JAZZ POETRY
by Kenneth Rexroth

Originally published in The Nation March 29, 1958
Reprinted from World Outside the Window: The Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth , edited by Bradford Morrow, New Directions 1987. Used by permission.

 A little short of two years ago, jazz poetry was a possibility, a hope and the memory of a few experiments. Today it runs the danger of becoming a fad. The life of fads is most often intense, empty and short. I feel, on the contrary, jazz poetry has a permanent value or I would not have undertaken it.

When it is successful there is nothing freakish or faddish about it nor, as a matter of fact, is there anything especially new. At the roots of jazz and Negro folk son, especially in the Southwest, is the "talking blues." It is not much heard today, but if you flatten out the melodic line, already very simple, in Big Bill Broonzy or Leadbelly, you have an approximation of it, and some of their records are really more talked than sung. This is poetry recited to a simple blue guitar accompaniment. Long before this, in the mid-nineteenth century, the French poet Charles Cros was reciting, not singing, his poems to the music of a bal musette band. Some of his things are still in the repertory of living cafe chantant performers, especially the extremely funny Le Hareng Saur . Even today some Rock 'n Roll "novelties" are recited, not sung, and they are some of the most engaging, with music that often verges into the more complex world of true jazz. It has become a common custom in store front churches and Negro revival meetings for a member of the congregation to recite a poem to an instrumental or wordless vocal accompaniment. I believe Langston Hughes recited poems to jazz many years ago. I tried it myself in the twenties in Chicago. In the late forties Kenneth patchen recited poems to records. Jack Spicer, a San Francisco poet, tried it with a trio led by Ron Crotty on bass. The result, more like the Russian tone color music of the first years of the century, wa impressive, if not precisely jazz. Lawrence Lipton has been working with some of the best musicians in Los Angeles for almost two years. William Walton's "Facade, " Stavinsky's "Persephone," compositions of Auric, Honegger, Milhaud, are well-known examples of speaking rather than singing, to orchestra in contemporary classical music. Charles Mingus and Fred Katz, two of the most serious musicians in jazz--to narrow that invidious distinction between jazz and serious music--have been experimenting with the medium for some time. The music has been impressive, but in my opinion, speaking as a professional poet, the texts could be improved.

What is jazz poetry? It isn't anything very complicated to understand. it is the reciting of suitable poetry with the music of a jazz band, usually small and comparatively quiet. Most emphatically, it is not recitation with "background" music. The voice is integrally wedded to the music and, although it does not sing notes, is treated as another instrument, with its own solos and ensemble passages, and with solo and ensemble work by the band alone. It comes and goes, following the logic of the presentation, just like a saxophone or piano. Poetry with background music is very far from jazz. It is not uncommon, and it is, in my opinion, usually pretty corny.

Why is jazz poetry? Jazz vocalists, especially white vocalists and especially in the idiom of the most advanced jazz, are not very common. Most Negro singers stay pretty close to th blues, and thre is more to modern jazz than blues. Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, there are not many singers whom all schools of jazz find congenial. Curiously, enough, the poet reciting, if he knows what he is doing, seems to "swing" to the satisfaction of many musicians in a way that too few singers do. I think it is wrong to put down all popular ballad lyrics as trivial; some of them are considerable poetry in their own right, but certainly most are intellectually far beneath the musical world of modern jazz, and far less honest, the best jazz is characterized by its absolute emotional honesty. This leaves us with the words of the best blues and Negro folk song, often very great poetry indeed, but still a limited aspect of experience, and by no means everything, translated into words, that modern jazz has to say. In other words, poetry gives jazz a richer verbal content, reinforces and expands its musical meaning and, at the same time, provides material of the greatest flexibility.

How is it done, in actual practice? Kenneth patchen has been working with Allyn Ferguson and the Chamber Jazz Sextet. The music is composed; it is actually written out, with of course, room for solo improvisation, but with the voice carefully scored in. There is nothing wrong with this. Far more of the greatest jazz is written music than the lay public realizes. Some of even the famous King Oliver and Louis Armstrong records of long ago were scored by Lil Hardin, a very sophisticated musician. Duke Ellington and his arranger, Billy Strayhorn, are among America's greatest composers. for the past year, i have been working with my own band, led by Dick Mills, trumpet, and including brew Moore, tenor, Frank Esposito, trombone, Ron crotty, bass, Clair Wiley, piano, and Gus Dustafson, drums. Recently in Los Angeles, I played a two-week engagement with a fine band led by Shorty Rogers. In each case we worked from carefully rehearsed "head arrangements." The musicians had each in front of them the text of the poetry, and the sheets were used as cue sheets, scribbled with "inners and outers," chord progressions, melodic lines and various cues.

I feel that this method insures the maximum amount of flexibility and spontaneity and yet provides a steadily deepening and thickening (in the musical sense) basis, differing emotionally more than actually from a written score. The whole thing is elaborately rehearsed -- more than usual for even the most complicated "band number." I would like to mention that jazz, contrary to lay opinion, is not just spontaneously "blown" out of the musicains heads. Behind even the freest improvisations lies a fund of accepted patterns, chord changes, riffs, melodic figures, variations of tempo and dynamics, all understood by the musicians. In fact, they are there, given, as a fund of material almost instinctively come by. Even in a jam session, when the soloist gets as far out as possible, everybody has a pretty clear idea of how he is going to get back and of how everybody is going to go off together again. Then the major forms of common jazz are almost as strict as the sonata --the thirty-two bar ballad, the twelve bar blues-- bridges, choruses, fillers, all usually in multiples of the basic four bar unit, in four-four time. Needless to say, the poetry is not "improvised" either. This has been tried with diasterously ridiculous results, and not by me. On the other hand, several poets have read over their things with sensitive musicians once and then put on a thoroughly satisfactory show. I have done this with Marty Paitch on piano or Ralph Pena on bass -- both musicians with extraordinary feeling for the rhythms and meanings of poetry. It all depends on the musician.

I hope the faddist elements of this new medium will die away. The ignorant and the pretentious, the sockless hipsters out for a fast buck or a few drinks from a Village bistro, will soon exhaust their welcome with the public, and the field will be left clear for serious musicians and poets who mean business. I think that it is a development of considerable potential significance for both jazz and poetry. It reaches an audience many times as large as that commonly reached by poetry, and an audience free of some of the serious vices of the typical poetry lover. It returns poetry to music and to public entertainment as it was in the days of Homer or the troubadours. It forces poetry to deal with aspects of life which it has tended to avoid in the recent past. It demands of poetry something of a public surface --meanings which can be grasped by ordinary people-- just asa the plays of Shakespeare had something for both the pit and the intellectuals in Elizabethan times, and still have today. And, as I have said, it gives jazz a flexible verbal content, an adjunct which matches the seriousness and artistic integrity of the music.

Certainly audiences seem to agree. Wherever it has been performed properly, the college auditorioum, the night clubs, the concert halls have been packed, and everybody --musicians, poets and audiences-- has been enthusiastic.

In the past two years it has spead from the Cellar, a small bar in San francisco, to college campuses, to nightclubs in Los Angeles, St. Louis, New York, Dallas, and I believe, Chicago; to the jazz Concert Hall in los Angeles, where Lawrence Lipton put on a program with Shorty rogers, fred katz, two bands, myself, Stuart perkoff and lipton himself, heard by about six thousand people in two weeks. Kenneth Patchen and Allyn ferguson followed us, and played there for the better part of two months. Dick mills and his band have performed with me at several colleges and at the San Francisco Art festival, and we are now planning to take the whole show on the road.

If we can keep the standards up, and keep it away from those who don't know what they are doing, who have no conception of the rather severe demands the form makes on the integrity and competence of both musicians and poets, I feel that we shall have given, for a long time to come, new meanings to both jazz and poetry.