Devoted to Jazz and 20th Century America
This truly foreign language
absorbs me into its differences,
rosetta stone hidden
in a cave of similarities
certain words share
with those of spanish
He could only play
when he had the heart and hope
that a bit of heaven
would persist in his deliverance,
a warmth that resembled
those long summer afternoons
where the sun flowed
upon a crown of greens
beneath an ever present
A deep, raspy New Orleans jazz
Its staccato notes shoot up my pulse
My legs shiver from that long, wavy vibrato
Born-again in your love, I cry like a baby
Yearning to be
all day a light breeze baptizes the landscape
gentle and captivating as a Paul Desmond solo
bushes rap windows and walls with rhythms
unusual and unexpected that Joe Morello would
approve would groove to and trees sway with
In an enlightening essay found in Kathy Sloane’s entertaining history of Keystone Korner, the famed ‘70’s – 80’s North Beach San Francisco jazz club, the poet Jack Hirschman writes that “post-World War [II] jazz, abstract expressionism, and what I call field composition in poetry represent for me the trinity of essential American idioms that really are the foundation of not merely my work, but the work of virtually a whole generation of writers and musicians.” Hirschman writes that he found inspiration for his poetry in the music of Monk (“he was like a poet writing in musical notes”), Charlie Parker and Cecil Taylor (“also a writing poet [who] fills the plane up and all the spaces”) and produced what he called “rifficals,” countless improvisations inspired by jazz that he passed out to the audience at the Keystone.
Like many of us, Hirschman believes jazz is a centerpiece of our cultural history. “The African American dimension has been a major influence on virtually all the artists in this country,” he writes, “even if people
In the hazy glow of streetlights through the window
the jazz man sits
drinking in the music
sipping slowly with his mind
He thinks of all the past loves
the broken promises
the unpaid
Eunice Kathleen Waymon, also known as
Nina Simone — I hear you now —
O no one has ever been Blue like you!
So long, Miss Blue, your ways more blue than indigo,
your heart that sung to piano jazz in hot notes
that fell like a shower of stars, dazzling the
shadows of the night…
No other woman sang
WHY HE ASKED
Bereft of family, his only voice
a sax that created a neighborhood
of lost love and no future,
he slipped into memory where his story
was etched into daguerreotypes,
sketches of abandonment and hints of
I edit my life
clothesline pins & clips
hang to dry,
dirty laundry,
I turn poetic hedonistic
in my early 70’s
reviewing the joys
and the
Clear my palate
so my mind wanders.
Flap down sweet
childhood memories.
Bare endless fields
of willowy cotton.
Open up vistas
of
