Jazz Text: Voice and Improvisation in Poetry, Jazz, and Song.

Charles O. Hartman. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. 2D8 pp. $29.95.

Feinstein and Komunyakaa's The Jazz Poetry Anthology and Charles O. Hartman's Jazz Text provide such different pleasures that they defy comparison. The former is hefty, nearly 300 pages, but being a collection with verve and much originality, it is not heavy. Hartman's critical/analytical study is brief, barely 150 pages, yet for most readers, it is, as the jazzer would say, "heavy." The language, whether Hartman is speaking of poetry, jazz compositions, or popular songs, is technical, and redolent of contemporary theory. While the subjects might not be considered recondite, the treatment, for all its brilliance and learning, is just that. The obvious relationship between the two books, apart from the j-word, stems from the notion that Feinstein and Komunyakaa's anthology begs the question of what a jazz poem is, whereas Hartman's book goes some distance to discuss many aspects of the topic.

The Jazz Poetry Anthology offers a wide-ranging selection of what the editors call "jazz poetry." The term means many things to many people, and it's an open question as to what makes a jazz poem. For me, a poem that alludes to jazz figures is not the real thing unless it also demonstrates jazz-like rhythm or the feel of improvisation. Many of the anthologized poems are simply about jazz figures or particular jazz performances; many others, however, try to imitate the music with their phrasing, idiom, and snaps of the demimonde. Despite the broad designation, this book, like the much slimmer and now out-of-print Bright Moments: A Collection of Jazz Poetry (1981), is a loving tribute, through poetry, to jazz.

Various aficionados will inevitably lament the absence of some of their favorites. Carl Sandburg is included and recognized for his role in the early history of the engagement between the two arts, but Vachel Lindsay is not, and his role, it might be argued, is larger. Mina Loy is represented by "The Widow's Jazz," a nice curiosity, rather than a jazz poem, while her contemporary, Maxwell Bodenheim, is not. A number of poems in his Bringing Jazz! such as "Futuristic Jazz" or "Jazz Kaleidoscope" would be congenial in such a collection. There are two surprising omissions: Nikki Giovanni, a natural for this kind of book, and Allen Ginsberg, who has recorded with jazz (not that this is a requirement, as the book's introduction points out). Ginsberg utilizes as much jazz imagery and phrasing as do other Beat poets such as Ferlinghetti, Corso, and Kerouac, whose work is here. Also, there is none of the poetry from the Last Poets; Raymond Patterson, author of Elemental Blues; Eugene Redmond, poet and editor of Drumvoices Revue; or jazz saxophonist/ poet Archie Shepp. The fact is, so many poets have been influenced by jazz that ten books easily could be assembled with the same title and with different poets each time. Perhaps this book might have been more appropriately called A Jazz Poetry Anthology, the indefinite article being more well-suited for this impressionistic and unsettled class of poetry.

Many of the poets included have performed closely and impressively with jazz. These include Langston Hughes, Kenneth Patchen, Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, Amizi Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Ishmael Reed, and Sonia Sanchez. The emphasis, however, is not on the poem in performance, but on those poets who, according to the editors, "have tried to write about the music and to keep the musical rhythms without relying on a live combo to set the pulse." As the book goes back to the period of jazz's early roots, 'the poems allow for a special reading of jazz history ... to see the different musical stages through their respective poetic treatments."

In addition to certain touchstone figures, some from the list above, who are essential to any history of the jazz-poetry connection, there are many other contemporary poets who contribute to the sense of what a jazz poem might be. Hayden Carruth, poet and author of Sitting In: Selected Writings on jazz, the Blues and Related Topics, is represented here by four sections from his finely structured yet casually associative "Paragraphs." William Matthews' selections include elegies to Coltrane, Bud Powell, and Coleman Hawkins; a fourth poem, "Listening to Lester Young," turns elegiac by the end. In his engaging "Alice Zeno Talking, and Her Son George Lewis the Jazz Clarinetist in Attendance," the aged Alice speaks in italics, and the narrator, with the gentle sympathy of a shared vision, comments on her life as it is revealed during an interview with folklorists:

They're trying

to link her to a theory of the past.

Creole? Creole born from here.

Silence. They can be heard riffing

for a next question, and it's about

a song to which she knows arid recites

the words. Her voice is low as usual.

Her son's trumpeter for years, Kid

Howard, seldom played above the

staff--

that was George-domain up there,

and George wound his loops and kerf 

around the melody the band

had to tend so George could

curl and twine.

Some poems here create an even greater illusion of improvisation, with Frank O'Hara's elegy to Billie Holiday one of the finest. Maybe the truest jazz poem would be Holiday's "Strange Fruit," based on a poem of the same title by Lewis Allen, or any number of the great lyrics written to jazz music. Inclusion of some of these would have solidified the book's implication of a definition for jazz poetry. On the other hand, some poems appear to be the opposite of jazz poetry, despite references to players, tunes, sets, or albums. When a poem is merely about John Coltrane (these outnumber aU others, with Parker and Monk running slightly behind) and is so tied to its elegiac, adulatory tribute, often turning wistful and romantic, it stops short of being layered or ambiguous. It hasn't the depth or power jazz suggests.

The strongest jazz poetry in this collection is that which needs make no allusion to jazz musicians or settings. Langston Hughes, who jammed with Charles Mingus, that poetry lover and sometimes poet, was also influenced by the performance work of the Beat precursors Patchen and Rexroth. Regardless of those collaborations on stage or in the recording studio, Hughes's writing, no matter what his subject, has jazz in its voice. In his notes to the 1951 edition of Montage of a Dream Deferred, he observed that he "would often make up [blues poems] in [his] head and sing [them] on the way to work," and when he'd perform with musicians, the rhythms of the players "improved" a stanza or two. "In terms of current Afro-American popular music and the sources from which it has progressed--jazz, ragtime, swing, blues, boogie-woogie and be-bop--" Hughes adds," this poem on contemporary Harlem, like be-bop, is marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms, and sometimes the popular song, punctuated by riffs, runs, breaks, and distortions of the music of a community in transition."

His four poems in this anthology--"Dream Boogie," "Jazzonia," "Morning After," and "The Weary Blues"--are about his inner sense of music, pathos, and longing, as well as his ability to play changes around his subtle themes. They are four self-contained performances. "The Weary Blues" begins with a simple rhyme that sets up an expectation that Hughes slides away from by the end of the stanza:

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,

Rocking back and forth to a mellow

croon,

I heard a Negro play,

Down on Lenox Avenue the other

night. But the delayed rhyme comes back in the next stanza in a most unpredictable way:

By the pale dull pallor of an old gas

light

He did a lazy sway ....

He did a lazy sway....

The Jazz Poetry Anthology is interesting beyond its specific contents, for it encourages thought about the collusion between these two marginalized arts. Not only does it invite us to question the boundaries of jazz poetry, but it comes at an opportune time, for there is currently a resurgence of interest in the subject. Poetry readings with jazz are taking place in cities all over the world--from New York to Detroit to London, Paris, and Lagos. An English journal, Ostinato, which has devoted itself to publishing jazz poetry and related commentary, is about to put out a double issue which will, in effect, be another anthology. Mixed Voices: Contemporary Poems about Music, edited by Emiliie Buchwald and Ruth Roston (Milkweed Editions, 1991), has a large selection of poems called "Blues, Bebop ... and All That Jazz," yet duplicates none of the authors in the book under review. Vernon Frazer, a poet and jazz musician, recently published an article in Poets & Writers magazine about the subject, as did Charles Suhor in ETC. A Canadian poet and performer, John Sobol, has written a book entitled The Voice, The Music, The Word which circulates in jazz and poetry circles, and Coffee House Press will be bringing out another anthology of jazz poetry next year. As if to underscore aU this, the ascendant current in post-modernist criticism favors orality over "literariness," coinciding with this movement of jazz poetry away from the deeply silent poem, the "fixed text," toward voiced performance--with room for improvisation.

A very attractive feature of The Jazz Poetry Anthology is an appendix with biographies and a number of personal statements on poetry and jazz. These are frequently illuminating, and if strung together could serve as an essay-in-progress about the relationships between the two arts. As Etheridge Knight has noted,

The influence of jazz in my poetry is

natural. Like most Black people--especially

those of us who were born

in the South--I grew up in an atmosphere

that was permeated with music:

blues, gospel, and jazz.... So jazz is

not an abstraction to me, it is a

physicality.... Our speech patterns--the

intonations, inflections, nuances--are

to a larger degree determined by

the music of our lives. We talk jazz

and we walk jazz. The editors recognize, in their introduction and through their choices, that African American poetry is the wellspring of the jazz-poetry connection, and they understand as well the universality of jazz and the ways it has shaped the voices of poets everywhere.

I'm not sure whether Clarles Hartman would like the bulk of the poetry in this anthology, but I'm quite certain the placement of much of it within the "genre" of jazz poetry would cause him to wonder. He'd no doubt miss a unifying strategy and be uncomfortable with the tangential relation to jazz of many of the selections. jazz Text is not burdened by subservience to any particular critical school, but it is in league with current intellectual fashion, the anti-New Critical, New Critical brand, which eschews "the canon" and argues for "the new."

The focus throughout is on orality: Sound and speech and performance are examined with the same intense--I might say, rapt--attention to detail that marks the best work of the New Critics. The chapters, which are fairly self-contained (some have been separately published), consider jazz players and their compositions, poets and songwriters. The book is exciting because the author links their separate activities, demonstrating how they inform each other.

Jazz Text opens with a detailed study of Lee Konitz's version of Jerome Kem's "All the Things You Are." The literature, or "printed" texts, he looks at are works that can be valued for their "dialogic" power and "authenticity"--e.g., the poetry of David Antin, Jackson MacLow, and Robert Creeley. In the same spirit, a song by Joni Mitchell, "Michael from Mountains," is analyzed with impressive detail, aiming not only at its lyricism, imagination, and the power of its imagery, but at its "dialogic" complexity; that is, how it engages the listener in a participatory way. Hartman challenges the canon by directing serious analysis to subjects more generally discussed by jazz historians, pop journalists, and even social historians than literary critics. Lae a fine jazz musician, he seems not to care if part of what he is doing is over the top--with its seriousness applied to diverse, esoteric, or cult-like figures--the Roaches, Antin, and MacLow. The enterprise of taking jazz and literature with equal seriousness--and, by the end, fair mindedness--is not only politically correct, but shows this author to be truly moved and entertained by the objects of his attention.

However, object is an inappropriate term; for Hartman, sound supersedes text, and text becomes alive only as it emits sounds. The works he studies are dynamic, voiced gestures, the opposite of fixed objects. The book hies for a fuller understanding of the slippery word voice, no less slippery than the term jazz poem. Hartman's interest is in the human voice, which provides clues to meaning depending on the singer's, or poet's, emphasis or intonation. Both poetry and jazz make extensive use of "the 'knack' of voice," and all the poets mentioned in Jazz Text are known as readers or performers of their work.

Hartman notes that the "different modes of the voice (singing, talking, reciting) and its different extensions (a printed poem, an instrumental solo) are the mysterious phenomena on which this book dwells." The early chapters address voice as metaphor--"applied to poems (silent) and jazz (unspeaking)." The later chapters "explore more metonymical senses of voice, first by taking in the further complications of song, and then by examining some uses and limits of voice."

Hartman concurs with many of the poets quoted in the back of The Jazz Poetry Anthology by noting how many U.S. poets respond to "two of the central principles of the jazz art: Improvisation, and that emphasis on personalized sound which. .. we call the player's 'voice.'" For all his analytical gifts, Hartman is also an advocate for jazz and poetry, two of the most unintellectualized arts in the U.S., and our major contributions to world culture. For him, the "jazz poem" has 'a special life and importance as a part of contemporary American culture."

Hartman is even less interested in the actual collaborations between poets and jazz musicians than are the editors of The Jazz Poetry Anthology. Apart from a mention of Steve Lacey's use of Robert Creeley's poetry for a performance piece, the names Langston Hughes, Kenneth Patchen, and Jayne Cortez do not find their way into the index. Instead, the artists have been chosen "for their purity as examples," for their ability to bring to life the general proposition that "poetry is ... language working in ways that uniquely preserve the priority of the ear." By looking from different angles at Michael Harper's "Dear John," a virtuoso performance that includes sophisticated rhetorical analysis, Hartman illustrates how a poem acts out "a tension between music and statement." Harper's is a jazz poem for its improvisational display (a characteristic Hartman also astutely discovers in the formal terza rima poem "The Yachts" by William Carlos Williams) as well as for its song-like repetitions.

The first chapter of jazz Text is appropriately about jazz, opening with a general discussion that serves as an indicator of Hatman's poetic preferences. In jazz, structure is less a concern than continuation, for " the jazz player's prowess is measured, in part, by how long he or she can keep inventing compelling variations." Jazz poems approximate this, as his many examples attempt to show, and stand in contrast to traditional poems with fixed structures of beginnings, middles, and ends. In his detailed analysis of Konitz's version of "All the Things You Are" (the music for which Hartman reproduces), we are made aware of the expert literary critic at work: "This inharmonic modulation by way of an ambiguous chord acts as a sort of musical pun, startling and witty.... literary parallels might be the repetition of the word 'Forlorn' across a stanza break near the end of 'Ode to a Nightingale,' or the syllepsis in certain lines of Pope . . . ." Throughout this first chapter Hartman ties musical (voiced) strategies with literary ones:

Different tropes in music verge on

each other as indefinitely as those in

literature.... This ambiguity in the

relation of theme to variation crops

up in every aspect of music, perhaps

never trivially. At least it mimics the

linguistic action of puns; more

powerfully it may underlie the musical equivalent

of pattern and imagery

in poetry. Such an exploratory insight is followed by a brief and insightful discussion of Frost's "After Apple-Picking."

The next two chapters, on Robert Creeley, poet, and Ornette Coleman, alto sax player and composer, continue the exploration of voice and authenticity in compositions and performances. Hartman makes the case for Creeley as a jazz poet by analyzing two small poems. Hartman admires the first, "I Know A Man," because, among other things, the speaker "has a period kinship with the fifties image of the jazz man ... living on the edge, making up his life by moments as he speeds toward destruction." This may seem a little suspect, confusing the poem's subject with the way it moves or sounds. But soon Hartman returns to his theme: "Such a poem insists on the priority of speech; it presents speech not as the lowest common denominator of language, but as generative--as producing (when heard and transmitted correctly) all the riches that literature would mine from it."

Insisting on such values as improvisation and voice, Hartman sees Creeley's work as "an occasion of action, not an object." But many modem and post-modern poems could be characterized in a like manner. Who doesn't have favorite poems, classics even, about which they'd want to say, The point the poem makes concerns the stuff of which poetry is made: speech as continuous invention, spontaneous fabrication"? The discussion of Creeley's poems is so informed, so sophisticated regarding rhetoric and prosody, maybe even ingenious, that it could be seen as a parody, given the apparently rather slight, throwaway quality of Creeley's absurdist, slice-of-life visions. However, Hartman comments on his own analytic procedure early in his introduction, and generally the book maintains a healthy stepping back from its own intense critical performance.

The "spontaneous intensity" he feels in Creeley's poems provides the bridge into the music of Ornette Coleman. Hartman breaks the stride of his analysis to note how little textual analysis of jazz exists, apart from the writings of Gunter Schuller and a few others: "To analyze jazz, then, might be to threaten it with reabsorption into the literature and politically repressive mainstream of the culture." Hartman reminds us of the hard time Coleman had with the critics early on in his career, how far outside the mainstream he was. Once Hartman places this African American artist in the context of developing racial consciousness, which is evident in the music as well as the culture around the music, he proceeds energetically to document Coleman's originality and authenticity. After placing the score of "Lonely Woman" in front of us, Hartman makes a connection: "This shifting around of the implied measure may remind one of Konitz's accentual play--or of Creeley's. It also recalls Charlie Christian and the Bebop style he helped to found 20 years before this recording." Ornette Coleman integrated European musical styles and African American energies and idioms to make his own voice, a music which Hartman finds compelling and complex enough for his extensive analysis.

Hartman, we learn toward the end of the book, is also a jazz guitar player, and his music studies no doubt fed his need to so explicate this music and the music of his selected poems. If it's true that 'revising the expectations defined by genres is recurrent literary business," then Hartman's about his business with a concentrated focus on the jazz poem. I don't know if his fondness for the work of David Antin and Jackson MacLow really advances his definition of the jazz poem, but by the end of the book, his feelings for this genre, like one's sense of a person he or she loves, become recognizable.

Antin is chosen, it seems, on account of his having "stopped writing poems and begun talking,... finding his words right before our eyes." Even his topics are unprepared. Antin is urgently saying something, rather than the more artificial, experimental "'word jazz' that Ken Nordine did for many years on Chicago radio." Hartman rather likes it that Antin dislikes books--"a totally dislocated occasion"--and that he needs to face a live audience to make his art. This chapter, like the later one on MacLow, makes this otherwise bookish critic seem very hip--in on the new which challenges all "privileged" art. Antin, like Creeley, is involved in dialogue: "Like modem jazz, his work complicates the relation between text and performance, but does not eliminate it."

One of the many surprises in jazz Text is the chapter on a song by Joni Mitchell, "Michael from Mountains." Well into his analysis of this song (one that might seem burdened by too much attention, for it is, after all, a fairly unremarkable adolescent love lyric with pretty '60s-ish sound), Hartman comments: "The demands made on words by the situation of song differ from the demands made by poetry." Indeed, the analytical attention here differs somewhat from when Hartman is speaking about poems, and he includes notice of the singer's fine voice. Near the end of his discussion he notes that "it would be an error to call her a poet for she is in fact a songwriter, and in songs 'voice' is always literal."

In the penultimate chapter, "Jazz, Song, Poetry: Toward Speaking For," a typical Hartman title showing its freedom from conventional constraints, he continues to distinguish song (sung) voice from print voice--as in the dramatic monologue. As he focuses on the monologues of Ai, we hear the voice of the speaker and the author's voice behind the poem, showing that poetry, like jazz and song, "tends towards dialogism." The final chapter concerns the performance work of Jackson MacLow, one of the few poets mentioned in the book who has actually worked with jazz. The title here is "Beyond Identity, or Objective, Hazardous Procedures," and it's about identity. Hartman argues that the individual is many selves, that no fully recognized voice is ever single." The book has been heading to this all the while: Both jazz and poetry, as in the Whitmanesque, oral tradition, call "for dialogic understanding." Thus jazz Text ultimately argues for a poetry which subverts both the "popular set of assumptions about lyric self-expression" and "the insistence that self be unitary," and instead relies on improvisation, chance, or spontaneous group interactions, akin to jazz. In this final chapter, Hartman, at some length, considers the sociopolitical issues of the appropriation of African music by a dominant white culture. Although not making a large business of it, the book generally directs the reader toward such recognitions.

Whereas Jazz Text grapples with definitions for jazz poetry and The Jazz Poetry Anthology suggests definitions through illustration, both are certain to come up short for the odd reader/listener who needs set definitions for such a fairly recently acknowledged genre. But this is hardly a criticism of either book, both of which are valuable resources for study and pleasure.