Milwaukee legend recalls poetry’s relationship with music http://www.uwmpost.com/2011/09/19/milwaukee-legend-recalls-poetry%E2%80%99s-relationship-with-music/
19 September 2011 By Graham Marlowe The fusion of poetry and music is one of human civilization’s earliest forms of artistic expression, going as far as back as the illustrated walls of prehistoric caves, Native American ghost dances and Charles Cros’ experiments with art songs throughout the 1800s. But the idiom – “a sonic binding” of poetry’s word, as UW-Milwaukee’s Dr. Martin Jack Rosenblum calls it – is better traced via recordings. With numerous theories emanating from the varied approaches that poets and musicians have taken over time to differing results, Dr. Rosenblum continues to shine a light on poetry and music in his scholarship and personal artistry. Well into his 60s, Rosenblum has lived through the majority of the idiom’s important moments and is compelled to recount some of history’s most significant examples. Jack Kerouac/Steve Allen recordings (1957) Prior to these recordings, it was poetry being performed next to jazz. In the Kerouac/Allen recordings, it’s as if they are overhearing each other, raising their eyeglasses and introducing themselves as they interact onstage. When author Jack Kerouac went on The Steve Allen Show , high on the success of his novel On The Road , it incited a rock ‘n’ roll-inflected thirst for literature in America. Suddenly everyone had become an amateur Beat poet, when really it had just been a while since an American writer had made literature cool in the way that Kerouac’s prose had been doing. The duo effect is warm and natural. Allen’s playing brightens Kerouac’s words at every turn. Lawrence Ferlinghetti – Poetry Readings in the Cellar (with the Cellar Jazz Quartet): Kenneth Rexroth & Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1957) Recorded at The Cellar in San Francisco, this album is downright cinematic, particularly on “The Statue of St. Francis,” where the true hypnosis that’s felt in poetry/jazz fusions is most easily found. Ferlinghetti didn’t record himself much, largely because he was too busy managing the poetry community (and the famous City Lights bookstore in San Francisco) to be doing much else. It’s a shame he never got out of the office more. Kenneth Rexroth – Poetry and Jazz at the Blackhawk (1958) While this record contains evidence of a strong personality, like any “young” style of music, it has its shaky, developmental first steps. The juxtaposition of familiar big band jazz licks behind Rexroth’s dark, contemplative images of the everyman works to varying degrees of success. (The guy can draw amazing pictures in the mind.) Poetry and Jazz at the Blackhawk revealed to the American public that this stuff could be fun, and that’s what mattered – and still does. It’s understood, in the content of Poetry , that “something important is happening, right here, right now…” In Rexroth’s words, it’s different. The poetry and the jazz “happen” simultaneously but are not bound to each other. (In other words, the text and the music operate on separate planes.) Kenneth Patchen – Kenneth Patchen Reads With Jazz In Canada (1959) Performance-wise, Patchen was a wildcard to the early days of 1950s poetry, despite that his words appeal to a wide spectrum of experience. Patchen’s synergy with the band puts an extraordinarily dark spin on everyday life, which he felt was transcendent. And in 1959, the relationship between jazz and poetry had only recently blossomed. But from a distance, Patchen’s life-questioning observations were extraordinarily colorful in a black-and-white era. Martin Jack Rosenblum – Music Lingo (with Jack Grassel) (1987) Music Lingo was an innovative step for the genre and proved to be “like dropping an atomic bomb in a cornfield” for the music industry at the time of its release. Rosenblum, a well-educated poet and Bob Dylan scholar, felt poetry had hit a wall (“boring [him] to death”). Grassel was fed up with the jazz community for not taking chances at the time (ex: Spyro Gyra, “smooth jazz”). On Lingo , the two took a jazz musician’s approach to the reading of poetry, feeling out the mood of a room and focusing on the now – that time, that place, those people, right there and adjusting their improvisatory performances to that setting. Lingo ’s overseas popularity is strange enough, but its local, underground popularity set the stage for what artists could do with poetry from that point forward. The Roots – “The Return to Innocence Lost” from Things Fall Apart (1999) Things Fall Apart showed people that the Roots were also capable of startling reflections on black consciousness in the ‘90s (third-wave feminism, poverty, domestic violence). This track is an example of work younger audiences might recognize from their seminal 1999 album. Truth be told, however, the African American poetry experience is considerably different than that of, say, the young white male. But the complexity of that experience makes for something difficult to discuss in a concise article. The track’s gross realism (literally) finds meaning in life’s darkest, saddest moments – the narrator’s voice ending as a beat reporter starts dictating the details of a crime via telephone. This may be off-putting to casual Roots fans. Various Artists – Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness (1997) This spoken word tribute album coincided with a ‘90s resurgence of interest in the writing of Jack Kerouac. The on-screen success of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas re-lit the fire caused by the Beat poets in the ‘50s and ‘60s and gave writer Hunter S. Thompson exactly what he didn’t want: more fame. Even the guy’s surprisingly-well-thought-out funeral caused a ruckus. It involved, of all things, a monolith cannon with a logo he designed for the occasion. Needless to say, the compilation might not have shined the kind of light it set out to achieve for its less-famous contributors, but it shows a different side to the personalities of Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Richard Lewis. Lastly, Kicks Joy Darkness opened up a vein of networking for the poetry community that continues today and brought a handful of fringe poets out of the darkness they were living in. Godspeed You! Black Emperor In the world of post-rock music, an anything-goes mentality suits the best bands best. Godspeed’s first album used poetry as post-apocalyptic narration from which the music is built around – a technique they’ve followed with nearly all of their subsequent work. Where Godspeed succeeded in the indie-rock niche made it a tough but convincing sell to experimental music listeners at the turn of the millennium. Here the focus is lifted from the words, but the music is built around them. Through the distant rumble of strings and chaotic instrumental climaxes, the environment densely coats the narrator’s words. To be continued in next week’s issue. . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to sixties-l@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sixties-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
