Wednesday, Feb. 4 — Jazz Poetry Day 2

Clockwise from top left: Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Bob Kaufman, Ken Nordine

For our second day looking at the intersections of jazz and poetry, we'll consider work from a variety of authors affiliated with the Beat Generation, along with a few fellow travelers. As was the case with Langston Hughes' The Weary Blues, here we'll see quite a few collaborations between poets and musicians,  as well as a wide variety of poems that seek to transmute the sounds, the energy and the ethos of jazz as an art form.  Here's a breakdown of our readings:

Jack Kerouac (PDF name  /  track name)

• from The Subterraneans  /  "Excerpts from 'The Subterraneans'"
• from "The Railroad Earth"  /  "October in the Railroad Earth"
• "The Beginning of Bop"  /  "Fantasy: the Early History of Bop"`
• "Some Western Haikus"  /  "American Haikus"
• from Mexico City Blues (choruses 239–241)  /  "Charlie Parker"
• from "San Francisco Blues" (choruses 1-21)  /  "Poems from the Unpublished 'Book of Blues'"
• from "McDougal Street Blues" (Canto Uno)  / "McDougal Street Blues"
• from "the Bowery Blues"  /  "Bowery Blues"

Additionally, it might be helpful to take a look at two brief craft essays by Kerouac that describe the creative process behind his "spontaneous bop prosody": "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" and "Belief and Technique for Modern Prose."

Bob Kaufman

• "Round About Midnight"
• "Jazz Chick"
• "On"
• "O-Jazz-O"

Gregory Corso

• "Requiem for 'Bird' Parker, Musician"
• "For Miles"

We'll call those our main readings for the class, but here are a few supplemental readings/tracks/etc. that will give you additional perspectives on this particular track of jazz-influenced poetry.

First up, a few tracks by Ken Nordine, purveyor of the "somewhat new medium" of "word jazz": 

"Hunger is From"



A playlist of animated tracks from the album Colors, which offered up beautifully absurd portraits of 34 different hues.

Here's "The Clown" by Charles Mingus with improvised narration by Jean Shepherd:

Next, a few tracks by Kenneth Patchen, an early experimenter in musical collaborations.  Compare the minimalist "The Murder of Two Men by a Young Kid Wearing Lemon-colored Gloves", which you can listen to below:

to "The Lute in the Attic," which was a favorite of New York School poets like Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett:





At the end of this clip of the John Coltrane Quartet performing "Afro-Blue," legendary jazz critic (and Rolling Stone founding editor) Ralph J. Gleason talks about the relationship between jazz and poetry:

The thing that a modern jazz musician does — and which you should really keep in mind when you see him in concerts, or see him in jazz clubs — is somewhat similar to looking at a poet standing in the middle of a supermarket improvising poetry. They are called upon by the discipline of this art form to go into public places where people are gathered informally and spontaneously create music.  Unlike a poet, unlike a writer of a novel, unlike a painter, they have no opportunity to take this product that they have created and reform it and correct the mistakes that they might have made or change the way in which they approach it — what they do is done for all time right then when they do it.  This is a very unique thing about jazz and it's one of the things that gives it a particular quality of aliveness that makes it one of the most interesting and vital of all contemporary art forms.

Finally, as another tangential approach to the overlap of jazz and poetry, I offer up a few select tracks by legendary bandleader and songwriter Slim Gaillard, an influence on Beat author like Kerouac, who took scat singing to a new dimension with his invented hipster language, Vout (you can browse a "Vout-o-Reenee Dictionary" here):

"Yep-Roc-Heresay"

"Cement Mixer (Put-Ti Put-Ti)"

All of Wednesday's reading and listening can be found here: [ZIP]