Off Minor

I have read few good poems about jazz. At first this seems surprising. A music so exciting, so American and full of surprises, ought to spark a celebratory impulse, and it does, but not happily so. Many poets seem drawn to what they take to be the “jazz lifestyle” (hideous phrase) – drugs, hipster lingo, racial politics. This started a long time ago, perhaps with Langston Hughes, but it certainly reached full chorus by the 1950s and the Beats. Poems about John Coltrane, most of them hagiographies and all of them awful, could fill a sizeable anthology.

I write as someone who has spent much of his life listening to jazz. Unlike Philip Larkin, a lot of the jazz I love most dates from after the 1930s – including Coltrane. Oddly, few poets seemed to have understood the significance of the discipline and intelligence it takes to create this music. Rather, they seize the notion of improvisation, romanticize it and turn jazz musicians into a species of idiot savant. There is little worthwhile improvisation without a disciplined and encyclopedic knowledge of the music, the instrument and the vast songbook of American (and other) music. The apparent telepathy we see and hear among jazz musicians as they perform is rooted in hard work and dedication, not “natural rhythm.”

About 15 years ago, reviewing an anthology of jazz short stories, Whitney Balliett noted the sentimentality that bedevils most fiction and film devoted to the music. Eudora Welty’s often-anthologized “Powerhouse,” he says, accurately, “may be the best fiction ever written about jazz.” Forgivingly, Balliett says fiction writers – and, by extension, poets – work at a disadvantage because, “The music is ephemeral. A novelist can describe the `Appassionata’ and tell you exactly how his pianist hero plays it, but a jazz novelist must describe a music that is gone the instant it is played.” The problem is not the ephemerality of the music – that’s merely its challenge -- but the ephemerality of the poets writing about it.

I have in front of me The Jazz Poetry Anthology, published in 1991 and edited by Sascha Feinstein and Yusef Komunyakaa. Poems by more than 130 poets appear in its 293 pages. Most are deservedly unknown, at least to me. There is a poem by Wallace Stevens – “The Sick Man” – that has nothing to do with jazz except that black men show up in it and they play guitar and “mouth-organ.” There’s a terrible, Langston Hughes-like poem by William Carlos Williams – “Ol’ Bunk’s Band” – that may or may not be about Bunk Johnson but that does contain a line consisting entirely of the word “drum” repeated seven times and followed by an explanation point (for emphasis, apparently)! The usual suspects make their appearance: Baraka, Corso, Kerouac, even Carl Sandburg. Somehow, James Baldwin shows up, proving his versatility: He wrote badly in prose and poetry. Balliett, by the way, describes Baldwin’s fiction as “heated and clumsy,” which reminds me of a fat guy playing tennis. Here’s a stanza from Baldwin’s contribution, “Le sporting-club de Monte Carlo,” and I’m not making this up:

“the lady is a wonder
daughter of the thunder
smashing cages
legislating rages
with the voice of ages
singing us through.”

Baldwin dedicated the poem to Lena Horne, and I’m pretty sure there’s no statute of limitations on filing a libel suit. A few poems stand up pretty well – Larkin’s “For Sidney Bechet” and Robert Pinsky’s “History of My Heart [Section I].” Out of love for Bill Evans’ music, I wanted to enjoy Bill Zavatsky’s two poems about the pianist, but both are embarrassingly maudlin, like so many poems in this volume. Most of these writers seem to confuse poetry with the earnest expression of emotion. To quote Thelonious Monk, “Well You Needn’t.”

If you can suggest a good poem about jazz, I would like to hear about it.