally these would require multiple readings or whatever but we do a a kind of version of that hello I have a two-part question and I was wondering the structure of jazz as opposed to the context you know

01:10:14 of the um the poetry and I don't know much about the structure of jazz could you just give us a little bit um an inter I this isn't fair but I know classical music but I don't know the structure and does it go necessarily with the rhythm of the Poetry so we know the and then the context the subject I'm going to answer it a little bit differently from the way you asked it because um first of all in terms of structure um the thing about jez is that you're improvising over a structure the

01:10:47 structures you're improvising over are not so different from classical music structures so we'll talk about the First theme the second theme but we're improvising really on the harmonies of those them uh Jazz we always say box Goldberg Variations are closer to Jazz than most uh forms in classical music because he takes a Harmony and does 32 amazing different ways of playing over that Harmony so that's kind of what we do but I also do free improvisation cuz I am a composer also and I'm well versed In classical music so some of one thing

01:11:18 I did I don't quite remember what it was but it was kind of a Dey kind of thing you might remember something like [Music] built on Dey you know I'm thinking about Dey you know Dey was a lot of composers will say he's the inventor of modern

01:11:48 music you know a lot of composers of even stavinsky said debc was like a god to him you know and uh I don't know if you know this but uh stavinsky showed the ride of spring piano version that he was using not the orchestral but stavinsky was playing it on the piano to company the dancers and he showed it to deisy and Dey site read it he said oh this is rather good and shinsky was looking at him you can read you can read that at sight you know it was a whole new kind of music but um so it doesn't really I wouldn't really think about it that way cuz the whole idea of De is to

01:12:19 get a sound that you like and uh he would use something that I sometimes call them cluster cords this one happens to be a diminished chord this one happens to be a dominant chord but it's it's this is not Jazz you understand so it's you can't make that comparison that's when I what my point is when I do that I'm not doing the Jazz thing I'm not taking a set Harmony and improvising over it I'm improvising the whole thing including the Harmony in a style that it happened to be a little like Dey it was it was me but it happened to be inspired to Dey

01:12:50 it's like composition but spontaneous composition not everybody can do I mean I happen to be uh very familiar with classical music and I like doing that kind of thing so that's different that's not a dance thing I think with the prems also I want to try to create a it's artificial to some extent but I create a situation that seems like it was inevitable but also somehow spontaneous the context um well the way that it sounds the way the lines are broken um

01:13:21 Etc the subject the subject the context do you address that I tried to but I I just want to say something about that which is that most poets not only poets but almost anybody you accompany whether it's I worked with dancers you do things for film sometimes uh don't like it if you try to catch every Nuance because then uh could you read like read a couple when you know when it's Thunder and he plays yeah and you go you don't want that you know they don't like if you go and try to try to emulate every

01:13:53 he says then I heard the blue and then I heard some Thunder but then it started to rain you know it sounds funny afterward the xop and there's a skeleton and yeah it sounds silly and in and by the way in the film business they used to call that Mickey mousing uh they maybe they still do because the idea is that in cartoons you do that but you wouldn't do that in the serious thing so what I so we have talked about that yeah that's what I'm getting at so we have talked about that and so what I try to do uh be what I was

01:14:26 uh it's a little hard since I'm not so familiar with his poetry and some of them were things I hadn't read before but certainly the ones I'd read before as soon as I heard the beginning I kind of had a sense okay is this a dark mood is it a light mood is it a blue some of them mention the blues you know this kind of thing so in that sense I try to do the overall mood of it but not try to catch every little Nuance you know and I was trying to play very softly behind them too but that you know with the soft pedal on I have two comments uh one is to combine and you said make a CD and you should combine it and make the

01:14:57 Poetry CD so we could take it with us good idea and the second part was uh discount for you you had the idea 2% uh the other part was uh like other people mentioning your words were hard to pick up sometimes and then you went into a kind of a Philip Glass melodic piece that tripped me out and I went to an altered state I saw your alar I noticed your aled when I play I did I

01:15:29 went yes yeah something like that and then I was able to hear the words a lot clearer since I went into an altered state so and then you could hear it better yeah yeah I dropped out and dropped in so what's the problem folks just alter come on that's right well play more altered music is that so hard come on yes you're all in TR out about the experience what's the problem come on did

01:16:04 youbody found saw information about you um it's on the website I think right David yes well there's a description on the announcement of your backgrounds and Publications and stuff and my site is easy to remember LSP porter.com do you have a site no is too famous to have a sight well I also uh found myself drifting a lot in and out and um it sometimes it felt like the the reading was competing

01:16:37 with the the music and sometimes I I sto listening to the words without without meaning to but then I'd come back and I'm not sure what to say other than that I think that it would be interesting to study what people hear you know how much I don't know how you do that and that's not question but um it's an interesting process listening to both things and sometimes and I

01:17:10 wonder why people either go into older States or or trip out into refy um what what in the music what in the Poetry what in their collaboration I don't know but I just found myself thinking of all these things was very pleasurable um all the time whatever notwithstanding what I say about feeling that they were in some instances competing for my attention um you know I went in in good places I always came back I never felt like GE I

01:17:41 missed something although I'm sure I did I missed a lot of the PO I don't necessarily feel that the language or the words sort of takes Supremacy I think there's a deliberate interaction and a kind of as you described it it was better but a give and take where you might hear that more certain moments or whatever yeah and I think also you know maybe when we're really successful you'll hear both at the same time but that certainly would be different from person to person and another thing is

01:18:11 that you but I am also doing certain specific things like you might notice I don't do any of my fast stuff while he's reading so certain rule I just have certain rules for myself nothing really fast while he's reading some of those found myself wondering but my slow is probably most I did fast so I don't know I do play a lot of fast no what if you kind of alterated would be another yes another way to do it like you read a couple of the verses well I did that with a with a uh a band called The John Eric Kelo quartet it's on YouTube oh yeah um I

01:18:42 recorded the this summer they're they're like uh they play uh I don't know what you call it Dixie Land kind of style of music but that's how we did it that time oh yeah but I mean I think he is like line by line almost well yeah with that I don't remember exactly what happened not necessarily I think I read and they played and we kind of did it that way well you know it again you know it was my experience which I you know didn't completely anticipate that um you felt more like a duet as if it were two

01:19:13 instruments and one of the instruments was a vocal cord vibrating um and and the sense of the poem wasn't important as important in this context as it would be in a different kind of context okay also it's important to know that poems really should not or can't be paraphrased I mean you've got to sort of experience the whole poem to get the poem you can't say what was about you know the time I journeyed over to Etha and blah you know it doesn't make any

01:19:45 sense you don't get it that way well that's a good point because the whole point is the words that you're using it's like I always say Dickens is such an amazing writer of fiction I said you can you can read the plot summary if that's all there were to it then there would no be no point to write the novel you know so um the writer spoke about working over the manuscript a great many times and changing things but The Pianist

01:20:17 speaks about doing the improvisation right on the spot and not necessarily being able to repeat it now that two very different views of how to perform this work now would you be willing to write it at to write out the music and change it keep changing it under different circumstances or is this what's unique about this presentation that you have a poem let's say that's been worked over many times

01:20:48 but a piece of music that hasn't been worked over many times well uh I mean in that example I think you're approaching sort of songwriting with musical accompaniment I mean like Cole Porter for example who that we know his compositions uh love for sale or whatever it was you know every time but like summertime another example I read there's 25,000 different

01:21:18 versions of it recorded version recorded versions of it and each one is different but they're all summer time so that's how that would work and also I mean a lot of these poems I wrote them maybe 10 or 15 years ago so I have no clue what I was what my mind was like at that moment I don't know anymore but occasionally when I'm reading I kind of take something out or change it or just to amuse myself at well that's good if you amuse yourself but I would

01:21:49 also say that um that's a different thing since I do compose we could certainly collaborate I would say I'm going to write a setting of one of your pieces either for with a written out piano part or for string quartet you know which could be great hey you might like that you know and uh on the other side there are people who improvise poetry but you can't improvise the same way that I couldn't write I couldn't improvise some of my orchestral music you couldn't improvise some poems that

01:22:20 are very arod di there's a certain kind of poem that you can improvise which is tends to be more on on one level it's not a multi-level poem where you have in the middle of it some kind of a reference to something that TS Elliot did they tend to be more one level poems and more direct and easy to understand but there is such a thing as improvising poem also when you're hearing it you're really missing a major component which is the lines poems verses written in lines there are Pros poems which is kind of a stupid name but yeah um that a lot of the information is contained in that

01:22:52 where the line is broken and for what reasons and so on and so forth but um just one comment um generally in good poetry relatively modern poetry anyway there's a feeling of spontaneity one feels as though the words were Happening by themselves jazz is sort of similar in that uh improvised Jazz has that feeling of being spontaneous even if organized it's it's spontaneous so I think uh the collaboration is is very

01:23:25 much equal in the sense that you have two media that are associated with spontaneity and therefore create their own sort of spontaneous interaction as they haveen so um I'm sort of not in favor of overworking and and uh overpreparing because that would certainly kill the goose that's okay so there's a point to that that makes sense I guess our time is up no thanks

01:23:55 thank [Applause] you we have books there and if anyone's interested in CD let me know