{"id":4158,"date":"2012-10-27T08:37:39","date_gmt":"2012-10-27T15:37:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/?p=4158"},"modified":"2012-10-27T08:37:39","modified_gmt":"2012-10-27T15:37:39","slug":"other-matters-amabile-and-yates-coltrane-and-monk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/2012\/10\/other-matters-amabile-and-yates-coltrane-and-monk\/","title":{"rendered":"Other Matters: Amabile And Yates, Coltrane And Monk"},"content":{"rendered":"

Old Pal Mike Yates mentioned in an e-mail note that he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going to see \"\"<\/a>his<\/em> old pal George Amabile for the first time in 40 years. J. Michael Yates (pictured left) is one of Canada\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pre-eminent poets, radio dramatists and prison memoirists<\/a>. We met in New Orleans in the 1960s and have stayed in touch. The story is too long to go into here, but without Mike my novel Poodie James<\/em> (right column, scroll down) would still be in a digital desk drawer. <\/p>\n

The Winnipeg Review<\/em> says that Amabile (pictured right) is, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the\"\"<\/a> \u00c3\u00a9minence gris of Manitoba poetry and indeed is an eminent figure in North American poetry.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d When Amabile shows up in Vancouver next month to collect the F.G. Bressani Literary Prize<\/a> in two categories, poetry and short fiction, he and Yates will get together. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s bound to be a momentous reunion. <\/p>\n

But, wait. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s more about Amabile<\/p>\n

Curious, I did a search and found that Amabile, a transplanted American, has a deep connection to jazz. Victor Enns<\/a>, yet another Canadian poet, interviewed Amabile for the Winnipeg Review<\/em> and asked him how much jazz had influenced his writing. Amabile\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s answer contains a lovely assessment of the unexplainable magic and evanescent nature of spontaneous creativity in jazz and other art forms.<\/p>\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve never been able to discover or invent a methodology for accurately measuring the influence of anything, including other poems and poets, on my writing, or anyone\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s writing. What I can say is that I began listening to jazz while I was still attending Princeton High School. Even after I left for college, gangs of us would go up to New York during the summer or spring break, and hit the clubs, the Five Spot, Birdland, the Blue Note, the Metronome, and half a dozen dives where jazz players would come in very late, after their paid gigs, to drink and jam.<\/p>\n

\nThis was in the fifties, Kai and Jay, Parker, Coltrane, Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Cozy Cole, Mingus, Rollins, the MJQ, Brubeck and Stan Getz, Gillespie, Adderley and one night in some dive or other, we saw Thelonious Monk sit down and hammer out his Quadratics. We got very pumped about this. Then in comes Coltrane and sits in. It went on and on, like they had tapped into some inexhaustible resource deep in the earth or the sea or the night sky \u00e2\u20ac\u201c breathtaking, and one of the things it taught me was the way maybe the best of jazz or poetry, or anything else, precipitates like that, so perfectly, out of the flux, out of unpredictable energies that come together and vibrate with such colour and clarity it seems their intensities are accessible anywhere, anytime, and just as you think that, the music fades, as if whatever brought such magic together also burned it away.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To read all of the Enns interview with George Amabile, go here<\/a>. <\/p>\n

To get at least a glimmer of what he may have heard from Monk and Coltrane that night, let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s listen. This is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Nutty\u00e2\u20ac\u009d from their 1957 Carnegie Hall concert<\/a> with Ahmed Abdul-Malik, bass, and Shadow Wilson, drums.<\/p>\n