More Jazz Poetry: Sonny and Joe

painting by Aida Emart



To Keep Him Alive
by Paul Freidinger
(soon to be published by New York Quarterly)


The embouchure directs action:
tongue, lips, curve of the cheek,
seek solution with the reed; a need
for saliva on the sliver of wood,
sense of sound by breath, wet wood
makes the moan that makes it good.

Sonny Rollins said
without music he’s dead;
without the embouchure he can’t play,
without practice
the embouchure evaporates into air,
a balloon without breath;

without practice he can’t play,
without the embouchure there is no music,
without practice he’s deceased,
without the reed (essential seed
of vibration) sound is memory
of something not there.

He used to practice sitting
on the Williamsburg Bridge,
his sound swallowed by the sea,
lights of Manhattan swaddling him,
tankers floating beneath him on their way
to the ocean; no one noticed day or night;
no one stopped to listen.

New Yorkers are too sophisticated
to bother with art or let it bother them
he remarked, thankful for anonymity and presence
of the ideal audience of cars and pedestrians
and maritime traffic—and the reed

in concert with lips, tongue, lungs, spit,
the heart of sound from practice, embouchure
a link to the horn around the neck, crucifix-
of-sorrow-mix into joy, shriek and honk,
to seek, to keep him alive, to keep him alive,
to keep him alive, alive, alive…


Don't Ask Me Now
by Paul Freidinger


Joe Henderson climbs the stairs of his tenor sax,
the scale in scale (above the minor chords by McCoy)

to reach accord. Then, tremolo and a flurry
of sixteenth notes fluttered with honks and screeches

bent to blue and a dissonant melody forged from pain
that all resident boppers long for. Monk lives

in the intervals, dreams in the spaces we can’t transcend
or remember how he stood at the piano

as the sax man pierced the night, his silhouette bobbing
like a branch of leaves in a spring downpour.

In this version of “Ask Me Now,” Joe embodies his mentor
and weaves echoes of Thelonious through the bell

of his gleaming horn. Listening to this on an old cd,
I rise and mime a soft-shoe in tribute. My minor moment

raining down with joy. Don’t interrupt. Don’t ask me now.
I’m bobbing and dancing, too

Jazz Poetry by Paul Freidinger

This image by Ann deLorge is available at Jazz Art Paintings


There are intimate connections that exist between jazz and poetry. I've written a little about this HERE. Sometimes the poet will use the music or its makers as the subject or in a fleeting image. Sometimes the rhythmic idioms of jazz are used structurally. Illinois poet Paul Friedinger brings his love of modern jazz into his work in all of these ways and more. He has given me kind permission to publish his work on this blog. Here are two pieces related (at the very least) by their invocation of Miles:


All Blues


In Antarctica, the ice is blue
due to extremes of light.
An entire continent composed
of light that bends through a prism
of cool to cold curled to pure burn
at one end of the world. Miles knew
about the poles and the need for seasons
to flip over, after having been fed up
in St. Louis as a teen in humid summers,
and hot for more than a decade—
until lifted aloft by Bird. In ’59
he released Kind of Blue with its own sizzle
of dry ice, blowing “Blue in Green”
and “So What,” the sober result of logic
tunneling through the ear to find that
mind was at the end of its tether.
If any of us listening then would have peered
around the corner, we should have intuited
Miles would let the world go
at the first sign of global warming.
He rocked across the electric stage the rest
of his career, more about a flashpoint
than any hint of new direction.
Last year, a chunk of ice the size of Texas
spliced from the Antarctic shelf and drifted
the Southern Ocean like a giant cloud
shifting into northern climes. Over time
Miles moved, too, with little love
and less notice. He grew thinner
and cantankerous. In his last days,
Miles’ eyes turned a curious shade
of turquoise against his grizzled skin.
His world had flipped in and broken off,
prepared to flood the land with the kind
of sea it deserved. An aqua-vision
of a planet, viewed from the moon,
retrospective light all blue again.

*italicized line is by H.G. Wells


Your Turn
In memory of Paul Chambers


The jazz is existential, angular
in the dimly lit clubs,
away from the snow,
the killer cold that creeps in.

In the city
Monk still matters.
Sonny still matters.
Trane still matters.

The city rusted and ruined,
in tatters.
The homeless huddled
on a corner under a street light,
sipping a half-pint of Ancient Age,
passing the bottle in a ritual
back and forth like a chalice
in the chaste breath of winter.

Inside the sax is a knife
that severs the heart
and finds the inside surfaced
with another inside
waiting for the blade.
We can slice forever
and never touch the core.

In the trumpet’s blue glare,
a cymbal crash is symbiotically
ice and ember.
Wind roars across Chicago
in December, the lake
a metaphor of deeper chambers.

The bassist plucks his way
up the ribs of space.
In memory, Miles nods
to him and mutters,

Your turn, Sucker.

Jazz and Poetry

Image from Kay Lovett's Fine Art gallery


As a jazz musician who grew up in the final third of the 20th Century, my exposure to the "golden age" of jazz-oriented poetry was pretty limited. When I've thought of jazz and poetry in the past it always brought to mind images of beatniks, berets and bongo drums. In fact, Maynard G. Krebs is the visual I get even now when I think of the Beat Generation. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Lenny Bruce, marijuana and heroin all blend together for me in the kind of highly stylized way that only ignorance can produce.

I've only recently begun to delve into poetry again, after a long sojourn in the land of prose. It has been a lot of fun discovering new stuff as well as revisiting old favorites like Rumi, Neruda, Bly, cummings et al. I've even gone to a few readings of local poets here in Chicago. If you've never gone to a poetry slam or a reading I highly recommend it.

Apparently there is still a strong tradition of connection between the two disciplines of jazz and poetry. There is poetry that uses improvisational forms, poetry about the music and/or the musicians, poetry that is read or created in the context of the music. When it is good, it can be very satisfying, especially to those of us who like things to have both sound and meaning.

One place I've started to check out online is the e-poets network. The site has a nice variety of contemporary written poetry, as well as audio and video clips of poetry performances. Of particular interest to me is their collection of "jazz in words". Curator Kurt Heintz has put together a section of the site which, in his words:

"lists artists whose work addresses jazz, or whose work has been influenced significantly by jazz, whether that's in historical or contemporary modes. Jazz and performance poetry have a long, entwined history from the mid 20th Century to today."

As I read and listen to some of this work, the mental cliches are starting to fade. Funny how a little knowledge and experience challenges one's prejudices.

Jazz Poetry: Reflections of a Side Man

From the wonderful Chicago poet Nina Corwin:



Reflections of a Side Man

- for Tom Harrell


Where do you go?

Where do you go when you swing

that solo none too sane?

That flugelhorn makes notes fall like rain

those sweet contortions descending

from the brain

of a Mad Hatter of sorts,

so far beyond mending.



Where do you go?

Over misbegotten rainbows

where few can follow,

turning figures so fantastic

when you blow they seem to just

float in from Never Never Land,

fingers flying to beat the band

as you head off stratospheric

on circuitous routes

that take you through riffs

nearly missing the mark.

Hear you coaxing those quirks

as if they were the song



Where do you go?

You've been out there so long

I could swear you were playing to Satan's changes

there for a measure or two.

Like the melody took a wrong turn

or stumbled through the rubble

of some twilight zone of deconstruction.



Where do you go

when you blow that solo none too sane?

Is that tune you hear

a roadmap of your brain?

Do you follow some cynical piper

to the lip of the moon?

And when your solo

swings an orbit so elliptical

it might never get back

to the starting refrain,

where do you go?



But we'll keep the beat for you, brother

like a landing pad

those sweet same changes

till they bring you home.

Like the way your momma sang

those lilting lullaby's

to a bedtime sky.

And listen: for the honeymoon in the chorus

where melody and baseline coincide

till they mingle with the cymbals

in the rhythm of a hellified coitus.



Where do you go?

I want to hear what you hear,

trumpet player,

see what you see.

Can you take me with you, Mad Hatter,

can I bring you on home?