Archives for January 11, 2008

In the 1950s and early sixties, there was a vogue for combining jazz and poetry. It wasn’t new. Poets as far back as Langston Hughes in the 1920s read their work in collaboration with jazz musicians, usually in the privacy of homes, rarely in public. Thirty years later the idea sprang up again in beatnik pads in San Francisco and New York’s East Village, then spread to coffee houses, night clubs, recordings and on at least one occasion, a Los Angeles concert hall. For David Amram’s recollection of the role that he, Jack Kerouac and Philip Lamantia played in the New York phenomenon, go here. In the west, Alan Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, Kenneth Patchen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Kenneth Rexroth were at the heart of the movement, along with musicians including Charles Mingus, Allyn Ferguson and Fred Katz. Here is a little of what Rexroth wrote at the time about jazz poetry.

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.
Things are beginning to get out of hand. The other day Ralph Gleason, the jazz critic, said to me that he expected any day to see ads in the trade papers: “JAZZ POET: blues, ballad, upbeat, free verse or rhyme. Have tux. Will travel.” And T.S. Eliot touring the kerosene circuit with Little Richard and the Harlem Globetrotters. Crazes are usually pretty empty, sterile things. It would be a pity if incompetents looking for a fast buck turned this into a temporary social disease like pee-wee golf or swallowing goldfish.

That didn’t happen. Rather, the movement had a brief period of attention, then faded into a subterranean region of the culture. Could it resurface into the mainstream? Maybe so, if Robert Pinsky, the former poet laureate of the United States, continues his interest in jazz and poetry. Pinsky combined forces the other night with the veteran drummer Andrew Cyrille. Paul Lieberman reported on their performance in The Los Angeles Times.

Pinsky, who proved to be a populist poet laureate by inviting Americans to send him their favorite verses, indeed teaches at Boston University. But the plan did call for him to try one exercise out of the jazz world, not academia: a round of “trade fours” with the drummer, Cyrille. Normally, musicians throw a few bars back and forth, “just have a conversation,” the drummer noted, the wrinkle here being that Pinsky would throw him couplets instead, two-line rhyming poems, such as one by J.V. Cunningham that went, “This Humanist, whom no belief constrained, / Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained.”

To read all of Lieberman’s story, go here.
In 1957, Kenneth Rexroth recorded an album of his jazz poetry in San Francisco at The Cellar, a Chinese restaurant converted into a nightclub. The performance by Rexroth with a group that included tenor saxophonist Brew Moore and bassist Ron Crotty is reissued on this CD. It discloses that Pinsky was not the first poet to trade fours with jazz players. This essay from the Rexroth Archives contains the poet’s observations on the form.

As far as I know, Pete Winslow never recorded his poetry, with or without a jazz group, but I played once while he read. Pete and I were in journalism school together at the University of Washington. He edited the campus humor magazine and sometimes wrote poetry for it under the pseudonym Eleanor H. Browning. He was a tall, skinny guy with short hair and horn-rimmed glasses. He often seemed to be smiling, even when he wasn’t. This badly reproduced picture from the yearbook will give you an idea of the seriousness with which he took his job as editor of Columns, the humor magazine. After graduation, Pete worked for the Seattle Post Intelligencer, I for The Seattle Times. Before long, I left for the Marine Corps. Four years later, I was a civilian again and in my first television job in Yakima, Washington, where, strangely enough, I have settled after four decades as a journalism gypsy. But I digress.
Bob Mitchell and, I both trumpet players, used to sit in at the Enchanted Gardens of the Chieftan Hotel in the heart of downtown Yakima with an all-girl trio from Los Angeles, The Three Vees. One night in 1960 or ’61 I looked into the audience from the bandstand of the Enchanted Gardens and, to my considerable surprise, saw Pete Winslow, smiling. Really smiling. When the tune ended, we had a reunion. He presented me with a copy of his first book of poetry, Whatever Happened To Pete Winslow? (Tolle House, 1960) and signed it. I asked him if he’d like to read some of his work to the Enchanted Gardens audience of cowboys, used car salesmen, secretaries and orchardists. He said he would. I cleared it with Mitch and the Three Vees–Verna, Paula and Mary Ann. They were game for anything. It was that kind of band.
We played behind him, listened closely, filled when he paused, reacted when he emphasized passages and, in general, sounded as if we had rehearsed. Pete became the sixth member of the band. It could have been a disaster, but it worked. We enjoyed it and so did the crowd. No one threw anything. Pete went on to establish something of a reputation in San Francisco’s North Beach. Although he read in coffee houses toward the end of the brief heyday of the beatniks, he never really qualified as a beat poet. Perhaps his work was too cheerful, too surrealistic I don’t remember which of his poems Pete read that night at the Chieftan. He may have included this one, which has gained a small amount of fame:

FORM
Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater
Is trochaic tetrameter.

Or this one:

UNDERGROUND RUBIYAT
A book of verses, underneath the Bau-
delaire, some bread, a real Guernsey cow,
mooing beside me, darling Filthy Bess – –
Ah, Filthy Bess were Mary Pickford now!
That great inverted bowl there, on the floor;
Why did I walk so quickly through the door?
Now stains and bits of cabbage spot the wall
Where moving Fingers writ the football score.
Come, spill the soup! And in the mire I sing,
You bitter varmint, waiting sentencing.
The bird of time has taught a turtle how
To stutter, and–the turtle’s stuttering!

Pete died at the age of thirty-seven of complications following surgery. He wrote a novel, Mount Gogo, which seems to have disappeared, and five volumes of poetry, none in general circulation today but all available if you look hard enough. They are Whatever Happened to Pete Winslow? The Rapist and Other Poems, Monster Cookies, Mummy Tapes and Daisy in the Memory of a Shark.
Pete was a good guy. I miss him. For more about Winslow, see this article at Poetry Bay.
During those Enchanted Gardens days, Bobby Mitchell had a part-time job as a garbage man; there wasn’t much steady work for jazz trumpet players in Yakima. Nor is there now. A fine player, he eventually solved the problem by getting out of town and working with Count Basie and Earl Hines. He is on several Basie CDs from the late 1970s, including this one. He is the featured soloist on this video clip of the Basie band at Montreux in 1977. Mitch died a few years ago. I miss him, too.