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. . An ongoing series designed to share the quality of jazz poetry continuously submitted to Jerry Jazz Musician. Thanks to the poets…and enjoy! . . ___ . . “Diz with Bird” by Martel Chapman . ___ . Life is Jazz Life is jazz, always improvisational. Groovin’ and swingin’, low down and funky, stately … Continue reading “21 jazz poems on the 21st of May, 2025”
...May 21st, 2025
working on projects at home
I pass the hours listening to jazz
blown away all over again
by an artist I could actually emulate
as a budding musician years ago
May 17th, 2025
At the Fondation, where he fell in love with Chagall.
In St Paul, where that painter lived
(And Albert played al fresco)
And in interview with Daniel Caux
He seemed positive
Buoyed up by the response
May 15th, 2025
Orange wings spread
No flutter
A butterfly glide crosses
An outside window glance
May 13th, 2025
Touchdown or Something,
back to you: crisping, lighted place
my swift escape, humble
glitz, jazz’d instrument
blowing quavers, shaking, from the cave
of your trumpet sounding like
all of my loving memories
May 10th, 2025
I had an old car
with a fender rusted out
on the back left side
and it was just another spot
of decay and breakdown
on that old machine
May 9th, 2025
Father of jazz poetry
Known for your artistry
Harlem-bred pedigree
In lines designed for spoken word
Like Montage of a Dream Deferred
Collabs you did with Monk & Mingus
Were all the stuff of literary genius
May 6th, 2025
I no longer roll my r’s.
I get nasal,
lost as I am in learning a new language.
Portuguese always held a special mystique.
This begins to wane
as I enter its world,
May 3rd, 2025
Jerrice J. Baptiste’s 12-month 2025 calendar of jazz poetry winds through the upcoming year with her poetic grace while inviting us to wander through music by the likes of Charlie Parker, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Sarah Vaughan, Melody Gardot and Nina Simone. She welcomes May with a poem devoted to Hoagy Carmichael…
...May 1st, 2025
Let’s celebrate that Contemporary Cat
and his celestial trumpet! Each day his
musical genius vibrates, accelerates, elevates.
Raised by his dad to listen to opera. Played
piano and trumpet at eight years old.
April 25th, 2025
If only wars could end
hate would cease and
the fate of the world
decided
by a woman
April 23rd, 2025
An ongoing series designed to share the quality of jazz poetry continuously submitted to Jerry Jazz Musician.
...April 21st, 2025
I didn’t take the call of inquiry
I don’t much care who did
I reckon’ you wouldn’t either
I know it changed the world.
Some say Miles Davis should get the credit.
I don’t think Max Roach is in that Chorus.
Matter of fact Miles would take the ‘big up’ with glee but for one cold fact
Miles Davis was dead.
April 19th, 2025
Day six
and the dissonance
of my pneumonia
has become as percussive
as Cecil Taylor’s piano.
April 16th, 2025
On a scratched record Saturday,
I learned the blues
in a water-stained Pittsburgh basement
where my mother’s records hid,
her handwritten name inked on each sleeve,
signed off like a confession.
April 12th, 2025
such Suite sounds cool
striding feels effortless
when bare feet
crosses velvet grass
and sandstone compacts
the sediment History inspires
April 10th, 2025
Look at that dude!
BEEP!
Look at his horn!
BOP!
Look at those cheeks!
Salt Peanuts!
POP!
April 5th, 2025
Jerrice J. Baptiste’s 12-month 2025 calendar of jazz poetry winds through the upcoming year with her poetic grace while inviting us to wander through music by the likes of Hoagy Carmichael, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Sarah Vaughan, Melody Gardot and Nina Simone. She welcomes April with a poem welcoming the promise of Spring, a time that “breaks icy borders to free wild rivers.”
...April 1st, 2025
Billy Wilder loved voice-over & the velocity
it gives a script. He loved to jump ahead trusting
the audience to stay with him. What’s more,
the satirist in him liked to comment.
March 29th, 2025
thick as soup
the summer air
and the music
rolling from nearby window
Mingus’s big band
in wild abandon
March 27th, 2025
I’m listening to the Köln Concert
and it is déjà vu. It’s Keith Jarrett playing
the music I always knew but never listened to.
It is every night at midnight putting away the violin
and sitting alone somewhere on the Kansas prairie
March 22nd, 2025
An ongoing series designed to share the quality of jazz poetry continuously submitted to Jerry Jazz Musician.
...March 21st, 2025
this America
(so rooted in Black culture)
what was Sonny’s view?
March 18th, 2025
He was born too early
for a shot or magical sugar cube
that could have prevented
the polio virus that found him
at the age of three.
March 16th, 2025
In this edition, Douglas’ poem is written partly as a reference to the Antonio Carlos Jobin song “Wave,” but mostly to get in the famed Japanese artist Hokusai’s idea of the wave as being a huge, threatening thing. (The poem initially sprang from listening to Cal Tjader’s “Along Came Mary”).
...March 12th, 2025
Is better than the alternative
Better than having to deal
With leaders drunk with power
Who crown themselves kings
Who sees the world as a commodity
To be conquered
March 10th, 2025
scales peel from your swollen cheeks
snakes slip into the shade
your fingers webbed with silk
run swift as rivers
over the silver pistons
March 8th, 2025
Beautiful, sad poet
haggard and thin
dressed in the polyester suit
you bought at Sears with Philly Joe
Your brow is damp
You hide the pain in your side
March 3rd, 2025
1. In the distance
a small blackbird
with red guitar epiphone wings—-
sings a far flung song, basic basie, cushioning
rushing winds and young spring crickets
March 1st, 2025
March winds swirl.
Frozen is the pond
where children skate.
In New York we wrap
our toes in pure white
wool blankets.
March 1st, 2025
…or merely take Giant Steps?
I scramble! I step lightly / jump rope! / I crip walk
all the way to San Juan Capistrano because I heard
you playing sax in a dive bar in that city
February 26th, 2025
Derelict dark and smoke ghosts
coagulate expectancy
among struggling silences.
Dumb dark sucks glances
of silver and gold
from yet mute metal.
February 22nd, 2025
and everything was evergreen
the light was so strong
we didn’t realize we were burning-
We were angels
and angels fly forever
February 15th, 2025
Carmen lives with me
in our poetry
of bromeliads
favorite films
comfort in a kitchen
Strayhorn & Evans
Jazz & cocktails
February 14th, 2025
Three days since this baby’s birth,
there’s nothin’ cuter on this earth. But
the crib can’t seem to hold him, tight
cottony swaddling meant to enfold him.
He thunders electric, skyscraping wails,
ear-piercing notes atop a chromatic scale.
February 8th, 2025
Pretty eyes are in a meditation retreat
seeing everything as it’s meant to be:
dazzling leaves in October’s ghost dance,
birds diving, birds hovering—a romance.
February 1st, 2025
her eyes carry oceans
like her hair carries
sunlight
and bells ring in her
hips
January 26th, 2025
When wind scatters leaves, and thoughts sprawl
across memory’s vast landscape in a wild array
of color and form and incident which has shaped
January 24th, 2025
14 West 55th
Concrete, white slab. Glass. It wasn’t always so.
They tore it down to build something new.
January 21st, 2025
Thelonious Monk tune
borrowed
Epistrophe
A bit of a mystery
A turn that twists
and turns
Yeah
fly right
fly bright
love in sight.
January 18th, 2025
Have you ever listened to your father,
Jackie Wilson’s rendition of “Tenderly”?
Several times? Well, that’s good.
The last I listened, it came through the dash
of my Wrangler at a busy intersection,
January 12th, 2025
I don’t want to stay woke
Oscar Peterson lulls me back to sleep
Sailing / swinging / meticulous
copacetic groove
January 11th, 2025
The first Jerry Jazz Musician poetry anthology published in book form includes 90 poems by 47 poets from all over the world, and features the brilliant artwork of Marsha Hammel and a foreword by Jack Kerouac’s musical collaborator David Amram. The collection is “interactive” (and quite unique) because it invites readers – through the use of QR codes printed on many of the book’s pages – to link to selected readings by the poets themselves, as well as to historic audio and video recordings (via YouTube) relevant to many of the poems, offering a holistic experience with the culture of jazz.
...January 10th, 2025
Spanish & flourish
Intricacies of ‘Pablo’ & ‘A Future Retrospective’
Of ziggurat / Giralda …architecture
Polyphony – bebop & free
January 4th, 2025
Jerrice J. Baptiste’s 12-month 2025 calendar of jazz poetry winds through the upcoming year with her poetic grace while inviting us to wander through music by the likes of Hoagy Carmichael, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Sarah Vaughan, Melody Gardot and Charlie Parker.
...December 31st, 2024
2024 produced its share of losses of legendary jazz musicians. Terrance Underwood pays poetic homage to a handful who have touched his life, imagining their admittance to the Final Arms Hotel, a destination he introduces in his prelude.
...December 30th, 2024
. . © Marsha Hammel . . Don’t Worry About the Labels Quintessentially American Scores of differing mood Even named by temperature Hot and cool include Categories unmemorizable Don’t worry about the labels On your listening journey “Giant Steps” “Slow Freight” “Big Train” May take Endless destinations This sprawling Jazz landscape . Listen to … Continue reading “The Sunday Poem: “Don’t Worry About the Labels” by Mike Mignano”
...December 30th, 2024
Listening recently to Chet Baker play and sing
“I’ve Never Been in Love Before”
on the local public radio jazz stream in Sacramento
sends me, thrills me, saddens me, deepens me
I want to jump in
I want to be there
the trumpet solo
the wondrous sound of notes.
December 21st, 2024
A hazy clip from Finnish TV,
the year he died
Shot in a dimly-lit studio
Evans has just finished a concert and the interviewer,
reverently holds an oversized microphone
December 20th, 2024
Looking a little sad and alone in an upper bin of the produce section – a handful of red celery-like stalks of rhubarb. They are still crisp – not yet wilted by the soft terror of avoidance too often rhubarb’s after life.
...December 19th, 2024
Mingus howling, his bass rumbling in their faces,
Shouting yeah! Yeah, oh yeah! The insistent barking growl.
Their chains beat loose by the savage blues that chases.
December 14th, 2024
Four poets react to the results of the 2024 election…
...December 14th, 2024
The evening burns,
riffs clinking glasses
dance to what is
not there.
My finger travels along the old
family photograph, 33 stern faces.
Forest cats in clan den, spotted,
camouflaged. Before I was born.
Who are they? No one knows.
December 12th, 2024
Maybe, whisper of your voice
could bring home
your far away love
before icicles begin to form.
It could be so.
December 11th, 2024
The vast and beautiful quiet of the weekend,
a weak dawn bleeds over the skyline’s edge.
She gropes her pockets to find a single cigarette
as she waits for that moment
December 7th, 2024
For speed and power, use the pick.
One side of the mountain,
Then jump to the other side.
Open mike nights I learned in real time,
Rehearsal studios we never wanted to leave, still young.
But time left, and everyone left me.
November 30th, 2024
the sound became a poem
after happening into
Kenny Burrell leading
an arranged Gil Evans
below a full moon
...November 29th, 2024
Tenuous
It’s probably always
been tenuous
The notion
The concept
of democracy and
how it was designed
to protect us
November 27th, 2024
Art Tatum plays fast
fast as Sundays
fast as sunset in November
fast as a hurry up offense
fast as a 20 dollar bill flying down the street
November 26th, 2024
Lauren, my high school sweetheart, and I
drive down Fifth Avenue in NYC, not in my
mother’s blue 1967 Cadilac, but in my polished
silver Caddy. This is after our group, The Kansas
City Soul Association, makes it big and I, their
drummer, can afford such a ride.
November 23rd, 2024
. . photo via pickpik.com . . The Sounds Outside My Window ………(for Jack Kerouac) So the drunk old genius of the road once wrote that the sounds outside his window were worthy of his poetical consideration but right now, out of mine, all I can hear are seagulls squawking and sirens wailing and, in … Continue reading ““The Sounds Outside My Window” – a poem by Bradford Middleton”
...November 21st, 2024
The conductor passed the notes around — birds strung out on wires —
Pieces they all knew well, nothing too inspired.
He checked his troops, baton raised, then marched them down the street.
Was it a groove, or was it a rut, that curbed their marching feet?
November 19th, 2024
I cranked the Woody Shaw Jr.
“Every Time I See You”
Marveling at the range
Authentic modal with a hint
November 16th, 2024
notice was received at the Final Arms Hotel
stating simply
expect Lou soon
& the buzz began
Good gracious!
Big John and Grant grinned
each to the other
with Hammond & Gibson harmony
November 15th, 2024
I am the sound,
the spontaneous voice you hear
beyond the melodic trance,
an array of multi-timbred,
fragmented, impetuous harmonies and rhythms
to carry you into an alternate dimension,
November 10th, 2024
Flip day for night then lose the glossy crooner
Let the trumpet solo drain the oil from showbiz lake
Cruise a lowdown hungry blues
Along the Great White Way
To citizens’ arrest on Lower Broadway
November 6th, 2024
He jazzed his way into my heart
with pulsing beats that have surpassed
the resounding rhythm of the jungle drums.
November 2nd, 2024
Drizzly droplets
Dripping from balcony rails,
Slipping down window panes
As I listen to Stevie Ray
Play Lenny. Man that
Cat could sweat as he
Plucks magic from
Six thin strings.
October 30th, 2024
I present you with a disgusting floor,
covered with ocher lumps of puke,
piles of paper refuse, cigarette butts,
all swimming in a sea of black water.
October 26th, 2024
A raggedy man lived for music and Nina Simone,
called himself “Mr. Bojangles,”
played jazz on his secondhand sax,
tap-danced for tips and smiles.
October 19th, 2024
“Big egos,” they now say –
Basie, Armstrong, Ellington
Did Louis Armstrong
Possess an outsized ego
October 17th, 2024
Jazz is a journey. The
listening keeps us
envisioning how creativity
is transformative. Jazz is a
journey, a sound, a tune, a note,
October 12th, 2024
Nostalgia
it’s the feeling that brought us here
a bit of joy / sweet glide to a hallowed space
and Fats Navarro is already here
October 10th, 2024
Antonio, steal me away from him
with a mango slice
on the tip of your knife
October 6th, 2024
Leaving residence
At the Final Arms Hotel
For a misty boulevard stroll
Could be I see you
(Maybe on your way
To meet up with Wes
To go Bumpin’ On Sunset)
October 2nd, 2024
When he entered a club ‘round midnight,
all 88 keys would break into a grin
and the stool would slide out from under
to invite him to sit down and play.
September 28th, 2024
Sometime before September ends
I will capture your love
among the flaming
fuchsia, paprika, mustard colored
leaves, blowing in wind on a journey
to somewhere close to where you are.
September 27th, 2024
Prisms resound, glow dissonant—
refracted word-dyes salvaged from malaise.
A bleeding swatch of rainbow,
cordless stains on muslin,
stacks of frightened tightropes,
my slippers thin and worn –
September 21st, 2024
. . Mallory1180, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons . . Donald Byrd’s Late Night Lullaby The Worker Bee finds a home In the honeyed tones of a trumpet As the sun sets earlier, answering Fall’s call, she stands sometimes Sturdy as a birch tree, the trumpet’s Wail suits her majestically. Jazz is The … Continue reading ““Donald Byrd’s Late Night Lullaby” – a poem by Erren Kelly”
...September 19th, 2024
When that first rumbling bass line
Tells me I’m listening to Gordon Goodwin’s
Big Phat Band playing “Jazz Police,”
I can’t help it, I always see an LAPD squad car
swinging out of the station
flipping on that groovy trumpet siren
as they join a pursuit with the whole horn section.
September 14th, 2024
This edition of the writer’s poetic interpretations of jazz recordings and film is written in response to Oliver Nelson’s 1961 recording The Blues and the Abstract Truth
...September 11th, 2024
If ever
I am subjected to
Further medical exploration
& something
Identified as Bio
Is discovered
September 7th, 2024
John Coltrane was the absolute
the decorated, the preternatural
and acknowledged master of what fury
can pour out of the body of a saxophone.
September 3rd, 2024
Hurrying to a dental appointment
I didn’t want to go to in the first place
an interminable red light and honking traffic
and the curve where people merge
20 MPH faster than necessary
four lanes into two
not a good day overall
though Sonny Rollins is playing loud;
August 31st, 2024
Sheets of music laid across a checkered table cloth
spread out like streets across the city.
Like the quarter notes on page one, a crescent moon
is seen rising in the ink dark sky.
August 24th, 2024
cohen says there are major falls
and minor lifts that come before
the fourths and fifths and i suppose
he’s probably right, most likely right
but this is not about some hallelujah
August 17th, 2024
Scattered discordant
Symbols woven into lines
Across blank white pages
August 16th, 2024
Woke up this morning to the Bugle Call Rag,
Straight no chasers made my head real bad.
Nothing left for breakfast … goodbye pork pie hat,
Dressed with chilies (ah um) – never hotter than that!
August 10th, 2024
The flute floats a legato stream of notes,
blood from the heart pouring in a lucent stream,
brilliant as a harvest moon filling the sky
with radiance such as the flutist releases
into the concert hall, notes carried on breath
August 7th, 2024
During a brief respite from the hard rain,
I heard a music born of spring and sunsets
coming from spinning black platters.
Their weighty cadence, their spry
crackling fireworks
August 3rd, 2024
In postcards to his sister Paula
He described what it felt like
To feel free
In America, he was
A disrupter of the peace
In a thickly-padded FBI dossier
August 2nd, 2024
On the Cape in P-town
August ‘55
Billie, Eartha, Ella vocals
Filled shoreline evening skies
Entrancing soaring seagulls
With jazzy siren song
July 27th, 2024
because Jupiter is 1300 times the volume of the Earth
because milkweeds in the yard are as beautiful as
“Hushabye”
because on clear nights the moon pours in my window
like a spotlight and makes me think
.Paul Simon’s in the room
July 20th, 2024
In which poets connect the swing of the bat with that of the bandstand…
...July 16th, 2024
When he plays he wears invisible glasses
picks his keys with patience and purpose
a tornado with time on his hands
while in walks light
July 13th, 2024
…From “Fatha” Hines to Brad Mehldau, poets open themselves up to their experiences with and reverence for great jazz pianists…
...July 11th, 2024
Surely Sonny still gets blue at times
I mean he’s a human being after all
isn’t he although sometimes he
seems more superhuman celestial
take now for instance as he bends
nearly all the way to the stage in
his 80s and plays and plays
and plays and plays and plays
July 6th, 2024
Audible pain
Introspective
Like the composition he wrote called
Alabama about the 4 little girls from
Birmingham:
July 2nd, 2024
Stripped down standards
ache the air. Keith Jarrett
with chronic fatigue
recorded “I Got It Bad
(And That Ain’t Good)”
in sessions so short
he sometimes ended
before the song.
June 29th, 2024
While consuming Mary K O’Melveny’s remarkable work in this digital album of poetry, readings and music, readers will discover that she is moved by the mastery of legendary musicians, the wings of a monarch butterfly, the climate and political crisis, the mysteries of space exploration, and by the freedom of jazz music that can lead to what she calls “the magic of the unknown.”
...June 25th, 2024
Mingus flipped the kitchen switch,
flooding the room with light,
just as, seeking purchase in the slippery sink,
I tumbled through the unlocked window.
June 22nd, 2024
In this, the 17th major collection of jazz poetry published on Jerry Jazz Musician, 50 poets from all over the world again demonstrate the ongoing influence the music and its associated culture has on their creative lives.
...June 21st, 2024
Nested into each other,
We listened to Dolphy play “Truth”
as softly as the bedding that held us.
June 19th, 2024
. . This space on Sunday is generally reserved for a single poet to read one of their works, but this week’s issue -Father’s Day – features 23 poets who weigh in on the complexity of their relationship with their father, revealing love, warmth, regret, sorrow – and in many cases a strong connection … Continue reading “The Sunday Poem(s): 23 Poets remember their father…”
...June 15th, 2024
He often remembered
how it used to be with her,
his former lover,
who would sing him a song
every night before bed
then teach him each line
June 8th, 2024
The hardest skill to learn
is to listen.
Always one wants to interrupt,
to explain, to contradict, to deny.
June 8th, 2024
Think of a river
Turned into
A Diamond,
June 5th, 2024
Entertain us, entertain us all
Give, give, give with your sassy voice, your young body
Despite the migraines…
At 11, on a North Philly street, gang raped
By three creeps
It starts there, the cracks
The headache
June 1st, 2024
My high school girlfriend’s older brother
lived in a garret in the Village, like something
out of La Boheme, and she said maybe if we
went there, he’d leave us alone and we could
…well, you know
May 25th, 2024
my claim to jazz fame:
I have had fun telling people …
I got to know david sanborn
in high school band.
May 20th, 2024
She was four, just waking to the world.
Aware of rain and blue air, of singsong words,
of a low trill as she drifted into night. Abruptly
she was lifted
into unfamiliar voices
May 19th, 2024
A myriad of styles and experiences displayed in eight thoughtful and provocative poems about jazz music…
...May 16th, 2024
We’ll have a little brunch for you —
pecan-crusted French toast,
oysters, smoked salmon,
a charcuterie board.
May 11th, 2024
That Black Olive near the back providing shade
a steady venue for beak & feather songsters
roaming around the leaves
as if they were tables at the Club Aviary
May 8th, 2024
I was preparing to make my exit from Heaven back to Earth,
And it was late March, so the lounge had transitioned
To their hot jazz band after playing the cool for months.
May 4th, 2024
. . The cover of the 1987 Mosaic Records collection of The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Herbie Nichols . . Thinking of Herbie I was thinking about jazz masters who died too young– private accolades for America’s unknown legion, perished by addiction, illness or accident— Herbie Nichols I didn’t forget you. Dead of … Continue reading ““Thinking of Herbie” – a poem by Daniel W. Brown”
...May 1st, 2024
A woman sits in a window frame
of old carved birds, listening to her
grandson in his jeans playing fig leaf music
in her home in Koshidekha,
a village in Nepal.
April 27th, 2024
I saw some crows in low and noisy flight.
I watched them until they were out of sight.
And I have heard, at times, the calling geese,
above and unseen in the autumn night,
April 24th, 2024
You punched him in his chin
Jimmy not her kin
can’t let a bully
do her in.
April 21st, 2024
Trading Fours with Douglas Cole is an occasional series of the writer’s poetic interpretations of jazz recordings and film. This edition is written in response to the music of Wayne Shorter.
...April 18th, 2024
At the bar of the
Towne Tavern, once
Toronto’s finest jazz club,
stage facing me,
sipping my one beer,
knowing even then
in my twenty-third year
I was witness to
a never forgotten gig.
April 13th, 2024
Cacophonous —
The honk, the blare of the tenor sax
And the scream! The guttural cry
Who are you, man…who are
You? “I’m nobody,” is my
Only reply
April 10th, 2024
The pollen is flying like mad –
frantic, crazy, amorphously Daliesque –
sort of like our trio the other day,
rollicking and lollygagging through Monk’s
Brilliant Corners, losing it so completely
that when Marty flung a stick at my head
April 6th, 2024
Dexter Gordon blew blue
blue notes for hours in his visit
to my CD player,
accompanied by wicked syncopations
rapped on window and roof
by bursts of rain as it came and went
April 3rd, 2024
washes up
on the keyboard.
Bill Evans’ glasses too.
I put Monk’s hat on
and suddenly feel
like the captain of a ship.
March 30th, 2024
Even if you never drank black coffee, that won’t stop you from drinking in the feelings that filter across a room whenever Sarah Vaughan sings Black Coffee. One could drown in that bottomless, inky liquid, that heartache-laden brew,
...March 27th, 2024
Soultrane came out when Ike governed.
1958. Before our nation
Would build up its war machine to invade
Viet Nam, training its Green Berets
March 23rd, 2024
She plays slow, haunting
notes that linger and flow
around her voice, unearths
the story that lies between
the words of each song –
March 20th, 2024
My friend is a Blues singer,
I am a Jazz drinker,
boozing shots after shots,
I never get drunk with Jazz.
March 16th, 2024
I was streaming The Fabulous Baker Boys
the other night and thought
it reminded me of the times I drank to
Mose Allison — in Boston, in DC —
and how righteous he was singing
Everybody Cries Mercy
March 14th, 2024
I admit I’d never heard of “Watermelon Man” before Harry Reid came to my kids’ elementary school to put together a concert band. He wasn’t a salaried teacher, but a part-time outsider brought in by the PTA.
...March 10th, 2024
I’ve never seen much of Spain.
A business trip to Barcelona.
A commuter ride to Girona. Salvador
Dali’s museum. A stop in Sitges
where ivory beach sand abets
a shimmered turquoise sea.
March 8th, 2024
The Portland, Oregon poet Emmet Wheatfall – whose jazz poetry has been published on Jerry Jazz Musician – talks about the connection between poetry and the environment, and the impact of climate change on poets and other artists, and the rest of humanity.
...March 7th, 2024
gentle the footprints go
up through the wilderness
to the heart-shaped night
short of breath, shorter, inches away on my speakers
miles inside
a sphere of glad- sad melancholy, dark tree twilights
March 2nd, 2024
These poems are new submissions by five poets relatively new to Jerry Jazz Musician, and are an example of the writing I have the privilege of encountering on a regular basis.
...February 28th, 2024
Evergreens and pink lawn
chairs sang through my windowpane
until silenced by grime
and retinal leakage.
I pass my good eye
back and forth;
February 24th, 2024
Marginalized, itinerant
Brilliance barely compensated
You want to save them all; you
Particularly want to save him
February 22nd, 2024
The 19 poets included in this collection effectively share their reverence for jazz music and its culture with passion and brevity.
...February 20th, 2024
Your father and I admonished you
for walking ahead on the craggy mountain ridge.
You defended your eager steps,
saying you were musing
on the musical styles
of Mingus, Parker, and Shorter,
February 17th, 2024
A relaxed, familiar comfort emerges from the poet Terrance Underwood’s language of intellectual acuity, wit, and space – a feeling similar to one gets while listening to Monk, or Jamal, or Miles. I have long wanted to share his gifts as a poet on an expanded platform, and this 33-poem collection – woven among his audio readings, music he considers significant to his story, and brief personal comments – fulfills my desire to do so.
...February 14th, 2024
Morning is dream time—
inns, strip clubs, and shops
are all eye-closed,
a hobo huddles
under a gray blanket
at a storefront,
neon signs illuminating
the strip all night long
February 10th, 2024
it seems like thousands
of nights hunkered
over dark beer and jazz
with my Guru
the janitor who taught
jazz to the novice
February 9th, 2024
when first he was asked
spring buds had yet to fully open
now rising out of autumn heath
that tenor sax strides deep
February 7th, 2024
Both of them put up with fools
until they didn’t
and the sea that men parted
collapsed under their stares.
February 3rd, 2024
shouts and dances in church
and thumbs its nose at shame
covers its body in brand names
and doesn’t worry about the future
holds hands and kiss shameslessly
in public; they call it p.d.a
January 28th, 2024
Trading Fours with Douglas Cole is an occasional series of the writer’s poetic interpretations of jazz recordings and film. This edition is influenced by Stillpoint, the 2021 album by Zen practitioner Barrett Martin
...January 24th, 2024
Take tonight, for instance.
I can’t ask you for the moon
the way Sinatra commands it
with his first-class confidence.
Let alone Jupiter or Mars.
January 21st, 2024
One-third of the Winter, 2024 collection of jazz poetry is made up of poets who have only come to my attention since the publication of the Summer, 2023 collection. What this says about jazz music and jazz poetry – and this community – is that the connection between the two art forms is inspirational and enduring, and that poets are finding a place for their voice within these virtual pages.
...January 18th, 2024
Sensational
Largely unsung
Dorothy Donegan
Known by jazz insiders as
The female Art Tatum
His protégé
The one who made him say:
“She is the only woman who can
Make me practice.”
January 14th, 2024
Takes on love and loss, and memories of Lady Day, Prez, Monk, Dolphy and others…
...January 10th, 2024
I jammed
with the Afro-American Jazz Band
in the old Off Plaza on McAllister,
and with the blind Black pianist whose name I can’t remember
in the club we knew as The Question Mark
whose sign on Haight Street was just a neon ?,
when the club was straight and featured jazz
January 7th, 2024
It’s Les McCann & Eddie Harris
heard it back in ’69, heard it now
not once but twice, so nice, but
sadness got me tonight, hit me hard,
January 4th, 2024
We begin to study Uncle George
in a cavern of disintegration.
A hospital bed wrenched through
a narrow doorway. Shag carpeting
cauterized and peeled from the concrete floor.
A hoyer lift wheeled in. A pully installed
so George can shift from horizontal to vertical.
January 3rd, 2024
Your chair is a kitten chasing a bird.
Hans Brinker skates across
your living room.
December 31st, 2023
Each year offered
a little blue box.
Trinket from a window.
December 24th, 2023
Dusk’s deep waters envelop me
with the quiet embrace of a Bill
Evans solo, the piano so low,
yet so all encompassing (drowning
me in beauty, beauty, beauty —
December 21st, 2023
I take my daughter to the ballet studio
at a former convent in Marin.
She will be dancing for hours.
At the edge of the church’s property
is an old gymnasium.
December 17th, 2023
Her first note wails amber
smoke near overhead pipes above
the guitars. It wavers
and rolls r’s better than spring.
December 10th, 2023
How can somebody so blue, Grant, be named
Green? How can the ocean current
and its waves? Simple. Immediate. Each note comes
from you slow as underwater speech. Say
a fish tank and pufferfish hugging the glass. Imagine
being trapped. Gravel pumped through the gills
December 8th, 2023
Yours is the sound of smoke
I love to inhale
the sound of a humid
summer night
its cool breeze
December 3rd, 2023
Hammers in a construction site
sound like a band warming up,
weird solos by a bunch of drummers.
Jimmy Smith comes down draped in groove,
sermonizing your stride,
clouds chest-out like they know something.
A man standing in front of a house,
shouting, I got nothing from you!
November 29th, 2023
Mamacita
with round brown
hips
roll and sway
sway and roll
slow that stroll
she sings
to ease
her sticky soul
November 26th, 2023
. . The Sunday Poem is published weekly, and strives to include the poet reading their work. Bryan Franco reads his poem at its conclusion. . . ___ . . . . How I Achieved Levitation They all lived in the Walnut Building. Satchmo blew the roof off the house. Fats Waller tickled ivories. … Continue reading “The Sunday Poem: “How I Achieved Levitation” by Bryan Franco”
...November 19th, 2023
It tickles my fancy the way
francophone announcers
ornately say the names
of jazzmen in those live recordings
put to reel in Montreux.
Jack DeJohnette in particular
tickles me, perhaps because
it is a french-like sort of name.
November 16th, 2023
Seven poets combine and art of jazz with an act of love…
...November 7th, 2023
The Young Turk disregarded the old trumpeter
labeled him a vaudevillian minstrel
because he shucked and grinned,
having no privy to old man’s roiling anger within
fueled by slights and shames endured for years
despite his lauded, storied career.
November 5th, 2023
Jazz divinity
The Divine One on hot, fevered wings
That fly east of the sun and west of
The moon
November 3rd, 2023
She is mesmerizing
flying in the air with the music,
ignoring gravity.
What is she thinking?
October 31st, 2023
La La Love,
even when the cold raindrops
pounded against the window,
we snuggled close like fuzzy cats,
purring with Thelonious Monk
as we drank our Guinness.
October 29th, 2023
I don’t know where it starts, he said, but can you imagine
watching They Cloned Tyrone and the music playing,
almost the whole dance club version of Love Hangover,
I can’t even watch anything, my mind looks through the settings,
the dialogue is like a crowd talking in a club and I want to listen in,
go into that Diana Ross whisper singing love voice
October 24th, 2023
My eyes were faster dreaming
a drum kit in bed with me
Rapid Eye Movement Disorder
disturbing my sleep and my wife
moving away with her cellphone
camera watch my arms begin to move
October 22nd, 2023
A poetic appreciation for the work of the legendary pianist
...October 21st, 2023
You ever heard of a Zoot Suit?
Do you own a Zoot Suit ?
What about the Zoot Suit Riots
you ever heard of them?
October 18th, 2023
I blame Chet Baker
For opening a window into my past
Sensing that phantom trumpet in my capable hands
The smooth curves of the hard brass, the cold
Mouthpiece against my buzzing lips
Bright melodies blaring
From carefree days of my youth
October 15th, 2023
A collection of Connie Johnson’s poetry is woven among her audio readings, a personal narrative of her journey and music she considers significant to it, providing readers the chance to experience the full value of her gifts.
...October 11th, 2023
Ce soir l’anniversaire
we defeat the oppressor
with our horns, our magic
here to bury us or set us free
October 8th, 2023
. . “Tree”(1924) photo by Alfred Stieglitz/via Raw Pixel/CC0 1.0 Deed . . Song of the Poplar Tree The song playing always catches me off guard. My trembling fingers quicken to remove the old vinyl record. I must stop her voice from singing. Even the wispy quality carries the heavy weight. I weep. Not … Continue reading ““Song of the Poplar Tree” – a poem by Jerrice Baptiste”
...October 5th, 2023
The woodshed was the hunting ground for wings of notes.
Black suits and ties, hipster hats and smoke rings of notes.
Was Robert Johnson alone, hellhound on his trail?
Was a deal made? Was Bird Satan’s plaything of notes.
October 1st, 2023
. . photo by Bernard Gotfryd/Library of Congress/PDM 1.0 Thelonious Monk, 1968 . ___ . Thelonious Monk and Mama Thelonious Monk paints a picture of Mama with his piano, the way Monet or Matisse would, with paint: loud, bright colorful notes that are a Rorschach test, screaming on the page. Perhaps, Mama would’ve modeled … Continue reading ““Thelonious Monk and Mama” – a poem by Erren Kelly”
...September 30th, 2023
Earlier this year I invited poets to submit jazz-themed poetry that didn’t need to strictly follow the 5-7-5 syllabic structure of formal haiku, but had to at least be faithful to the spirit of it (i.e. no more than three lines, brief, expressive, emotionally insightful).
This collection, featuring 22 poets, is a good example of how much love, humor, sentimentality, reverence, joy and sorrow poets can fit into their haiku devoted to jazz.
...September 27th, 2023
I’m whistling a tune about
a woman’s broken heart,
down a long and empty
hallway, just to hear it
move itself along,
September 24th, 2023
Barstow to Boron, bound for Bakersfield
we fly across the Mojave Desert, will wind
through and over the Tehachapis
only to come to rest in another desert
on the rim of the sink of California.
September 22nd, 2023
Trading Fours with Douglas Cole is an occasional series of the writer’s poetic interpretations of jazz recordings and film. In this edition, the poet connects the recordings of Jessica Williams’ “Little Waltz” and Gene Harris’ “Summertime.”
...September 20th, 2023
From a third floor window I imagine
I can almost see the cracked black
& white tile welcoming Penn Avenue
to the long-closed Kappel’s Jewelers.
September 17th, 2023
Ella Fitzgerald is whispering
to me: “sit here and enjoy your dinner with my
sweet honey voice,” eternal bloom of time,
filling the corner of the street where I eat
with a Golden Age long gone but that remains
like an idea, lingering, like the steam of a
hot bath leaving
traces of fingers on the mirror
September 13th, 2023
Strains of Charlie Parker’s alto sax fill
the empty apartment song-after-song –
“Dancing in the Dark,” “Loverman,”
“Embraceable You.”
Between every note I wish.
September 10th, 2023
Coltrane said a prayer to his musical God
Straight through the horn of his saxophone.
Not a metaphor; he spoke the words
Through the reed and the music into the air.
September 3rd, 2023
There are two types of clubs
Highfalutin hoity-toity stuck up clubs
And gritty grimy dingy dank dungeons
I prefer the latter, for obvious reasons
Clubs must be weathered
Crackled paint & nicotine stained
August 31st, 2023
The shadow from the brick facade
of Central High School did not seem
to spread much shade on the streets
of our Little Rock neighborhood.
August 27th, 2023
This edition features poetry chosen from hundreds of recent submissions, and from a wide range of voices known – and unknown – to readers of these collections. The work is unified by the poets’ ability to capture the abundance of jazz music, and their experience with consuming it.
...August 22nd, 2023
once said I’d marry a man
Who could hum the first four bars
Of Cal Tjader’s “Doxy.”
We say these foolish things
When we’re young and
Still learning the ways of the world.
August 20th, 2023
n On the Road, Jack & Neal raced Rocky Mount to Ozone Park,
speeding dark quiet American roads
Today, 2023. I drive the new superhighways, continuous sterile green
at median & shoulders,
August 18th, 2023
Shrouded in smoke and cigarette spheres
Jazzy speakeasy on a summer slog of a night
Where hips ramble in tandem,
Slide and slip in an out of rhythm
Juke Joint shifting with an uneven floor
Naked feet shuffling and colliding
August 13th, 2023
Vivaldi, especially “The Four Seasons,”
keeps showing up in forms of jazz:
a hint, a structure—but try unraveling
any musical DNA you go straight back
to singing and to drum, voice and poetry—
August 10th, 2023
free
what
bars?
intra-
views,
posit-
ions
o-
pen.
August 6th, 2023
Smooth. Jazz. Chill.
Write. Think. Build.
Listen. Vibe. Poetically
design.
Spend time with jazzy
sounds elevating the
mind. Jazz is smooth.
Jazz is chill.
July 30th, 2023
Did you dream up the orange golden sun of Aruanda?
Seashells far from your mother, you would no longer need
to whisper, “Take Me to Aruanda.”
...July 27th, 2023
The poet covers the spirit of the music, and the likes of Coltrane, Handy, and Ella…
...July 24th, 2023
The light aspires to be equatorial
but each eroded moment quiets otherwise.
The twilight Superior shore fills
with pine smoke from fire pits
just as Coltrane played in the
smoldering light at the Village Vanguard.
July 23rd, 2023
. . Lester Young, 1946 . . Solace I relish the cultivation of my Lester afternoons an endeavor still absorbing at my age captive in that garden of ambient sound …………………that Young tenor breath ………………………….a zephyr expulsion stirring atmosphere rare these days for this climate caressing time & movement with a tone to stream still … Continue reading ““Solace” – a poem by Terrance Underwood”
...July 18th, 2023
During that electric dawn
when I first heard
a bracelet of notes
which traced a subtle rhythm
within an hourglass of music
and sharpened the silence with sound,
July 16th, 2023
It’s 1958
and the epitome of 50s style
Anita O’Day steps onto
the stage, white gloves
to her elbows, black hat
crowned with white feathers,
slim black dress and finger clicks
the band into sound and dynamic
jazz minors and majors.
July 14th, 2023
in jazz composition
everybody knows where the one is
even when nobody chooses to play it
if the space is quiet enough
you can hear blood racing
July 11th, 2023
It’s one of those moments.
She only has ears for Miles Davis.
Reflecting on things that never came to be—
July 9th, 2023
In anticipation of a collection of jazz haiku — to be published sometime in August, 2023 — a small sampling of the jazz haiku received so far is published here.
...July 5th, 2023
he was/
a flightless bird/
bright as sky/
full of natural lies/
and sweet conflict/
when speaking the/
jazz
July 2nd, 2023
The poet describes his joyful experience of listening to “Mumbles,” a 1964 recording by Oscar Peterson with Clark Terry
...June 28th, 2023
Naturally, his lyrics are cued a cappella./“I’m home” slips from his lips,/sizzles like the taste of what I’m baking in the oven,/as he unwinds his day.
...June 25th, 2023
Two poems devoted to Steely Dan’s 1977 recording of “Aja”
...June 22nd, 2023
The poet Alan Yount and son Arlan write about a live 1964 performance by Duke Ellington and His Orchestra
...June 18th, 2023
The poet recalls an evening when he serendipitously encountered jazz in “The Point” neighborhood of Boston
...June 15th, 2023
All damn day/
talk — talk — talk/
I told him, son/
why not fit those fingers/
down that damn gullet/
and make it a proper/
squawk squawk squawk —/
June 11th, 2023
Poets honor jazz as an international music in five atmospheric poems
...June 7th, 2023
The poet recalls a live performance he witnessed by the Timeless All Stars
...June 4th, 2023
This busy bee, at the end of a life like clockwork,
a symphony of service to everything but herself—
wings snatched in a world blinded by the way it is—
slowly expiring in the sweet nectar of stillness,
May 31st, 2023
When the water and sand dance, whence (whence?)/their music? What is that music? What /jazz, what syncopation surfs itself in?
...May 28th, 2023
That feeling when everything makes you sad/Nothing you can think of would make you glad/No matter how hard you try to remove yourself/From this blue funk
...May 21st, 2023
A call-out for submissions for upcoming poetry collections to be published on Jerry Jazz Musician
...May 19th, 2023
The poet writes a profile of the jazz drummer Elvin Jones, inspired by a photograph by Lee Tanner
...May 18th, 2023
The poets Richard Radcliffe and Svi A. Sesling share their experience of listening to and interacting with to the music of John Coltrane
...May 18th, 2023
Nine poets, nine poems on the leading figure in the development of bebop…
...May 17th, 2023
The poet writes a fantasy about Parker’s time in the California asylum Camarillo…a 15 song playlist accompanies the poem
...May 16th, 2023
. . The Sunday Poem is published weekly, and strives to include the poet reading their work. Ms. Baptiste reads her poem at its conclusion. . . ___ . . David Dellepiane, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons . . Jazz Within Me I like Jazz playing within me. ……………….Record that never skips. Since age sixteen, … Continue reading “The Sunday Poem: “Jazz Within Me” by Jerrice Baptiste”
...May 13th, 2023
A woman’s fingers explored/piano keys, as though bairns/plowing through snow drifts/in search of hidden life;
...May 11th, 2023
An abstract poetic view of an abstract jazz recording…
...May 10th, 2023
A remembrance of incidents in the Bronx, Harlem and at Bop City…
...May 9th, 2023
The poet describes the clear, crisp sound of listening to jazz music on vinyl
...May 7th, 2023
Poet musings on Ellington — and big band music, by the poets Claire Andreani, Russell duPont, Laurinda Lind and Terrance Underwood
...May 4th, 2023
The poet remember jazz pianist Horace Tapscott
...May 2nd, 2023
The poet recalls an encounter with Carmen McRae at a Hollywood shoe store
...April 30th, 2023
The poets share their love of jazz through personal narratives, and memories of live performances
...April 28th, 2023
A poem and an essay devoted to the legendary jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery
...April 27th, 2023
The poet writes about the depth of the trumpeter’s playing, and the connections to many of the great trumpeters before him
...April 23rd, 2023
Several poems devoted to the pianist Ahmad Jamal, who died on April 16, 2023 at the age of 92.
...April 21st, 2023
In five poems, the poet writes of the music and complexity of trumpeter Chet Baker
...April 20th, 2023
The poet writes about the significance of Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue”, and why it is the “it” jazz recording…
...April 18th, 2023
The poet describes the impact of pianist Ahmad Jamal on a cherished evening, and beyond
...April 17th, 2023
The poet reflects on loss, fate, remembrance, and hopefulness
...April 16th, 2023
This is the 14th extensive collection of jazz poetry published on Jerry Jazz Musician since the fall of 2019, when the concept was initiated. Like all previous volumes, the beauty of this edition is not solely evident in the general excellence of the published works; it also rests in the hearts of the individuals from diverse backgrounds who possess a mutual desire to reveal their life experiences and interactions with the music, its character, and its culture.
...April 13th, 2023
The poet recalls her early-life friendship with the pianist/composer Dave Frishberg
...April 9th, 2023
The poet writes on how a musician putting their heart into their playing is a key to a great solo
...April 7th, 2023
The poet recalls Miles Davis’ depth of character and musicianship during a particularly complex era of his career
...April 6th, 2023
The poet writes about the impact Jimi Hendrix’s performance of “Star Spangled Banner” had on America
...April 3rd, 2023
This narrative poem is informed by quotes and stories in What Happened, Miss Simone? the 2015 Netflix biographical documentary about the singer/artist’s life and art
...April 2nd, 2023
Thoughts of sadness and hope in the wake of the March 27, 2023 school shooting in Nashville
...March 28th, 2023
The poet profiles the larger-than-life figure of the legendary jazz bassist Charles Mingus
...March 26th, 2023
The poet writes about the changing sound of jazz in the 1970s through the work of Wayne Shorter
...March 24th, 2023
The poets Amy Barone and Mark Fogarty share personal thoughts and memories of the bassist Jaco Pastorius
...March 21st, 2023
The poet writes of youthful memories conjured up from listening to Chick Corea and Return to Forever’s 1973 album, “Light as a Feather.”
...March 19th, 2023
Poetic narratives by six women experiencing the blues.
...March 16th, 2023
The poet writes about the origins of our personal blues, and how they can affect us…
...March 12th, 2023
In this edition, the poet writes about attending a McCoy Tyner performance (or “ceremony”), and hearing the musician’s one word philosophy of music.
...March 9th, 2023
The poet writes of a dreamlike, mystical evening experience
...March 7th, 2023
The poet honors his friend, the late jazz pianist Janice Scroggins, and reads his poem while Ms. Scroggins accompanies him
...March 5th, 2023
A poem honoring the greatness of the saxophonist/composer Wayne Shorter, who died today at the age of 89
...March 2nd, 2023
The poet reflects on winter, its moon, and the playing of saxophonist Art Pepper
...March 2nd, 2023
The poet is inspired by John Coltrane’s 1961 recording, “Ole”
...February 26th, 2023
The poet is inspired by the 1956 recording of “St. Thomas,” by Sonny Rollins
...February 23rd, 2023
The poet suggests better music could have accompanied the final scene in the film “Casablanca”
...February 19th, 2023
The poet’s humorous look at the importance of musicians showing up, and on time, for their performance!
...February 16th, 2023
A brief history of Rodgers and Hart’s composition “My Funny Valentine,” and a poem by George Held, who reflects on the song
...February 14th, 2023
The poet recalls the impact of Chet Baker’s music on her late, earlier life friend
...February 12th, 2023
The poet tells the complex and tragic story of jazz pianist Bud Powell
...February 9th, 2023
Meanwhile, digging
the scene
a sultry
walking hip-step
bop that
fell to the
sweetest
moody!
...February 5th, 2023
A sampling of recent submissions from six poets who, until now, have not had their work published on Jerry Jazz Musician
...February 2nd, 2023
first light skims on green wing like sprouts strobing for ray
...January 29th, 2023
A collection in which over 30 poets communicate their appreciation for jazz music in poems no longer than seven lines.
...January 27th, 2023
The poet writes of the blues of Billie Holiday…
...January 25th, 2023
The poet writes about the complexity of pianist Cecil Taylor’s music, and the liberation he feels from listening to it
...January 22nd, 2023
The poet writes of how the desire for love can be distilled into one golden wail of a Billy Strayhorn declaration.
...January 20th, 2023
“Blow by Blow” is a portrait of Berkeley, California in the 1970’s, and the fusion jazz that was finding its way onto the scene at that time.
...January 17th, 2023
The poet imagines being a monarch butterfly, inspired to movement by the music of Django Reinhardt
...January 15th, 2023
The poet uses the winter snow for inspiration and self-reflection
...January 12th, 2023
The poet shares a memory of the jazz pianist Carla Bley
...January 8th, 2023
Four poets share their appreciation for jazz in poems seven lines or fewer
...January 5th, 2023
The poet reveres the power and beauty and historical significance of Black women, and reads his poem
...January 1st, 2023
The poet brings in the new year, with the virtuoso sounds of pianist Art Tatum
...December 30th, 2022
Every day should be Kwanzaa, you ask me,
given our shared African heritage,
December 26th, 2022
The poet writes of a flute and London at Christmas time
...December 24th, 2022
The poet writes of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s hit song, and offers an 18 song version playlist
...December 21st, 2022
.This collection of jazz poetry – the largest yet assembled on Jerry Jazz Musician – demonstrates how poets who are also listeners of jazz music experience and interact with the spontaneous art that arises from jazz improvisation, which often shows up in the soul and rhythm of their poetic language.
...December 16th, 2022
“The Weeping Tree” arises from the poet listening to (and watching) Sinne Eeg & Thomas Fonnesbæk perform “Willow Weep For Me”
...December 13th, 2022
Chuck Sweetman and Patricia Carragon write two very different poems, both inspired by Frank Sinatra
...December 9th, 2022
The poet writes of a visitor to his listening of Louis Armstrong’s “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue”
...December 4th, 2022
The poet celebrates the sights and sounds of the New Orleans French Quarter
...December 2nd, 2022
The poets D.H. Jenkins and Stephen Bett on the jazz guitarist Pat Metheny
...November 28th, 2022
The fierce resistance…to Revelation! Disordered
listeners. The forest clearing in the thicket… The
Universe expanding on the Theme… The
Future finally right
now?
November 20th, 2022
In the winter of 1981 we were hired to play Downtown—
a performance in Greenwich Village billed “Frank Zappa Presents:
a Musical Tribute to Edgard Varèse.” I sat on stage,
wearing black, tuning my violin, warming up,
looking out at the audience milling around, most of them
covered in tattoos and piercings of every body part
November 14th, 2022
A poem about what’s at stake in the Nov 8 2022 midterm election
...November 8th, 2022
They are gathering now
all along the shoreline.
Their bones sing October!
Their wings cry out Go south!
I walk with my banjo
down to the water’s edge.
What can I play for geese
who carry their own tunes
November 4th, 2022
News concerning a new collection of jazz poetry by Michael L. Newell
...November 3rd, 2022
Musicians
make conversation
around the notes
warm up before leaving terra firma,
say goodbye to familiar places.
Soar.
October 28th, 2022
“Fire From Heaven” arises from the poet Douglas Cole listening to John Coltrane’s 1964 album A Love Supreme
...October 24th, 2022
That inner sense of freedom,
a natural balance
with an impulse
to preserve the day,
as the equinox
tilts from a window
with a view of leaves on fire.
October 18th, 2022
In five separate poems, poets write of Robert Johnson, Beethoven, Ornette Coleman, Duke Fakir and The Band
...October 10th, 2022
Old photos link the narrator to his mother’s love and strength, and thanks her while humming Billie Holiday’s “All the Way”
...October 4th, 2022
The poet honors the late Pharoah Sanders
...September 30th, 2022
Jazz and poetry…Mingling Yeats, Dylan Thomas and Coleman Hawkins — and communicating a lifelong passion for music
...September 26th, 2022
I was there to see The Trio:
Ramsey Lewis, Eldee Young,
Red Holt. The darkened space
lived up to its name. It felt edgy,
sophisticated, high voltage.
September 21st, 2022
Cool, cool, ineffably cool,
his trumpet grieves with
a restraint barely able to be
embraced by listeners, his music
is pain on ice, whiskey frozen
September 13th, 2022
As if the stars contained wood ticks
on fire. As if there were forests within
forests. Trees within stones. Stones
folded over into water.
The most secret nocturnal animals
walk around during the day, unseen.
September 11th, 2022
You listen to Karrin Allyson sing “Blame It on My Youth,” you picture her in the throes of its May-December scenario. You picture her on a college campus. Columbia University, the steps in front of Low, a pleated skirt, a short bob, the full flush of love on her cheeks.
...September 7th, 2022
My friend and I are talking indignant politics
as we head across the Mid-Hudson bridge,
steel sky above, chilly water below,
when a cloud of birds twists, spins above us.
They seek every bare branch, fill them
as if they were summer leaves, then scatter
again like confetti in wind. No one is in charge,
yet balance animates all.
September 5th, 2022
It’s
sittin’ in the corner knowing what others don’t get and smile-noddin’ over scotch and coda after a day bounced you about like Buddy’s snare and high hat clamped you down to sweet Georgia brown dirt in the Summertime wailed by Sidney Bechet
August 31st, 2022
Forgotten poems fly here and there
like birds that circle aimlessly
high in the thin and chilly air
till, willy-nilly, they come down
August 28th, 2022
“The Ghost Note” arises from the poet listening to “From Paris With Love” from Melody Gardot’s 2020 album Sunset in the Blue
...August 23rd, 2022
Through your horn’s dark pieties,
the glamor of its golden mouth, a youth
lost to the call and response of too many needle-nights,
too many dumps, too many dives,
you play a mudwater music, slow-flowing under an old iron bridge,
so sad, so far gone, it wings away never to come back.
August 18th, 2022
A broad collection of jazz poetry authored by an impressive assemblage of regular contributors and established poets new to this publication – all of whom open their imagination and hearts to the abundant creative experience they derive from this art.
...August 14th, 2022
I rise, change the sheets on the bed
that used to be in Mother’s basement.
I step into her body or she into mine,
attempt to line the blanket and spread
evenly, to tuck in the ends the “military”
square-corner-way and then, I remember
Mother doing chores to jazz, blues
August 12th, 2022
Was it something she said? about
the famous Charlie Parker drawers
He — himself a drawer —
illustrator, declaimer of conclusions —
commenced to rapping
about terrorists
on LA flight
demanding underwear
August 8th, 2022
The poet’s tender remembrance of his father’s passion for the clarinet
...August 5th, 2022
Through the art of meditation,
I become transfixed—transported
to the days of Baldwin & Joplin,
the Black Renaissance of Harlem— the resurrection
of a muse, Langston Hughes,
...August 2nd, 2022
bass
piano
blues
low
down
blues
and higher now
12 bar blues
right now
cliché
like
“a little bit a soda”
but not.
July 27th, 2022
My country, right or wrong
I call it home, the land my forefathers
Help built, but got little credit
July 23rd, 2022
Give the man a toothpick,
he is dying!
Perhaps his teeth need cleaning,
Sweet starchy deposits of his life trapped
and pleading for rescue
from the dying body
July 18th, 2022
He’s a-stagger the patrilineous
hillside grove wonder tunnels
street black ribbons going bower-deep
with sunlight glitter punctuations
feeling the great payoff on the way
July 11th, 2022
When I hear Sketches of Spain or Kind of Blue – Miles Davis masterpieces from his earlier career – I am always calmed, thrilled by the ways that music can take over every portion of a person from head to toe, from inside to outside, from innermost mind to outermost layer of skin.
...July 6th, 2022
. . Distributed by Joe Glaser’s Associated Booking Corporation. Photographer uncredited and unknown., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Chet Baker, 1955 . . Always Cool Alison weaves on her loom in the living room. Fifth floor walk up. Manhattan. Chet plays on the stereo; a trumpet divinely graced, caressed like a stunning woman’s body, soft … Continue reading ““Always Cool” — a poem by Judith Vaughn”
...June 29th, 2022
The Club is almost ready to open.
It’s clean, the bar stocked, piano
polished and the crowd is lined
up down the street.
June 19th, 2022
Throughout the day, the sky has bled
boatloads of water to drown the streets,
a level of grief I have not known
since the day the e-mail arrived
with the heading, “Landing gear down,”
a note from a brother informing me
of my father’s passing in Oregon
June 19th, 2022
The poet writes about the 1956 collaboration of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
...June 17th, 2022
The poet reflects on a childhood of the 1960s
...June 12th, 2022
The poet recalls a special night on the town, listening to Les Paul
...June 4th, 2022
When in spring/Miles’s horn awakens/The nodding giant of the streets…
...June 2nd, 2022
The poet reveres the jazz drummer and musical mentor to many, Art Blakey
...May 31st, 2022
The poem “Convergence” rises from listening to the 1960 album, “Stan Getz Quartet at Large”
...May 28th, 2022
A selection of poems from Michael L. Newell’s new collection of poetry, Still the World Beckons: New and Selected Poems (cyberwit.net)
...May 25th, 2022
Two poets reflect on the May 14, 2022 mass shooting in Buffalo, New York
...May 16th, 2022
The poet writes of the collaboration of Ellington, Roach and Mingus on the 1962 album “Money Jungle”
...May 13th, 2022
first light skims on green wing
like sprouts strobing for ray
climbs from soils of night,
through damask-leafed curtain
a gateless gate, come home
from crescendo of star-gazing
to dew of earth shiver
May 5th, 2022
Tall girl walks around
With a violin worn
Across her back
Her red hair carries
The fire of spring
April 30th, 2022
Mamacita with round brown hips roll and sway sway and roll slow that stroll
...April 27th, 2022
While we were waiting in the wings____
tuning our instruments,
From clefs to choruses, ominous portents
reared their ugly heads.
We didn’t see them, though.
We were cowering in dark corners,
hiding from the apparition
screaming through the night.
April 23rd, 2022
Mr. Cole’s suite consists of eight poems, all interpretations from songs on pianist Tommy Flanagan’s album Sunset and the Mockingbird Suite
...April 14th, 2022
Over 60 poets from all over the world celebrate their love of jazz…in poetry.
...April 7th, 2022
From a dark corner, night crawls across a wood-board floor
warped from a life beneath boots and spilled beer.
Her music is a moan, a collection of sorrows,
lost love, broken hearts, and illegal dreams.
April 7th, 2022
Inspired by the essays collected in the jazz and cultural critic Nat Hentoff’s 2010 book At the Jazz Band Ball: Sixty Years on the Jazz Scene, in this series of poems Sean Howard uncovers new relationships and resonances in the author’s writing – reusing, recycling, and remixing text from the book as poetry – while allowing him the opportunity to pay a personal tribute to a writer he reveres.
...March 29th, 2022
The earth has got a fever of 103, and I’ve
found Langston Hughes languishing
on the sidewalks of NYC.
Piano keys were dancing in the wind;
Thelonious Monk was bluer than blue,
his slouch hat rolling to Timbuktu.
March 24th, 2022
a trumpet cries over orchestral waves
trumpet mourns like a wounded beast
trumpet demands attention
orchestra swells trumpet riding its waves
silence then trumpet reappears softly in distance
March 17th, 2022
It’s the darkness, man, the
Darkness
that laughs with the evil of the vamp.
It’s the wildness, man, the
Wildness
that greets the gray of dawn.
March 15th, 2022
We hear it from the street corner
as someone’s fingers begin to
pray the tune on the alto sax.
…..Let our rejoicing rise
…..High as the listening skies…
March 10th, 2022
The poet Erren Kelly honors the voting and women’s rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer
...March 4th, 2022
Gene Hyde’s poem connects nature and the moon to the music of John Coltrane
...March 1st, 2022
Set forth beautiful one
open sea and open sky
as far as your eye can see
full wind filling the sails
pushing those hesitant steps
three at a time before
the cymbal crash of wave
February 25th, 2022
do you hear the wind?
see that scarlet leaf
dance on concrete?
I am that wind
I am that leaf
I am that dance
February 17th, 2022
hands do talk
to me they do
& after shaking his
some years back
clasping those long digits
expecting ivory key smoothness
I was stopped short by
their cement block
& long handle roughness
February 12th, 2022
They stretch octaves
across the sheet music
and the decades
of “Charleston Rag”
fingers like twisted bent tree trunks–
remembered rivers of antiquity
flowing through his veins–
February 8th, 2022
Tonight, I am alone,
lost in a dream,
and the dulcet tones
of Grappelli’s violin
glide lazily across
the twilight of my mind,
February 1st, 2022
A concert for lovers
Romantic space
For an eternal memory.
Well-dressed musicians
Well decorated scene.
.
Each note inspires exact words
To win Ghislaine’s heart,
The beauty of my youth.
January 29th, 2022
Remember when
the music saved
your life?
It’s different now.
Snow chills and hope,
like the rhythm section,
is subdued.
January 24th, 2022
Horace Silver’s got a grove. Just listen to that left hand,
like a heart skipping a beat or jumping up to a double-beat,
like beholding something so beautiful you can hardly believe it.
January 19th, 2022
wind whispers song of grief
its version of
Ben Webster’s sorrowful solos
January 12th, 2022
So long ago, before Ornette Coleman,
Coleman Hawkins, John Coltrane—
all those free spirits running up and down
the alphabet of jazz, there was old
J.S. Bach, running through the changes.
I always picture him, and hear him,
at the pipe organ in Tomas Kirsche
all by himself,
January 7th, 2022
Between the notes
lies the silenced passion and pain
of a people
too enormous for lyric expression
though the black dots on the page
attempt to decode the encrypted message.
January 1st, 2022
In the cold vastness of space without end,
we swirl through time, around the sun,
alone, unknown, unknowable, lonely
collections of stardust, certain we matter,
but vague as to why and how, unable
to prove our value, yet convinced we must
December 23rd, 2021
The woodshed was the hunting ground for wings of notes.
Black suits and ties, hipster hats and smoke rings of notes.
Was Robert Johnson alone, hellhound on his trail?
Was a deal made? Was Bird Satan’s plaything of notes?
December 21st, 2021
Trading Fours with Douglas Cole is an occasional series of the writer’s poetic interpretations of jazz recordings and film. This poem is written to the 1957 Coleman Hawkins recording of “Juicy Fruit.”
...December 17th, 2021
I live inside Erik Satie’s piano
with my dog.
Every day is early morning autumn here
The leaves never fall
inside Erik Satie’s piano – they dance
December 14th, 2021
Molly Larson Cook’s abstract-expressionist paintings accompany the 50 poets contributing to this collection. Her art has much in common with the poetry and music found within it; all three art forms can be described as “landscapes of the imagination,” created by artists from all over the world who are inspired in a meaningful way by jazz music, and whose work can be uniquely interpreted and appreciated (or not!) by those who consume it.
...December 10th, 2021
One of my greatest joys for decades
was exploring unknown record shops.
I once walked into a newly opened used
shop around the corner from my university
and discovered a used album, apparently
the improvisatory result of a session
set up by Norman Granz that included
December 8th, 2021
I never did read the news, though I don’t suppose
it made a splash in the Post or Herald Tribune–
with maybe just a line or two
among the baseball stats, divorces,
and the marches picking up
deep down in the Cotton States.
December 3rd, 2021
I sit on a balcony,
a cup of coffee held for warmth
on a chill spring morning,
as waxwings and vireos flit and flash,
percolating with song.
November 26th, 2021
I had a little radio up on top of the refrigerator, and I turned it on as the sunlight went and the world filled up with darkness. I listened to a jazz station and smoked a cigarette and blew the smoke out the window.
...November 18th, 2021
the
horns
blow
melodies
seduce
hairs
on the
back
of
necks
November 14th, 2021
You Supremes in your long black robes
are at it again, sitting as though on Olympus, while we
soulfully wait to hear if you’re in tune with our needs.
We know You Can’t Hurry Love, but
we’re anxious to see your next decree.
...November 9th, 2021
Julie London purrs.
Smooth, sultry, classy, sexy.
Temperatures rise.
November 5th, 2021
Wind sweeps through screen into living room;
papers dance across desk and floor;
an old woman’s hair floats,
a tattered flag of silver and gray;
November 2nd, 2021
On my walks alone lately I fantasize
that I’ll come across a woman my age
give or take a few years.
She’ll be listening to Miles, or Monk,
or Horace Silver, and reading
one of my poetry books.
October 29th, 2021
if i could
i’d ride the trains
again
just to make it all go
away
like that phone call i
got that evening
from sis
or that last conversation
we had
October 15th, 2021
The jazz DJ you listened to each morning
Is broadcasting from another sphere.
Perhaps you and Phil are parsing
Charlie Parker together.
His nasal voiced juicy lisp that spilled
details of Parker, Lester Young, and Coltrane,
no longer flies the airwaves in Birdflight.
October 12th, 2021
Having invented jazz, Buddy Bolden
Tried to imagine what else he’d invent,
Maybe the light bulb or dry cereal,
A cure for syphilis or dementia
Praecox, something he was familiar
With, but he stuck with jazz, American
And quintessential as coffee with milk
...October 3rd, 2021
Ferlinghetti at 101 took the cosmic bus home
this week. A life abundant, blessed with
art, poetry, creativity, and a lot of fun.
RingMaster for the poetry revolution,
Mr. San Francisco Big Daddy!
City Lights! The Mecca of hip!
September 28th, 2021
Dear Miss Ella, song supreme,
Improvisations sovereign –
I, swayed and moved by.
She, both modest, shy
Yet spoke of love (and what’s above),
Deserving place in poetry
Centered around her artistry –
The art of spontaneity;
A musicality called jazz!
September 21st, 2021
a strange caribbean woman
kneeled down
very close to me,
in my hospital recovery bed.
she seemed very animated
also even sensory
she gradually came closer
as she put her face next to mine.
September 16th, 2021
Dim dusk breaks down
the receding light and one after another
strands of the passing hour unravel
leaving behind an existence beyond time
that opens the doors to another world:
It’s late in the evening in a foreign metropolis
September 10th, 2021
High overhead (turned turned and turned
again) a bird defines wind currents.
Branches crackle wildly gesticulate
a confusion of gusts.
With grace and ease a student
navigates school rapids until
September 5th, 2021
Missa brevis —a little requiem. At most I know
perhaps forty Latin words and have already used up
four of them. Maybe not too bad for a Jew boy.
And besides, editors of poetry are always carping:
Keep it short.
August 23rd, 2021
“It’s not exclusive, but inclusive, which is the whole spirit of jazz.”
-Herbie Hancock
.
And…this spirit is not limited to the musicians, because celebrating jazz is rich in creative opportunity for writers and visual artists as well. The 54 poets who contribute to this poetry collection are living proof of that.
As always, thanks to the poets, and I hope you enjoy…
Joe
...August 19th, 2021
Almost sixty years
have passed yet
it could be today
she sings murder
oppression
protest in the streets
school children
sitting in jail
August 9th, 2021
water
cold
pleating
over
against
rock
planted
August 5th, 2021
Blossom Dearie sings Mad About The Boy.
Her fingers quicken over black & white bars.
A young man & woman fall in love during summer.
Moon climbs up the mountain, lips quiver
during their first kiss under stars.
...July 24th, 2021
My mouth hungry
ravenous lips slathered
with Radiant Ruby gloss
I dine on the very edges
of the celestial universe.
Ingest illumination
until my voice box
awakens antiquities,
beguiling even the moon.
July 15th, 2021
Sidney Bechet was a nasty man
ill-tempered and suspicious
– anything but jolly –
a man of hot and steamy trade
wielding the iron all morning
in his New York basement tailor shop
July 11th, 2021
Information about two newly published books by the poet Michael L. Newell
...July 9th, 2021
Taking Forster’s bucket
into the unknown
like Keith Jarrett
in Bremen sailing
into pianissimo
July 8th, 2021
Stella sticks her toes in the grass
and she don’t know the impact—
the moonlight bending on the bowing blades of grass
casting long shadows like tracks
I follow her, relaxed.
July 3rd, 2021
On my birthday in 1917, Jazz
was first recorded.
The time of Jelly Roll Morton was at
hand—the king of Blues,
June 29th, 2021
He hovers,
flesh and presence,
round the story of midnight jazz….
a single note hangs, suspended
in a cigarette-whiskey haze
as ears perk open, anticipate
the pleasure of surprise
June 24th, 2021
I’ll first catch “Song for My Father”
as Steely Dan churning in a tape deck between
the thin walls of this two-room cabin, biting
what I’ll later come to dig–Horace Silver’s opening bass notes,
June 19th, 2021
Spring rains watercolor the earth leaf, daffodil, violet,
then soften to a blue-gray mist,
and clear. Day’s begun transitioning, sky-bright blue to
lapis lazuli. Moon dreams in the north.
June 14th, 2021
a Saturday night
Blue Note
jam session
chaotic improvisation
settling into discordant conjunction
June 4th, 2021
Golden Gate
shadow arms
ocean and steel
ships of souls
harbors deep waters
avenues of piers
city welcome
the blood of youth
May 29th, 2021
Few artists inspire creativity like Miles Davis. This collection of poetry by 50 poets from all over the world is evidence of that.
...May 27th, 2021
Your blood, poisoned by neither drink nor drugs,
but the ravening appetite of some fickle force
we can’t fathom; the way hearts attack us or else
our systems are assailed by cells made to invade.
May 21st, 2021
“What’s he even mean by that,” my son asked the other day.
Whose love? What love? And for whom?
May 16th, 2021
. . Polydor Records, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Chick Corea, 1976 . . In Summa Summit ……………in memory of Chick Corea Pretty, I’ve got a postcard picture mind that finds windows inside a supermax where lost time and space are a double bind — the phenomenology of the sax remembered from all-night pot-toked jazz … Continue reading ““In Summa Summit” — a sonnet (in memory of Chick Corea) by John Kendall Hawkins”
...May 15th, 2021
It was the sixties.
“It’s cool,” he said.
“You’ll dig it.”
A row of attached
and run-down
brick three-stories
on a dark side-street
May 11th, 2021
My homing pigeon heart
Eternally it wings me
On a long journey back through time
We follow the north star to the lake
Of Neptune’s song and mermaid hair
And land beside that ramshackle cottage
May 8th, 2021
Sailing through a midnight sky,
entangled in pine branches,
a golden full moon graces
the night with a beauty
comparable to a Bill Evans
or Duke Ellington solo,
nothing needed to expand
the floating vision;
May 2nd, 2021
I believed you were still
in that orange plaid upholstered rocker
in the sunroom.
We danced our mutually agreed upon waltz.
You pretended you knew who I was. And I pretended
you hadn’t forgotten me.
April 23rd, 2021
On the day Miss Lena took her reward
I’m breaking bread w/Eddie
who shoveled her sidewalk as a kid
and picked Miss Ella’s roses.
High-fived Cootie runnin’ scales ’n
JB takin’ the bridge.
April 15th, 2021
I can see you sitting outside the Reno
where the Mob’s tight hold makes dollars spin.
You are scuffling the dust, then homing in
whenever Lester launches his solo.
April 6th, 2021
A poem by Michael Amitin celebrating John Coltrane’s classic “A Love Supreme” recording
...March 29th, 2021
A collection of the poet Erren Kelly’s unconstrained, improvisational and provocative poetry written during the era of COVID
...March 19th, 2021
Are you singing on balconies these days?
Do you still sing only in your car, radio tuned
to hot, blistering jazz?
March 15th, 2021
The poets Terrence Underwood and George Held write about the jazz pianist Thelonious Monk
...March 7th, 2021
In this winter collection of diverse themes and poetic styles, 55 poets wander the musical landscape to explore their spirit and enthusiasm for jazz music, its historic figures, and the passion, sadness, humor and joy it arouses.
...February 25th, 2021
The first flat of my own in Stockholm was
really small but in a nice area on one of
the islands south of the old town.
My girlfriend often stayed with me,
since her own flat was way out
in the suburbs.
February 13th, 2021
Yesterday removed from the warm artery of time
And the ground beneath my feet shrinking
Falling
Falling
Falling
into the ramshackle cottages
leaning together on the streets with no names
February 11th, 2021
Round Midnight at the Silver Seas Hotel
and falling stars parade through
an espresso black sky in Ocho Rios.
Caribbean waves lap against the sea wall
like brushes swishing against a snare.
February 7th, 2021
Wading through the gloaming, almost majestic,
looking ready for a coronation, the bird stretches
wings as though sweeping night air from his regal
January 27th, 2021
a lot of the trumpet players
I used to go hear, are all gone now
or too old to play.
clark terry
miles & maynard:
ray anthony’s still around though.
January 22nd, 2021
In this fifth collection of poetry reflecting these times, 33 poets offer their perspectives…
...January 20th, 2021
. . Inside the Village Vanguard, November, 2016 . ___ . . To The Audience Members Who Chatted During The Recording Of Bill Evans Trio Live At The Village Vanguard, June 25, 1961 . Relax, I will never scold, don’t shush. All music, like all moments, is soon lost. It’s vocal … Continue reading ““To The Audience Members Who Chatted During The Recording Of Bill Evans Trio Live At The Village Vanguard, June 25, 1961″ — a poem by John Riley”
...January 18th, 2021
Way back in the ‘40s,
she had a cat
black as night
and named it . . .
Well, you know.
This was the ‘40s
January 9th, 2021
a quid pro quo threw knives
into the government’s heart
a coup to reinstate an orange plague
almost happened
combustion
fueled by messianic idiocy
used privilege to smash windows
& attempt abduction of evidence for a nation’s choice
January 8th, 2021
Bobbin’ an’ weavin’
schuckin’ an’ jivin’
I’m comin’ up.
I’m comin’ up.
Down the corridor, I walk—
square ring stage
Garden audience awaits.
January 4th, 2021
Thank you dogs that started barking
who made me turn the jazz up on New Year’s Eve
loud
loud
loud
so mutilated America would hear what horns are supposed to sound like
December 30th, 2020
Never up first, he was always
downstairs first, his four little boys
aligned like ascending angels
up the polished staircase, already
dressed, eager to see the tree,
December 23rd, 2020
Bethlehem lies far away from here
and home is a speck in the eyes of dreamers
we had to getaway to get our
peace on earth
December 18th, 2020
Halyards play jazz
snapping rhythm
against sailboat masts.
Floating docks moan.
The sloop rocks.
December 16th, 2020
Imagine the ocean
and holding it
Back
with only two hands,
and one outsized mind.
Only God,
or the moon,
can move the tides.
December 9th, 2020
Jazz and poetry have always had a symbiotic relationship. Their creative languages share the common soil of imagination and improvisation, from which their audiences discover inspiration and spirit, and perhaps even a renewed faith in life itself.
This collection features 50 gifted poets from places as disparate as Ohio and Nepal, Estonia and Boston, Guyana and Pittsburgh, each publicly sharing their inner world reverence for the culture of jazz music.
...December 3rd, 2020
In the mountains
trees practice for winter,
dropping their leaves.
Birds, like thin farmhands,
sweep down on rutted back roads,
begging for food.
It’s Thanksgiving.
November 26th, 2020
To where have our better angels flown
Instead of wings, ghoulish shadows darken our skies
So___ past the book stalls and flower carts
And down the Champs-Elysees stretch
naked tables and vacant chairs
November 24th, 2020
We tripped through the parking lot and fell into the Woods—
Brown Amphitheater, then rested a bit as musicians tuned up.
When John McLaughlin’s first eerie notes of “Birds of Fire”
came through, we were taken by surprise. I’d thought
we were going to India, instead it was a caravanserai
to hear the scream of the butterfly.
November 20th, 2020
Beautiful skin,
infinite shades & tones
deep black to crescent white,
golden yellow to indigenous red.
November 17th, 2020
Too many miles, far away from
home, my girl’s photo in my pocket
mine in her gold locket, above
my bunk, Lena smiling down on
me, my girl, she don’t mind
she knows I love her, she knows
she too is fine
November 11th, 2020
Another new time is upon us
We must again touch the mobile of life
So the parts may re-wed in a new balance
November 3rd, 2020
On the cusp of an election of consequence the likes of which America hasn’t experienced for 150 years, and in the midst of continued Black Lives Matter protests and an indisputable surge of COVID, 29 poets sharing perspectives from all over the world contribute to this volume of poetry reflecting our tumultuous, unsettling era…
...October 29th, 2020
in evening western sky, golden clouds pile
beneath sinking crimson sun and spill
toward river and ocean with the beauty
and rhythmic precision of notes tumbling
from a vibraphone during a dazzling
improvisation by Milt Jackson
October 26th, 2020
No Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, King Oliver, Satch Mo’ and his velvety horn, No royalty of Jazz! No A Train taking us uptown, no Langston Hughes, or Zora Neale Hurston. No Chuck Berry and rock and roll
...October 20th, 2020
She started to scat, I started to cry.
My tears taste like salt baked on my lips.
I hear her soft voice
like the river I walk to each morning.
I carry a jar to give her the river.
October 16th, 2020
He closed almost every show with that tune.
It was so like him.
After giving us more than we ever knew
could be coaxed from a piano
or a trombone…
he thanked us.
October 9th, 2020
I am probably being
followed online by
the CIA
because I have listened
to your poems on YouTube,
you were just that
revolutionary! You were
just that powerful of a poet
my teacher
October 7th, 2020
a touch of salt
peppered with depth
the bang of delivery
served up
as cymbals sizzle
in smoke clouds
of madness
October 4th, 2020
An invitation was extended recently to poets to submit work that reflects this time of COVID, Black Lives Matter, and a heated political season. In this third volume, 33 poets contribute…
...September 25th, 2020
September’s breeze slightly more than a whisper
rubs shoulders with a tired overheated August sky
summer makes its exit seeks retirement
from a year struck by ten swords
September 23rd, 2020
My Motherland, like:
Jack Kerouac
like
blow-on-subject-seas-of-thought like
hip hip Ginsberg clackin’ right at it, like
eye on the rug, boy
September 19th, 2020
The herd, now scattered, tired, and thinned
lies down in the electric wind
which cools the summer air and ground
so sleep may come, however sound
September 15th, 2020
There it was
On the waterfront bench
Tempting me
In this Summer of
Covid inspired fears
A little flower framed heart
With the message
Free! Enjoy!
Smile
September 10th, 2020
1963 and Mingus and his mighty band
of musicians play and sing “Freedom,”
as marchers for freedom fill streets
throughout the South,
August 30th, 2020
. . “Clifford Brown” is a painting by Warren Goodson, a Saxapahaw, North Carolina artist whose work is driven by his appreciation for Black culture. With his gracious consent, Mr. Goodson’s art is featured throughout this collection. . . _____ . . “Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.” -Lawrence Ferlinghetti … Continue reading “A Collection of Jazz Poetry — Summer, 2020 Edition”
...August 24th, 2020
The needle drops on Charlie Parker
playing “Relaxin’ at Camarillo”
the boy lies on the floor
of his room and listens to the gorgeous ease
the affirmation
buoyant love song
August 14th, 2020
A marker for memory,
a last thought,
for the trumpet that opened the gates
at the end of the world,
and passed on into forever.
August 9th, 2020
23 poets contribute 26 poems that speak to the era of COVID, Black Lives Matter, and a heated political season
...July 30th, 2020
The loss of Annie Ross
Is loss indeed.
I was a teen in ’53.
Mom owned along with Slim Gaillard
The first jazz club in all Long Island.
July 25th, 2020
If the sea keeps rising
it will reach Pittsburgh tomorrow
and I will put on new clothes
and forget Myrtle Beach
and Charleston
and the Outer Banks
July 20th, 2020
Music
gathers all our grief and rage,
transforms it into rhythmic dots
that dance across an open page,
which hearts and mouths and fingers strive
to share upon the human stage.
July 10th, 2020
Must I retrieve my black leather
jacket from the chest in my closet
My Afro pick, discarded in a
forgotten drawer?
July 4th, 2020
Despite the many trials
and tribulations of black folks
here in America, as a means of survival
my people have learned to laugh and smile
in the face of adversity.
June 27th, 2020
I recently extended an invitation to poets to submit work that reflects this time of COVID, Black Lives Matter, and a heated political season.
What follows are some of those submitted. More will appear in the future.
-Joe Maita/Editor and Publisher
...June 18th, 2020
. . photo by Tengilorg / CC BY . . While Playing A Vinyl Record Music lightens blue mood. It softens mind like feather floating towards earth, then brushes against cheek, chin and ear. Body sways with Jazz in air. A tickle on skin, sensations cradled in ears, harvesting goodness like wheat to enjoy … Continue reading “Poetry by Jerrice Baptiste and Moe Seager”
...June 12th, 2020
. . © Veryl Oakland Bill Evans, Berkeley, California; April, 1969 . . Listening to Bill Evans, June 2020 First the piano by itself— after months of darkness after a Winter of clouds and wind after discontent after lies and lies explaining lies and prayers and ice and rivers forgetting to … Continue reading ““Listening to Bill Evans, June 2020” — a poem by John Stupp”
...June 12th, 2020
. . photo/National Park Service South Kaibab Trail in Grand Canyon National Park . ___ . At the Grand Canyon A white man and a black man stand side by side on this precipice, silently looking across the Grand Canyon, watching the revolutionary ravens surf the deep blue ocean of sky and … Continue reading ““At the Grand Canyon” — a poem by T.S. Davis”
...June 5th, 2020
no wars
no greed
no famine
no disease
just rainbows
and blessings
May 31st, 2020
. . photo Bret Stewart/Wikimedia Commons . . Afterwards …………………….For the Spring of 2020 . …………………..“The World Breaks Everyone, And Afterwards, ……………………Many Are Stronger At The Broken Places.” …………………………………………………………….– Ernest Hemingway. . many, many, years ago …………I was in need …………………..of some extra money. I had decided …………to sell my upright 1940’s ………………….. kay … Continue reading ““Afterwards — For the Spring, 2020” — a poem by Alan Yount”
...May 23rd, 2020
. . . …..The poet Michael L. Newell, whose work has often appeared in the pages of Jerry Jazz Musician, has informed me that his new book, Wandering, is now available. Published by cyberwit.net, the book features selections of his poetry from the past fifty years. …..Michael draws readers into his lyrical, vast world with … Continue reading “News about the poet Michael L. Newell”
...May 22nd, 2020
33 poets from all over the globe contribute 47 poems. Expect to read of love, loss, memoir, worship, freedom, heartbreak and hope – all collected here, in the heart of this unsettling spring.
...May 12th, 2020
The flute floats a legato stream of notes,
blood from the heart pouring in a lucent stream,
brilliant as a harvest moon filling the sky
with radiance such as the flutist releases
May 6th, 2020
Which to recue first:
The Human right or the human left?
No, neither
But the human heart
From every human center
May 3rd, 2020
That massive blind face, rough hewn
As any one of Michelangelo’s Captives,
Fills the cover of his first Columbia LP.
White beard. Capped head.
The cloak a part of the costume he wore
As “the Viking of 6th Avenue,”
May 2nd, 2020
In the late late light of the Delta
I look up to see the tugs glide by
above the levy
flying high above the Quarter
as if to shrug and say
What else you gonna do?
April 25th, 2020
now frequent outside
bouyant butterflies drift
through a rush of hot breeze
…………blending
with dry yellow
Black Olive leaves
...April 21st, 2020
Speak memory—
of the cunning hero
from Little Italy
the archtop carver
the workshop magician
blown off course time and again
April 15th, 2020
the rhythmic flow
that trills and travels—
a saxophone
exploring sound—
the making time
to trace each riff,
watching it wander
all around
April 10th, 2020
rain’s elegant tap dance
across rooftop across
windowpane has sorrowful
joy of old
folk tune plucked
April 8th, 2020
i listen to wallace roney
as i watch the sun rise
i make a safe haven out of
jazz
this music is social
but right now, i am alone
April 4th, 2020
What is an arpeggio
…………….that it sails
…………………………….so quickly –
…………………………………………ear to heart,
April 3rd, 2020
sits on a shelf, forgotten save when I open
the closet, and feel my aching knees complain
of hours spent crouched behind home plate
where I had no thought of any consequence
other than winning or losing
April 2nd, 2020
There is a great banging coming from inside the brewery
while out here in the sun my blood knocks at the blue
ceilings of my veins like an irate tenant in the apartment
one floor down unprepared for that first blast of Lee
Morgan’s trumpet
March 31st, 2020
that intro, dat bass
a Mount Rushmore of jazz players
listen how Miles
utilises space in his solo
humanity reached its peak in evolution
at 1:32—the best cymbal crash
into a laid-back groove ever
March 28th, 2020
Chet Baker’s trumpet sings
unrestricted airwaves
in a senseless world
lonely trees by the promenade
wooden arms and hands
feel wind’s breath
March 26th, 2020
I wasn’t expecting the sound of seagulls
& water when I popped out of 2 train
at 135th Street
Randy birds mating,
attacking trash bags
outside of Harlem Medical Center
March 18th, 2020
“Doc, here’s my dizzy symptom:
I’m buying these skinny books
like they’re jazz CD’s—
rackin’ ‘em up on the changer,
five at a time, punchin’ in
‘All Disks’ and ‘Shuffle,’
March 13th, 2020
Do you believe in God
after hearing McCoy Tyner
on My Favorite Things
who wouldn’t
hallowed be his holy name
March 6th, 2020
They slip in from the sidewalk one by one
as the day dims to brown. Some stake tables
near the stage, some lean against the bar.
March 4th, 2020
Walking on the wall around Jerusalem’s Old City
I meet Gary, a potter from New Orleans.
He tells me he’s hitchhiking to Africa
but talks mostly about music—
February 21st, 2020
The winter collection of poetry offers readers a look at the culture of jazz music through the imaginative writings of its 32 contributors. Within these 41 poems, writers express their deep connection to the music – and those who play it – in their own inventive and often philosophical language that communicates much, but especially love, sentiment, struggle, loss, and joy.
...February 17th, 2020
Dancing with you
I’m not aware that one leg is
shorter than the other
or perhaps one leg is longer
than the other,
February 14th, 2020
Shepp, believing in the immortality
of Malcolm’s significance, murmurs,
a few weeks after his murder,
“Semper Malcolm” over disjointed jazz,
February 11th, 2020
over the image of a city sidewalk
broadly peopled like in
tight dollied crane shots
topcoat thick with
jump notes coming in swarms
February 5th, 2020
even in winter, she is a fire blazing, her eyes are
like the the clearest lake or the best dream or
like an opal, where night finds its song
January 29th, 2020
After a New Year
not the first sunrise
not the first cold bus
not the first trip along the Ohio
not the first day at work
not any of those things
there is nothing special about this morning
January 22nd, 2020
I got da bones
of jazz
scratched out
in diners
back alleys
and cellar stairs
January 11th, 2020
And the clouds
unfastened their seat belts
and fell across the roads and rivers
so Pittsburgh looked like it was a flying pig
January 6th, 2020
. . . We Call Him Man-Man ……………In honor of my grandson, Domonic His name is Domonic, we call him Man-Man Only 13, but whatever he wants to do he can He has music running through his veins Beats, rhythms, melodies on his brain At 6 he played the drums in the school drumline moving … Continue reading ““We Call Him Man-Man” — a poem by Aurora M. Lewis”
...January 5th, 2020
stepping up the stairway
I carry my trumpet up here
*****
up here in the partial dark
at seventy-two years
December 31st, 2019
There will be no presents, wrapped or not.
Gifts can be sought, bought, ought to
Anytime, occasion rhyming with a need one’s own.
Food? By all means, and of course!
Lots of courses, for it’s fun to cook,
Break traditions, keeping some.
Summing up a feel and food one’s own.
December 24th, 2019
What song sings the earth’s Requiem
The end note in the last stanza of the final chorus
A screaming sax? A trumpet’s ache?
In the Amazon, in California, blazes of wildfires
...December 14th, 2019
In Central Park, New York,
a vigil for dead Lennon.
Sandra, living in Merthyr Tydfil
(the kids now ten and eight),
shooshes them, and Barry’s said
he’ll get them off to bed.
December 8th, 2019
I have had the privilege of publishing John Stupp’s poetry for several years now. Every time he gifts me with an email stuffed with submissions, I eagerly open it like a kid unwrapping the shiniest package under the tree. His creativity is really, honestly, that special.
...December 4th, 2019
It was a rainy Thanksgiving when
everyone I was related to
or knew even somewhat
were out of town.
I found some semi-edible
turkey at Hughes Market, along
with frozen stuffing that proved
reasonably tasty, adequate
November 28th, 2019
I remember a Polish jazz combo I once saw in a movie
about Jews and nuns and suicide. It was after the war
and the band played in basement clubs –
November 20th, 2019
Twenty-eight poets contribute 37 poems to the Jerry Jazz Musician Fall Poetry Collection, living proof that the energy and spirit of jazz is alive — and quite well.
(Featuring the art of Russell Dupont)
.
...November 11th, 2019
gee baby
hurt is just
…………………a thought away;
let the blue the color
of your true love’s eyes
…………….as you slow dance
with their departing memory.
October 25th, 2019
My striking wife
is the cat’s strut—
cello sass
with a syncopated
escalator to
move
October 19th, 2019
Like the song,
“Autumn Leaves,”
thoughts of him
drifted by her windowsill.
October 11th, 2019
Where blood pulses, where
nerves thrum, fingertips
hum with scrape of strings,
September 20th, 2019
It’s all about the jazz…
Sonny Fortune at Boomer’s
Illinois Jacquet on 58th Street
Duvivier and Cheatham at Highlights
September 12th, 2019
They
start
right now.
Something new?
Some chords, progression.
...September 8th, 2019
warped certified gold hangs over the shoulder,
…………………………………blue on the wall,
……………..notes on Trane (Coltrane).
September 7th, 2019
Zoot blew this earth
into a friendlier place—
I can still see,
at the Half Note,
his rough angel face
September 3rd, 2019
. . CC0 Public Domain Power house mechanic working on steam pump photo by Lewis Hine, 1920. . . . Vespers In the foundry men made engine blocks ate dirt ate sand made fire Henry Ford was the captain and his word was law when a shift was done there was a … Continue reading ““Vespers” — a poem by John Stupp”
...September 2nd, 2019
Bent over his guitar, bobbing
to its rhythm, he sits on the center wall
that runs the length of the breakwater
August 24th, 2019
. . Photo by. Marco Chilese .on. Unsplash . . Prayer to the Three Rivers in Pittsburgh . Who I love who I pray for more than anyone but my wife and children do you think of me beautiful Allegheny when you reach the Gulf of Mexico? Monongahela what about you? and … Continue reading “Poetry by Michael L. Newell and John Stupp”
...August 14th, 2019
. . Rahsaan Roland Kirk at the Jazz Workshop, San Francisco April, 1967 (photo by permission Veryl Oakland) . . FROM FLYTOWN When I die I want them to play the Black and Crazy Blues, I want to be cremated, put in a bag of pot and I want beautiful people to smoke me … Continue reading “Poems for Rahsaan Roland Kirk — by John L. Stanizzi”
...August 1st, 2019
Seventeen poets contribute to a collection of jazz poetry reflecting an array of energy, emotion and improvisation
...July 25th, 2019
. . . Climate Change If the sea keeps rising it will reach Pittsburgh tomorrow and I will put on new clothes and forget Myrtle Beach and Charleston and the Outer Banks and I will pray with the fish over rusty mills and trade places with ore cars and cranes roses are red … Continue reading ““Climate Change” — a poem by John Stupp”
...July 20th, 2019
There can be bebop and billowing skirts,
hot pastrami and cold beer, but only if
we’re good.
July 8th, 2019
all night I dreamed I was lost
at sea in an alley on a battlefield
in a junkyard in a waterfront dive
when suddenly I found a room
filled with music where fear
was eased where losses were mourned
June 28th, 2019
Jazz
is
a charged trap in chill-charmed, ginger jams.
Chaz
says
their charts changed the channel from the jejune chants.
June 25th, 2019
Nineteen-seventies half-heard-of place.
You needed to tread up through the garlic
and the raspberry canes to the hall,
a sort of hall, with a lovely grained
and golden floor. Sometimes committees
of a kind would sit around there
June 17th, 2019
my grandmother always said
my father had all the luck.
he was in all the right places
at the right time.
June 15th, 2019
In this month’s collection, with great jazz artists at the core of their work, 16 poets remember, revere, ponder, laugh, dream, and listen
...June 6th, 2019
swollen with spring rain
creek sings in crooked path round
boulders trees down mountainside
a song wild as Coltrane solo
...June 1st, 2019
A low tide
in South Carolina recedes
like the end of a Sonny Rollins solo
until
sand leaves its resume in the inlet
or until
pelicans take the remaining choruses
out where the ocean says I am the God
May 24th, 2019
Watching the documentary
I CALLED HIM MORGAN
it began to gnaw at me
that I’d been unfair to Helen
May 15th, 2019
This empty quarter inside him,
inside his still-beating heart,
was full of song and fun.
There was loud pizzicato music
and air and spirits flying about
all bright things in sight.
May 12th, 2019
This month, in a special collection of poetry, eight poets contribute seventeen poems focused on stories about family, and honoring mothers and fathers
...May 8th, 2019
. . . . Trajet Introspeculative — to Sun Ra, Saturday night: on one (actually, Sun Da morning) — terrible swift disin- clination to forgive the equally terrible tyranny of time signa- ture, attesting to what can, which must not — that, that ken abundant wherever choi- ces be told: rs, joints, and drums, … Continue reading “Two poems by John Jack Jackie (Edward) Cooper”
...May 7th, 2019
choirs of insects serenade night
couples bury faces in lovers’ hair
distant train’s cry soars through dark
May 2nd, 2019
It sounded like, “Che ate Pat’s grandma”!
And I’m like…. Before I forget, the “Check Engine”
April 27th, 2019
I only rose after I heard the horn
Good Mary gave up
On me
But my soul only knows the
Song Miles sing
He made it with notes
April 21st, 2019
Steve Dalachinsky, a New York poet whose work is often published on Jerry Jazz Musician, is currently in Paris, and contributes two timely poems…
...April 20th, 2019
I’ve suffered Winter
enough America says
shoveling the 1930’s
and scraping
and shivering
April 19th, 2019
it was inevitable that eventually the voodoo would run you down
catch you and carry you away so you left with him on the sorcerer’s train
April 12th, 2019
Seventeen poets contribute 21 poems in this month’s edition…
...April 10th, 2019
The poets Ed Coletti, Arlene Corwin, Roger Singer and Michael Keshigian celebrate jazz music…
...April 3rd, 2019
has 10 Picasso’s in Timbuktu
says the sand dunes in the sahara are
sensual & soft
refers to that desert as “she”
carries secrets in his water sack
March 29th, 2019
Weathered and calm,
A slight, gray haired saxophonist,
Peers out at the world around him,
He steps forward,
and begins a conversational discourse,
March 22nd, 2019
. . . . Miles In five notes …all the sadness of life A pause___ long enough …for another sorrow ………to slip in And then___ a note so piercing, …it hurts . by Susandale . . ___ . . . Susandale’s poems and fiction are on .WestWard Quarterly, Mad Swirl, Penman … Continue reading ““Miles” — a poem by Susandale”
...March 15th, 2019
18 poets contribute 20 poems to the March collection
...March 8th, 2019
in the toilette
in front of gate 73
Louis Armstrong sings & plays
i can’t see him but i know he’s here
he’s soloing
March 7th, 2019
I intended to be up there – way up there –
Vermont, perhaps,
playing jazz
into the blue
predawn hours
sipping something strong.
March 1st, 2019
Storyville a bit of hell in the city of Saints
Piano men played ragtime and honky-tonk
It was there Buddy Bolden with his cornet
February 22nd, 2019
Like rivers
bubbling to the surface
he brings
the vibrations
of jazz
blending into
shadowed corners
where light pushes in
February 19th, 2019
when thinking
of this idea,
I always,
think of someone playing
February 14th, 2019
It is the silent song
inside his head
inside his heart
inside his ear,
February 10th, 2019
John Coltrane
A bitter wind blows thru A LOVE SUPREME
& people are still waiting for the Ascension
with their eyes closed teeth clenched & fingers crossed
February 5th, 2019
Twelve poets contribute 15 poems to this month’s collection
...February 5th, 2019
. . . . SERENDIPITY As I walk down the dirt road from my job, headed slowly home, I pass a few people wandering here and there as their work day ends; I amble past an old home with a corrugated metal roof, bricks holding down the sheets of metal from blowing away, a … Continue reading ““Serendipity” — a poem by Michael L. Newell”
...February 1st, 2019
Apollo Blue, come blow harmonica.
The blues in the meadow, the brass in the horn.
The drum hammers beating where thunder is born.
January 29th, 2019
The snow flows
across the night
each flake a note
one pure blues note
unrepeated unequalled
throughout all recorded time
January 17th, 2019
Guitar has provenance:
American women, Baez, Mitchell,
lingered over thrumming strings,
hair flopped in absorption.
January 14th, 2019
. . “Billie Holiday” by Steve Dalachinsky . . Billie Holiday someone’s special greatness hides inside us somewhere like a strange fruit……..unexplainable hard ripe rotten..fine..fractured but mellow filled with love…disappointment & solitude & heavy like…a rock in one’s heart you may make it or you may die in your room overlooking the park….or an … Continue reading ““Billie Holiday” — a poem (with collage) by Steve Dalachinsky”
...January 7th, 2019
. . In this collection, nine poets contribute ten poems celebrating jazz in poems as unique as the music itself . . . . I Am Jazz . I Am Jazz. It is my nature to evolve, to change and adapt. I’m restless. I move towards a future I cannot see or predict. … Continue reading “A collection of poetry celebrating the culture of jazz — January, 2019”
...January 7th, 2019
. . . . AS DAY ENDS . Clark Terry’s horn unleashes a silvery note ……………….that ascends ………………………ever higher ………………………………to join a golden full moon ………………………………………rising into early evening orbit. When the note ends, listeners discover they have forgotten ……………….to breathe, ………………………and slowly rejoin ………………………………………their quiet neighborhood and prepare for sleep ………where they will drift … Continue reading “Two poems for the New Year…by Alan Yount and Michael L. Newell”
...December 31st, 2018
. . . . . He Wrote a Song for Tina Monk’s first love was Ruby, McCoy Tyner wrote of Aisha, Miles, Back Seat Betty and he wrote a song for Tina the one who broke his heart, led astray only to creep back in again with someone else’s baby, I nursed his wounds gave … Continue reading ““He Wrote a Song for Tina” — a poem by Aurora Lewis”
...December 26th, 2018
. . . Cool Blue He leaned back, closed his eyesand blew and knewthat next to him a string bass twirled,was plucked and plinked, and the drumwas a follow-up man with a tin cancollecting coins from flat handsmeeting in the darkto celebrate the soulfulsound of his breathbecause the moon was fulland the night cooland … Continue reading “Three poems by Phyllis Wax”
...December 19th, 2018
. . 12 poets contribute 19 poems dedicated to the culture of jazz music, and to the holiday season… . . Collage by Steve Dalachinsky John Stupp’s third poetry collection Pawleys Island was published in 2017 by Finishing Line Press. His manuscript Summer Job won the 2017 Cathy Smith Bowers Poetry Prize and will … Continue reading “Poetry celebrating jazz and the holiday season”
...December 14th, 2018
SONGBIRD a blues note broken in the middle the songbird in the brambles startled into silence shame for the intrusion all autumn I have wandered in search of a music which would still this dull grief for every person I see wandering alone every child I see looking at the world with a … Continue reading ““Songbird” — a poem by Michael L. Newell”
...December 14th, 2018
So many great poetry submissions of late, for which I am incredibly thankful. The spirit within every poem received — whether published or not — is evident and cheered and appreciated.
Here are three recent arrivals…
Happy Thanksgiving, peace and blessings to all.
_____
The Keyboard Player
by Robert Nisbet
Daily, he worked from nine o’clock till five.
His life and family and things were fine.
For some the moment, the anticipatory one,
...November 21st, 2018
Those interested in the power and possibility of mingling poetry and music – especially jazz music – will find great joy in a 10 minute conversation between Brazilian singer and composer Luciana Souza and NPR’s Lisa Mullins, in which Souza discusses her 2018 album, The Book of Longing. The album features poems by
...November 17th, 2018
In honor of Veterans Day
Eight poets — John Stupp, Aurora Lewis, Michael L. Newell, Robert Nisbet, Alan Yount, Roger Singer, dan smith and Joan Donovan — write about the era of World War II
...
November 12th, 2018
two hepcats scat sing
drum the hippest
of hip music
advertise “Love for Sale”
in wild musical riffs
dancing through air
nothing held back
all is passion
imagination
total physical commitment
November 9th, 2018
I saw the nod of the piano-man —
Launched into the written introduction
Of melody & theme weaving practiced notes
Inside and around the bass & percussion’s tempo.
Delightful eight bars — an in-unison quartet
November 5th, 2018
You were reading Bukowski.
The trio was playing Imagine.
Pretty sounds for our satisfaction.
I said Bukowski was a tough mother.
October 31st, 2018
Ilya Bernstein, Freddington, Michael L. Newell, Stephen R. Walsh and Dan Franch contribute to this fine collection of poetry…
...October 8th, 2018
FULL OF FAT From discarded crumbs, like falling stars onto stage horns and strings form dreams from blues and tears, where fear has no place and lies provides promises past midnight while jazz makes people hungry and rhythm tops off the soul like cities next to rivers smothering the seeds of … Continue reading “Two new Roger Singer poems”
...September 26th, 2018
Time is all time
for the player in cosmic space.
Undo the bolts & let fly
or jump back in the box
and die.
These are your reality implications
on any day of earth-clinging.
But as to the progressive continuance
of organic life on this orb,
September 19th, 2018
charlie parker
sits on the end
of my bed
holding his alto sax.
and for pete’s sake! mr. traps:
buddy rich was also there,
getting his drum kit ready
by the end of the bed.
then ray brown’s there
and making a
September 13th, 2018
In early morning silence,
breathing is audible.
Steam rises from tea.
A train’s whistle moans
in the distance, and I
whisper to the night
secrets I share with
...September 6th, 2018
there’s new Coltrane out
lost recordings tootin’ the devil’s horn
and while I’ve been leery
of these “new” releases, how
wrong can John Go?
even John on scat is pure
...August 29th, 2018
Concert postings and colored stickers on the crossbeams,
black-clad cyclists crossing East River—
I remember when nobody pedaled
past your grim entrance—around 1985,
when Garden Cafeteria had to close
to keep the junkies out.
They even shut you down in ’88,
said you were
August 21st, 2018
Eight poets — Michael L. Newell, Aurora Lewis, Roger Singer, Lawrence J. Klumas, Freddington, Victor Enns, dan smith and John Stupp — connect their poems to the spirit of jazz in this eight page collection…
...August 10th, 2018
Weave for me a basket of brotherhood.
For the frame choose a hardy bark
of inclusiveness
And within the waters of redemption
Soak long the grasses and stalks
To strip racism from their barks
To make pliable their
August 2nd, 2018
wind howls through trees round
corners shaking bushes windows eaves
lightning fractures night and all
you locked up in memory too fragile
to be handled comes tumbling out
July 26th, 2018
Wizard of Cool
Eyes liken to a bird of prey
having seen, what we would
never see as he blew phenomenal
madness into the heavens
taking our breath away
On a level, others tried to perpetrate
my first time, Live at the Blackhawk
July 20th, 2018
There’s a pawnshop in Tarzana
Called Thrifty Pawn & Loan.
And propped up in the window
Is a haunted saxophone.
The tag says “50 dollars-
A sweet and honeyed tone”
But fifty bucks ain’t all you pay
July 16th, 2018
Her name practically scats itself,
Say it out loud, and you’re on your way,
It’s a grand stand big band criss-cross delivery,
An overnight town to town swing set deluxe,
July 9th, 2018
Midnight and we sail on a boundless sea
nothing in sight but a vast pool of black
dimly lit by starlight sprawled without end
June 28th, 2018
This ground is mine.
I sweat it into growing.
My eyes water the sound
while my hands grasp
the dirt,
holding its generations
of dust and stone
with a blending of
June 21st, 2018
sitting on the top of my dad’s tombstone
… in sedalia, missouri,
I was thinking
of how much
we practiced
our horns together.
you played
...June 17th, 2018
Oh Lord
I was thinking is there anything better
than chorus girls dancing in unison to Thelonius Monk
I beseech thee Lord on my deathbed kick my
June 15th, 2018
When the needle touches
the wax that will sing
the collected prayers
of A Love Supreme, it’s
like the
June 11th, 2018
The carpenter (whose hands have grown
too large for the twenty house town
he was born in) sticks out his thumb
and catches a jet to Los Angeles where
he drowns off the Santa Monica beach trying
to ride a wave to beautiful downtown Burbank.
II.
His sister stays home and marries
the county’s star high school running back
who turns into the
June 2nd, 2018
Here in this place
forces are in motion.
Truth is in the notation.
Beauty in improvisation.
Forward, forward, forward
speak the drums
to our spirituality.
The ritual function of
May 26th, 2018
You are amused
by my passion
for taxicabs.
Their drivers know
where we are
going.
We don’t need a
...May 19th, 2018
“Who,” you ask.
“Chris Connor,” I repeat.
“Oh, sure, right,” you say
(with little enthusiasm.)
“You have to listen, really listen,” I say.
“O.K.” (an acquiescence).
I carefully place the vinyl record
on the Rek-O-Kut turntable.
May 15th, 2018
Jacko the Jazzman, office hack,
computer screen by day. At nights
he roams the pubs and village halls,
blowing his sax’s rise and fall.
May 10th, 2018
The wind blew all afternoon,
blue my mood, moody the blues
on the box, bleak and blue when
Robert Johnson took over the airwaves;
the wind blew louder and then
May 3rd, 2018
Albert Ayler, the Cleveland-born saxophonist whose unorthodox style was inspirational to a generation of free jazz-era and contemporary musicians, is noted in four poems, by four poets
...May 1st, 2018
It doesn’t help
that my guitar starts complaining
ok
a 1935 Epiphone Broadway
probably had owners who were better players before me
sure
and probably was in show business
when there was such a business
and probably
April 24th, 2018
April 15th, 2018
And a daughter is not enough or a son
or be a couple with someone who would stick thru all the shit
or the idea of a family
and god or the belief to a higher being is not enough.
The cheap girls and empty sex are always there but never
April 9th, 2018
The sightless pianist,
Presents the information,
The ideas,
Ornate and complex,
yet always grounded in logic,
The practical applications
of a mountain of details,
and the harmony hidden
April 5th, 2018
Snow & Ridge our rock n roll Mecca.
The Tastee Shoppe jukebox our holy of holies
best for miles around was our Kaaba
where Elmore James’s Dust My Broom
sent shock waves through my hormone addled brain
& Night Train by Rusty Bryant & his Carolyn Club orchestra
was a bump & grind fantasy of rockin’ & rollin’ ecstasy.
April 2nd, 2018
a girl dances alone in a room
to an old blues tune sung
on a boom box by Mance Lipscomb
she whirls leaps and floats
on her toes with
March 25th, 2018
At the piano
his two hands pump fingers
wide in unison
one hand does one thing
the other another
his eyes fixed on the sheet
music sheathed in
March 19th, 2018
March 14th, 2018
Theirs’ was a kind of mediation between then and now
No, it was a meditation on their only freedom: the deliverance of their music
No, no: a melding. One musician calling out: another answering.
Or maybe, a metaphor for the chorus of life
The way Lady-Day lamented the brief glory of
February 27th, 2018
Excursions in free-fixed melodic,
A quirk-offering; dust of suitcase-bearing dreams
Plucking away sobriety in taps of steps
Blending day chords with night rhythms
An immediate perfume, instinctively
February 19th, 2018
In anticipation of Valentine’s Day, I recently invited many of our contributing poets to submit work that combines the themes of jazz music and love, with the result being a collection of voices expressing their own contributions to the language of love…
Dozens of writers submitted over 100 poems, and the best of the submissions — 29 poems by 18 poets — are found on the following 12 pages. Advance through the selections by utilizing the page monitor at the bottom of each page.
Many thanks to everyone who submitted their work.
JJM
...February 14th, 2018
the music’s so profound
so round & loud
& full of love
her word not mine
how stupid to argue over little
nothings
stupid to wrap ourselves around
February 6th, 2018
Jazz rich,
falling water
a stream of story’s
open bleeding
years releasing pain
backside alleys
whispers without words
tan and white
February 1st, 2018
A wealth of excellent poetry has been submitted recently. Poems by Steven Dalachinsky, Michael L. Newell, John Stupp, Ron Kolm, and Freddington are examples…
...January 29th, 2018
Godmother of the gypsy tramp
half-breed goddess, unparalleled queen
of less is more, effortless weaver
of that old black magic—
your strength lay in the space between
the screaming sax and the scatting singer.
If midnight blue velvet were sound,
January 24th, 2018
(in response to an invitation
musical and raucous from the fingers
of Wild Bill Davis tickling the keys
of his organ seeking a musical response
by someone and something of equal stature)
Illinois I say accepted the challenge and blew
some blue some very blue blue blue notes
that set listeners
January 19th, 2018
Poetry is a courageous art form. No poet can possibly succeed without the willingness to create a completely transparent window into his or her soul. A poet rarely achieves by faking it.
A successful poet’s thoughts are naked to the world, and this full-on exposure — because it is so often blunt and painful for the poet — leaves the reader with a reasonable understanding of lives led and footsteps taken (or not). These revelations build a rewarding and intimate connection.
I have never met or spoken to Mike Faran, whose poetry I occasionally publish on Jerry Jazz Musician. I only outwardly know him by the short biography he sent me — retired lobster trap builder from Ventura who has had some work published in journals around the country. That’s it, really. I don’t even have a photo of him.
He has periodically sent me emails with a poem or two attached to them, seeking my interest in publishing them. (“Here is another poem that I hope will meet with your approval.”) Although I haven’t published them all, they almost always
...January 17th, 2018
Miles boils his bitches brew
in a night of worlds much blacker than black
His demons and angels let out slack
January 14th, 2018
I.
All those good times
might’ve been what Duke
had in mind when vamping
his silky-fingered B-flats,
letting Coltrane counter
until tenor notes cluster
close to the
...January 9th, 2018
Halema
with the soulful jazz eyes
deep dreaming the notes
January 5th, 2018
croons “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire;”
voice velvety as cocoa butter
warms listeners, seats them round a hearth;
every word, every idea, clear as a bell,
...December 25th, 2017
Jazz rained down in rivers
catching out strong soul
and soft hands
rising to the call of music prayers
among blind angels
who fail on color
and possess
December 22nd, 2017
The slow tumble of snow past
my partially open window
recalls the year in Amman
I sat for hours watching
a bleak whiteness deepen
all through the abandoned farm fields
surrounding my apartment
while the cool sound of Miles
gave shape and form to my grief
thousands of miles from
December 19th, 2017
It’s like talking of a lemon light, a blue mist,
a pale moonlight. In this case a pink rain.
It was something to do with Christmas
and I was leaving the supermarket,
buzzed, bugged, by muzak’s soothe and slink.
I walked out, into December,
...December 14th, 2017
snow fell
like notes from
Jan Garbarek’s saxophone
as we stood in Raekoja Plats
drinking mulled wine and marveling
at the size of the Christmas tree.
It was crowded and festive; somewhat loud
sure, there was a
...December 12th, 2017
December 6th, 2017
That old red Dodge maybe
has a new muffler –
sounds like soft jazz
Ol’ Leroy Gathercole thinks
he’s still in his
forties or fifties;
wears a bright yellow beret &
drives with one hand –
plays the blues if he can find
November 30th, 2017
Gifts and Messages. Which
the more important?
Dissonance launches
me listening feels
more like I’m playing that
swooping of sax waiting counterbal-
answer slowly fading
November 24th, 2017
Tonight I’m spinning
the ugly, unhip
jazzmen of Beehive records,
sweating in their transition shades,
mustaches sincere and wide,
collared tapestry shirts,
hair erupting from ears and noses
and they’re killing—
bellicose ogre grunts
November 22nd, 2017
At risen angles my furniture sits
each chair fills with blood
with a pulse that could strike, may cease.
Blue couch slants toward vibration
my black arms embracing, hold on
for the dark clots of bass hammering
initials into the
November 19th, 2017
From red kite country, driving South,
Dai Grandpa, fresh from yesterday,
such yesterday. Only when the
June sun sank, had Dai – dudein’
up my shirt front, puttin’ on
the shirt studs – reached evening’s land
– and such a yester-e’en. (Dai caught
the breeze, his ship came home.)
He breakfasts now in wild kite
November 13th, 2017
we all were
three fifteen year olds
along with one of our fathers.
we were
the only white guys
in the club.
it was at dino’s club
in st.louis, in the fall of 1962
at the corner of
November 10th, 2017
Oh, to see back into the beginning,
To 1944, and 52nd street,
To Minton’s Playhouse, and the Royal Roost,
To Monk and Bud’s first rehearsals,
To see the fever spread,
To see the disciples line up to sit in,
November 7th, 2017
His voice, cucumber-crisp,
coaxes silence to step aside
Sates the air with tender words
suspended in song’s sweet
November 4th, 2017
October 27th, 2017
When Miles Davis gets back into his mood
I go where I need to be in my own
somewhere in or near Mal Waldron’s Love Span
over the River Tender where moons flow
reflecting piano keys rippling night
October 17th, 2017
Eric Dolphy blowing out little curlicues
Booker Little baby-burping back to him
trumpeted weird diminutive 2-way messaging
thump thump thump and thump again
bass bass you grandfather clock clocking
October 6th, 2017
September 28th, 2017
This truly foreign language
absorbs me into its differences,
rosetta stone hidden
in a cave of similarities
certain words share
with those of spanish
September 16th, 2017
A deep, raspy New Orleans jazz
Its staccato notes shoot up my pulse
My legs shiver from that long, wavy vibrato
Born-again in your love, I cry like a baby
Yearning to be
September 7th, 2017
all day a light breeze baptizes the landscape
gentle and captivating as a Paul Desmond solo
bushes rap windows and walls with rhythms
unusual and unexpected that Joe Morello would
approve would groove to and trees sway with
...September 1st, 2017
In the hazy glow of streetlights through the window
the jazz man sits
drinking in the music
sipping slowly with his mind
He thinks of all the past loves
the broken promises
the unpaid
August 24th, 2017
WHY HE ASKED
Bereft of family, his only voice
a sax that created a neighborhood
of lost love and no future,
he slipped into memory where his story
was etched into daguerreotypes,
sketches of abandonment and hints of
...August 2nd, 2017
I edit my life
clothesline pins & clips
hang to dry,
dirty laundry,
I turn poetic hedonistic
in my early 70’s
reviewing the joys
and the
July 30th, 2017
Clear my palate
so my mind wanders.
Flap down sweet
childhood memories.
Bare endless fields
of willowy cotton.
Open up vistas
of
July 22nd, 2017
dressed to slay
smokes and drinks every note
as if the night was terminal
and her table never lacks
for attention
July 20th, 2017
piano dances listeners down the street
feet must move to keep up
crowds gather round
street life jumping this way and that
...July 1st, 2017
Zorida had two fingers wrapped
around the stem of her wine glass
but never took a sip
Few of us did
while ol’ Leroy Wilcox blew the
shit out of
his
...June 28th, 2017
Shit was flying everywhere
like sparks from welders’ tools.
They were putting something
together up there on stage –
June 26th, 2017
when you fell out of a window
… you made me give up on you.
(maybe I shouldn’t have).
when the movie about you
recently came out: all of us
believed ethan hawke
was you, in “born to
June 22nd, 2017
The purpose of motion begins,
A clear mind, aware and in focus,
Ahead, the optical pathway lies empty and silent,
Slow at the start, breathing steady,
Stepping through the changes,
Favouring a motif,
Blowing hard,
As the intensity builds,
June 18th, 2017
Them knees,
full of bees again,
two gates
flapping in a stuttering breeze,
hands rapping
tables, thighs,
high up on
...June 12th, 2017
You bring out the jazz in me
The art blakey, max roach the roy haynes in me
Seeing you shake your hips like
Congas…the way you move your hips to a mamba
My heart pounding like drums inside my head
But this fever won’t put me in bed
Instead I get out on the dance floor
June 11th, 2017
In the circus mind of my dying spirit
I listen for the tinkling keys of Monk-
Yeah, Monk Mingus moonlight madness
I long to be, though tonight it’s a new
moon, meaning no moon and my madness
May 19th, 2017
May 18th, 2017
It’s the anybody;
the horned rimmed glasses,
book reader, bus rider, bow tie,
felt hat or tattoo that holds the
jazz. Distilled in flavor, an aroma
gentle and fierce. Its nail scratching,
May 13th, 2017
The wordsmith paints a picture,
A kind of bebop exchange,
Rambling around the neighbourhood,
Conversing apropos,
Curbside to parkside,
Phrasing with style,
May 8th, 2017
Somewhere between the wide open spaces
And those tiny, secret places in the heart,
The sound of nursery rhymes and temple chimes
Mingle with incense and nonsense
Until even the air has to smile.
That’s where you’ll find me, in my hiding place,
Making up rhymes and trying to keep time
To the pace of the
May 4th, 2017
the kitchen sits
in fruit soup…
steamed apricot
mango shadow
down thru spinning
smoke into hot light
blink beat
body ends dangle
April 29th, 2017
Watch her closely; loosen your clothes.
Her quiet storm makes love to listeners
in the heat of each performance,
cuts through crap, produces mystic music…
She’ll seduce you with contralto soul
until you lose your mind,
...April 19th, 2017
IT WAS ALL ABOUT SAX
when man said the wind man
blowing when does the wind do
its voodoo upon leaf and bud
bloody the morning the storm
warning it is on its way its windy
winding wickedly roaring crack
thunder and snap way paving
the air for
April 12th, 2017
Saxophone Girl
She sat comfortably cross-legged
On a straightback chair,
Outside the small studio practice room
...April 7th, 2017
Unlike New York City
L.A. is a woman who will love you back
But she gives her love freely and often
On a not so beautiful morning,
I went to the movies and thought
about you as the credits rolled.
Tried to wash you out of my hair,
but love lingers like a
April 2nd, 2017
Someone in the back of my
VW bus said it would be good to
turn our rock & roll band
into a jazz trio.
I turned off the radio. Complete
silence except for
the whistle of wheat as we swept
through Nebraska
Then Pete said that he could
...March 31st, 2017
swing swagger and sway
she bop she bop drift those feet
first one way then another
swirl round and round and back again
light up the floor fly up above
March 13th, 2017
Thank you
For showing me
That black comes in
All shades
That being corny can
Be cool
That even
March 8th, 2017
Yes, it is hot,
night sweats beneath
Spanish moss and the terror in trees
now knowing no cover of darkness
to greet a Sunday morning
10:22 a.m.
under the stairs
16th Street Baptist Church.
“Three minutes”
and the siren wails
February 19th, 2017
Wind-swept sheets of rain, notes
gusting from Oscar Peterson’s fingers, grounded,
soaked up by rock-steady Ray
February 13th, 2017
She didn’t want to drink
anymore
so we walked hand-in-hand
half-way home before
it dawned on us that we had
a car
parked behind the
February 11th, 2017
His fingers move
with sounds of rain,
while clouds roll
within eyes of long years.
Sweat marks the work undone,
A river hammer beats
streams of jazz
into his
January 12th, 2017
a leaf flutters rises and glides
to its rest a blues note
in autumn as a slow rain falls
at the end of a windy day
and a scattering of distant
voices creates
January 11th, 2017
At the abandoned jazz club,
where I once debuted,
only spiders and rodents
reside behind the acoustical panels
that once resonated my dreams.
I see my distorted image
reflected upon the scarred ride cymbal
of a headless drum set
and feel like an intruder,
disrupting a Buddy Rich riff
when he
December 16th, 2016
Where have all the flowers gone?
Have I been asleep?
Gone
The brilliant yellow sunshine crispness of
June Christy….
The seductive red rouge intimacy of
Jeri Southern…
The smooth rich rose caress of
December 14th, 2016
Her voice shredded, turned to gravel
by cigarettes and whiskey, she navigates
grocery aisles and checkout lines
as sotto voce she sings old songs
both jazz and country. People stare
in amazement as her ruined voice
elicits tears from listening bystanders.
In her living room she croons with
December 10th, 2016
after playing, my upright
kay bass, my fingers
still loving, the birds eye maple
neck & strings:
my left arm
hurt the next day.
after playing my old
...November 14th, 2016
I had them
all down
pat
from the winged
Studebaker
to the old
Henry J
November 10th, 2016
“Miles & Me”
slash here
semi-colon there
dash and a
period
comma down to
colon
lead me back
to quotes
November 6th, 2016
… a great song
by frank loesser
played by gene harris, piano,
& his quartet.
played by two black guys
& two white guys …
jazz brothers, in the
...October 18th, 2016
A marsh harrier soars above the Norfolk broads
circling higher and higher
rather like a Gillespie trumpet solo that rises and rises
to dizzying heights of pitch and volume
eventually the bird slides behind billowing clouds
and vanishes into distance
so the trumpet reaches and
...October 4th, 2016
Carlito Dumas didn’t leave his
drums at intermission,
just lit a cigarette and stared
into space
From our small candle-lit tables
some of us glanced at him —
Would he rattle off a jazzy solo
as a legacy, his
September 27th, 2016
For years, the autobiography proved elusive,
speeding east like the double-jointed run
that skipped from white keys to black,
soldiers chased from Central Avenue battles.
Then the book took a rest, hiding out
in a nondescript store among academic texts,
tomes whose covers bore geometric shapes.
Cardboard screamed orange, red, and white,
the slow burn of a
September 13th, 2016
Long ago
in quiet caverns,
summer breezes
wrought with song
brought secrets
of the forest–
shared earth songs
nurtured through
...September 2nd, 2016
Rikki spun, spun
and leaped, twirled
and dipped,
James Brown
on the jukebox, the small
bar filled with smoke, clinking
glasses, Filipinas in short dresses,
and a couple dozen G.I.’s profane,
obscene, and three-quarters in the bag;
Rikki, half-black, half-
Filipino, ten, living
in alleys and under bars, danced
August 25th, 2016
He was becoming the ground.
Saturating the soil with jazz sweat
as he loosened the lines to men
and women and the breaths that seek
the flame of him
and the fire shared to ears that hear.
August 11th, 2016
Playing bottleneck guitar, an octogenarian.
His arthritic fingers coax a life’s history,
ring changes of love and loss,
sketch joy’s birth in pain,
the rhythm an invitation
...July 25th, 2016
I wonder if it will take another body to stream into the Infinite….
For this was the odd idea that stirred me eerie
Like a push into the wild past from my future spirit to relive my final day,
Or a siren calling me to steal the virtuose of fire.
I was looking for Charlie Parker that night,
Improvising my footsteps under porch lights which spotted
July 13th, 2016
T-Bone Williams was the first
to use the
double-D harmonica &
he employed some lyrics that
seemed compatible —
this was way before Bobby
Dylan
sometime in the late ‘40s when
he did his 12-string
guitar experiments
July 11th, 2016
Why is my race your foe needling you to lord over me, saving me from my own savagery?
Why is my skin color a phobia gnawing at your innards,
making door locks snap as I approach?
Why is my punishment swift revealing deep seated prejudices, exposing unrecognized biases?
Why is my street flashing “blue”
when verdicts and fines from the 2008 meltdown are reversed?
Why is my excessive “heat” normal
...July 7th, 2016
Young and Gifted and Little Girl Blue
wants only to play classical ways of
Bach, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Beethoven,
but Curtis – Philly, perhaps Carnegie too, whether prejudice or preference,
doesn’t think her particular hue
belongs with the masters, so she skips circus tents, every star in the sky,
June 24th, 2016
Barnacles scratch the hull of a voice
that grinds coral to grit in salty water
while a tune plays the tide
which whispers sandy beaches
and blows free on the wind.
Ships far from port halt in the night
to hear the fog-horn song,
to feel, to know and share
June 7th, 2016
Chet Baker Sang
in velvety slender voice
thin on gender identification
thick with fracture-able delicacy
scared it could fall away forever at it’s very next note.
Wispy high clouds of mellifluous tones,
...May 25th, 2016
Grabbing the blue basket of bottles I’d promised
to take to a recycle plant and then forgotten,
I drove too fast down a twisting mountain road,
safe in a young man’s faith that death is abstract
truth until a radio voice — speaking over Johnny Hodges’
sweet tenor on his “Take the A Train” — intones,
May 17th, 2016
PIANO MAN BLUES
Back room –
I sit & light a cigarette,
staring at my hands;
I can barely feel them
Doc says it’s neuropathy
probably pre-diabetic
I tell him there is
numbness in the
May 2nd, 2016
“Liner Notes for ‘Stardust’ — In Seven Choruses” is a cycle of short poems framed as imaginary liner notes and prompted by poet Doug Fowler’s favorite musical covers of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust.” In essence, according to Fowler, they are “imaginary liner notes for a real song about an imaginary song about love.”
The cycle is also partially a tribute to Chu Berry, who died as the result of a car accident in Conneaut, Ohio, in 1941, not far from where Fowler lives.
...April 25th, 2016
I’ll have it spare as the reverence you feel for silence
in your long melodic lines, where the music cries
in the sacred spaces you leave between the notes…
I’ll have the long curve of your back bending over
your shadow on the keys as you play “Turn Out
the Stars”, written for your father when he died,
Blue Notes stretching out as if you’d have them last
...April 15th, 2016
Oh, Mister Silver, please please please,
don’t make me beat my feet
no more no more no more.
I’ve been finger poppin’, thinking
about Juicy Lucy, dreaming
of some sweet stuff,
wanting to come on home to some
...April 9th, 2016
No trickster god,
demon, savior, saint or
train wreck, but human, very.
Not irrational, primal,
primitive, dark unconscious,
exile or martyr.
No more priapic
than your Sunday morning
erection. Not lost or liminal.
March 26th, 2016
Man of the blues,
Sing me a song
Plead, moan and holler those blues.
Sing…
Of love and passion
And joy and sadness;
Of being alone
and being together;
Of payback to enemies,
March 18th, 2016
Gerry Mulligan
My Funny Valentine
What is There to Say?
Swinging baritone sax
soaring trumpet
wrap my
funny valentine
in cool love
...March 16th, 2016
Elvin Jones
the Bear
He surrounded us with his sound
He was the safety net when the tightrope
walkers began
Can you hear him?
There is a new thunder in the sky
March 8th, 2016
naked
her scar
Miles’ howling horn
spring morning sparrow
tripping across my sun-splashed lawn
Thelonious kisses the keys
February 16th, 2016
Miles’ horn blows
thru my head
down to my toes
down baby down
i need to blow
my bleeding nose
a red note bleeding
dododowaaaah
a smile with my heart
she just tore me apart
wuwuwuwaaaah
don’t know myself no more
February 12th, 2016
INSIDE THE LANDSCAPE LOUNGE
We drank bourbon & listened to
Hank Gathercole on sax
cutting a throat
through heavy pink clouds of
cigarette smoke
Man was he cuttin’ it!
& all the while his feet were sliding
February 5th, 2016
Drive that engine, all eight
cylinders, ripping down the open
road faster than can be
clocked, hurricane in our faces,
thunder from the wheels, open
throated, full voiced whole body
January 27th, 2016
Put the Blame on Mame Rita Hayworth in Gilda (1946)
There was never quite a dame as hot as Rita in Put the Blame on Mame
Gilda with luscious red locks
And strapless slit dress
We can imagine her while dancing in a state of undress -but I digress
Hair wanton and free expressing sexuality
In ample quantity
Gilda/Rita undulating to jazzy accompaniment in sultry climes
A time capsule of those forties’ times
January 25th, 2016
Songs overflow from doors
opening to the sidewalk
where neon lights
baptize the weak, stirring the curiosity of
a night strung tight
while others pray in alleys
whispering their sins
under a celestial curtain as
stars cross behind the black
of space where not
a molecule is out of place
January 16th, 2016
ray’s voice
is what a brotha
feels like after he’s had
a good piece of
pussy
i know now why mama didn’t want us
playing secular music in her home
and why white kids love
r and b so much
it was heroin
for your ears
ray was the only brotha
January 15th, 2016
uncle ping made my lemon chicken sing
with dueling jazzaphones
and unexpected tunes
there was no moon cake after
but the honey walnut prawns
laid down their own
January 11th, 2016
We like to immortalize talent in this culture, and in so doing, often decontextualize it, absolving it of complexity and stains. Media especially likes to make angels out of demons, and vice versa, stripping the truth out of images and ideas.
In the case of Chet Baker, William Claxton’s photographs helped especially to immortalize the singer and trumpeter, fixing him in time and space, freezing an idea of him as beautiful, ethereal, ideal.
Chet Baker is almost always remembered as the
...January 10th, 2016
this young girl playing
trumpet in all the supermarket
parking-lots
so loud the sun showers
gleams
of gold
January 5th, 2016
the pain contained within those
seemingly effortless sounds
lifts us from our couches
to applaud years
after the event
the tone arches stretches slinks struts
leaps to fence tops and deftly prances
December 18th, 2015
the lion.
man, this cat could play
formin’ the stride
a jazz musician of the times-
sophistication-harmony._____
enter the lion
...December 10th, 2015
The music theory professors
took their treatises
to the dumpster,
their pianos to the tuner,
then took themselves
and their students
into the fields
where timbres circled
November 25th, 2015
LITTLE LIZA JANE
Sing me up. Bring the jazz
for the baptizing of souls,
living strong, breathing cool
fires from river running out of
the Ohio snaking down mightily
to Louisiana where the steps
get wide and songs speak
of folks left behind, walking
river banks, looking south,
November 11th, 2015
HARRY AT THE PARK
Today the trees
in constant motion, you’ve
seen the same thing
at cocktail parties, in restaurants,
on the beach, bodies
moving to the breath
of the world, do wop,
November 3rd, 2015
Dizzy in Thurston Howell garb steps samba-like
through the airport exit. On film, he and his entourage
move like dancers tapping clave in a Las Vegas
revue called A Night in Havana. His embrace
of space defies ground and grounding.
Amiri, you called him high priest, royalty,
a monarch who flew you from dusty bebop
October 24th, 2015
Roger Singer, our most prolific and accomplished contributing poet, recently submitted three new poems for our consideration, which we proudly publish here. Singer reports that he has now had almost 800 poems published in magazines, periodicals and online journals — 400 of which are jazz poems — and has recently self-published a Kindle edition of his book of jazz poetry called Poetic Jazz.
“Jazz poetry flows out with such ease,” Singer writes on his blog. “The people and places, the alleys and sawdust jazz clubs. The stories that bring jazz alive with horns and voices, from sadness and grief to
...August 18th, 2015
Tumbling out of the second story window —
an accident, I swear — passing the first floor,
and, “You’ll never make it as a musician, Chet!”,
an endless string of notes plays by my ear,
one solo interlude strung out forever,
reaching, reaching, for the ultimate chord,
my sideman lost in a tinkle of piano keys,
the percussion of the vibraphone,
July 10th, 2015
Paula Hackett’s four newly published poems include pieces on Max Roach, Billie Holiday and Milt Jackson…
_______
Billie Holiday
(lullaby)
Sometimes when nature is quiet
and the moon shines just where you are
I can hear you singing the spirit world to rest
I remember as a child, your voice would
wrap me in cotton
as you felt the blows for all of us
Born into a country that tried to
make your voice illegal
poise and elegance was your response
And tonight like so many
June 20th, 2015
His jazz is thick,
mantled in hair
black with twists
rich with shine
absorbing the lights
as his hands
push the track of
strings
chasing
demons
of his love
while fingers
May 27th, 2015
Baseball’s back
It’s crackling on a radio
Sitting by a canning jar filled with fireflies
A barefoot summer, always afternoon in voluptuous-full July.
The screen door slams and flies scatter
A stick and ball routine with umpteen possibilities
Written in the DNA of the Americas
...April 6th, 2015
I like The Jazz
We listened to Roland Kirk
and Eric Burdon sing of
Roland Kirk
And the hum of the freezer
Roland borrowed a phrase from Coltrane
and I borrowed a phrase from
March 19th, 2015
I recall you
dream weaver
I remember you
You’re the one
who makes most dreams
come true
Sir Charles
just not your own
when the sax
ceases dreadfully
heroes fall
trumpets screech
Max Roach calls you
to attention
Sir Charles
listen to Diz
man just don’t fade man!
I hear Lover again
Bird you’re with me
like my mother’s voice
February 26th, 2015
They must have materialized at the open mike
out of carbon and nitrogen in the air,
those poets you’d never see in a jazz club.
A guy in Roman-helmet-like Mohawk
reads three-chord rhymes about Mingus,
an MC in Phat Farm jeans
fires machine gun words about Miles,
and a woman in high collar and sensible shoes
chops Art Blakey into fourteen lines of ten syllables.
Seems you can’t be a real poet
unless you
February 12th, 2015
Lazy humid Lake Pontchartrain
breezes slip sideways
through turquoise louvered doors
past a cat, on a stool with its legs hanging
like green tangled moss
as the man, deep with pillow worship
lays still, breathing soft, his hands open and flat
holds court with dreams of last night
the jazz holding tight
the band cutting through
January 22nd, 2015
Whitewalls better,
blackwalls cheaper.
White collar
has fines.
Inner city
December 22nd, 2014
Tunes come to me at morning
prayer, after flax sunflower
seeds jammed in a coffee can;
when we went to Japan
I prayed at the shrine
for the war dead broken
at Nagasaki;
the tears on the lip of my soprano
glistened in the sun.
In interviews
I talked about my music’s
voice of praise to our oneness,
them getting caught up in techniques
of the electronic school
lifting us into assault;
in live sessions, without an audience
I see faces on the flues of the piano,
cymbals driving me into ecstasies on my knees,
the demonic angel, Elvin,
answering my prayers on African drum,
December 11th, 2014
Her rhythms are held by open
waves of blue strength.
Faces cool under a crescent moon.
The insides of listeners turn red
with passion. The crowd reaches
for her flavor.
Words birth from her as the children
of sound. Fingers tap to the
October 10th, 2014
O you sweet be-
spectacled bird!
you’re too cool for me
sitting there perched
in your wild catbird seat
with your sleek black
beatnik goatee &
blindman’s shades
pulled down low over
your hot orange
djellabiya while you
spill out shrill jazz
riffs and raffs
October 3rd, 2014
The stem pipe was cracked
he told me gently
as if I were an anxious relative
in a hospital waiting room
The craftsman nursed my boy’s trumpet
deciding it needed more oil, too
And while he was at it, fashioned a screw
replacing one long missing
September 17th, 2014
Great “black” poet?
Is Robert Frost identified as “white” as snow?
I devoured every heart fired revolutionary syllable
Each righteous rectifying rhyme a mountainous memorial in time
Barefaced truth like Emit Till’s open casket
A little Harlem hustle humor
August 22nd, 2014
not even schroeder from the peanuts
comic strip
is as dedicated to the piano
and he has a bust of beethoven
gracing his steinway!
you pull sounds out of the air
making something out of nothing
you call it improvisation:
i say, god’s just using you as
a transmitter for his thoughts…
August 8th, 2014
Guess who I saw today
The last one left
To sing the scales from butterscotch tease
To the willows that wept
A slippery taunt, toffee sweet
...July 23rd, 2014
Still tingling with Basie’s hard cooking,
between sets I stood at the bar
when the man next to me ordered
scotch and milk. I looked to see who had
this stray taste and almost swooned
when I saw it was the master.
Basie knocked his shot back,
then, when he saw me gaping,
raised his milk to my peachy face
and rolled out his complete smile
June 18th, 2014
Coltrane
by Alan Patterson
His Voice
crying in the wilderness
sighing, screeching, singing,
of soul secrets and sufferings
stark, silent sound
invoking Heaven’s muse
and Purgatory’s cleansing fire.
Who, speaking in toungues
created new language
who captured Eternity’s essence
June 5th, 2014
“The Weary Blues” — a poem about the importance of music and the blues in everyday life — is a signature work of Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance writer whose poetry helped change the way art created by African Americans was viewed, and influenced the writers of the beat generation. Written in 1925, the melancholy poem is set in a Harlem bar where a piano player plays the blues, and is one of the first poems to mix poetry and music.
Besides being a great writer, Hughes was an eloquent communicator, and it is a wonderful experience to hear him read his own poetry.. This 1958 film shows him reading “The Weary Blues” to the accompaniment of a Canadian group led by pianist Doug Parker.
...June 3rd, 2014
STAR WORSHIPPING
Her message encouraged
tears from hiding, like light
exposing corners; no emotion
remains uncovered.
She walked a line through resistance.
The eyes and hands of judging formed
May 5th, 2014
The morning glory —
another thing
that will never be my friend.
— Basho
Rain has a way of darkening the bark on trees,
deepening the wood cracks in fences.
Grass appears softer, envious of clouds
that tease with their rootlessness,
their promise of travel and a good night’s sleep.
Normally, I’d have a little Johnny Hodges
playing in the background or Casablanca
splashing silvery-blue against a wall,
April 19th, 2014
You Can Be A Genius And Be Sane
Watching Monk and watching self,
One senses that one can have genius
And be sane.
You can
Be odd,
The brain its own,
To nail the themes
Your thought-extremes deem right.
Monk plays and pounds
In rhythmic spasms;
March 30th, 2014
It’s light on silver-black and white,
Grainy footage of a smoky room,
A woman at the keys. A spotlight
As perfectly round as the moon
Frames her form. She picks at a tune.
This is jazz, now, it’s uncertain.
Her fingers stop, hover, resume.
She stands, walks behind a curtain.
Years later — in color now –her
Faith allows her to break that long
Silence, permits her to
March 5th, 2014
Show me a clarinet, teacher,
one from a distant continent’s wood
that has suckled nourishment
from a heated, morning sun
then show me the reed,
the dried, shallow, vibrating stick,
that will tickle sound
through many dark nights
when those with flicking tongues
articulate their passion
between panted breaths.
Show me the silver,
flailing fingers have mined
with a synchronized motion
February 18th, 2014
Names like
Little Bird & Bicycle Horn
missed your tracking
Parker solos faster
backward to the future,
higher than Shaker Heights,
further than armies marching
to spiritual masterlocks
missing the Trane
to the Future Truth
marching in.
French Mayonnaise
sustained journeys
to Sweden & Denmark
where pickup players
kept standard time
while you advanced
February 13th, 2014
ON DIVISIDERO
A hill with faces
and sidewalks,
green shoes and sneakers
without laces,
chalkboard menus,
peppers and onions
and bicycles passing
apartments with yellow
shutters and
terracotta pots with
flowers reaching over
touching heads
as buses crawl
and street cars
February 2nd, 2014
In anticipation of our very soon-to-be-published interview with Charlie Parker biographer Stanley Crouch (see the preview below), poet Erren Kelly defends Parker from the caricature portrayed in Clint Eastwood’s 1989 film Bird.
Bird Read Beckett
bird read samuel beckett
he read novels and plays
he lived his life as one long
exstitential episode
he prided himself on being
intellectual
bird loved his fried chicken
and preferred his gin
to go down smooth
like his solos
mr. eastwood,
take that lie back
and apologize!
January 21st, 2014
1
Man is the animal that knows
the clarinet
makes his living
on the docks, a stevedore,
110lbs., carrying what loads
he can
the Depression comes along,
his teeth rot, no money and
he has to accept silence
January 3rd, 2014
In memory of George Lewis, Great Jazzman
1
Man is the animal that knows
the clarinet
makes his living
on the docks, a stevedore,
110lbs., carrying what loads
he can
December 27th, 2013
my funny valentine
by ed corrigan
Miles’ horn blows
thru my head
down to my toes
down baby down
i need to blow
my bleeding nose
a red note bleeding
dododowaaaah
a smile with my heart
she just tore me apart
November 12th, 2013
THE BIRTH OF JAZZ
Syncopated sounds
mingle in bayous,
roll with Mississippi currents,
splash in Lake Pontchartrain.
The haunting melody
sleeps in pine forests,
nestles in the cypress,
sways with willows,
stands with oaks.
November 1st, 2013
Coltrane, Dig?
I suppose what it is with trane and me is
he takes all the time he wants to take
even outside of time, sidereal time,
stardust time, bessie blue time,
through-and-through-him time,
trancey groove time, even arranged time.
October 19th, 2013
Lots of interesting new poems have been published this week…
Here is a sampling:
DAVE BRUBECK
You can hear the youth of his heart
in the rhythmic pouncing of his block
chords. He’s a kitten when it comes
to his ball of twine. He’s in his ninetieth
October 9th, 2013
I find comfort in a downpour.
The sound of intermittent pings
is almost a sonata, lulling me.
If Beethoven played on tin,
it would sound like the rain on my roof
October 1st, 2013
For years, we have been publishing work by poets from all over the world who are dedicated to putting into words their relationship with jazz music. Our most prolific poet is Roger Singer, a living, breathing example of fire and love and brilliance. His contribution to the art of jazz is here – all 26 pages of it – in full glory, waiting for interested readers to discover.
Here is a new poem of his, just published today…
...September 20th, 2013
Loving Adverbs
I know I should love
nouns more than adverbs but
I definitely
don’t. The same weighty expectation
accompanies phenomena like the Beatles,
Harry Potter, or sushi. My loves never seem
to be trendy, and I say this with confusion,
not pride.
June 24th, 2013
Disparity in River City
THE MUSIC MAN (1962):
Robert Preston,
the picture’s star,
extols “76 Trombones”,
spots “Trouble in River City”,
earning immortality in the process.
June 9th, 2013
THE PATH
Real time straight jazz
curved the room.
Its ribbons of play formed justice
to notes,
releasing streams of fever.
May 26th, 2013
CRESCENT CITY LULLABY
Bbooooooo bboooooo,
Two octaves below a deep bass voice
river boat horns quake on the water.
Night scrambles the groan
with croaks of frogs, barks of herons,
gator cries and splashing fish.
April 28th, 2013
Valentine
Listen to the music
Listen to the sound
Turn off your thoughts
Tune in turn on
Gather round
Miles Davis is calling you
Gather round
Listen to the sound
April 15th, 2013
Bad Luck Moan
Hard luck and trouble have hounded me all my days.
Oh yes, hard luck and trouble have hounded me all my days.
If I got some good news, I could change my ways.
April 15th, 2013
So Much To Do, So Little Time To Do It In
For Michel Petrucciani
A little man, glass bones disease.
A la Lautrec: two prodigies.
At thirty-six his lungs gave out.
We cried, we would not be consoled.
April 6th, 2013
Bowl of Black Petunias (Version 2)
If you must leave me, please
leave me for something special,
like a beautiful bowl of black petunias
for when the memories leak
April 4th, 2013
Coltrane, Dig?
I suppose what it is with trane and me is
he takes all the time he wants to take
even outside of time, sidereal time,
stardust time, bessie blue time,
April 4th, 2013
SOUTHERN ELEGY
Just two “good ole boys”,
Levon from the Arkansas delta, Harry south Georgia,
gone within a month of each other,
both with big obits in The New York Times.
Who said we don’t honor earthiness!
April 3rd, 2013
BLUE SMOKE
The last yellowed leaves
from the Norway maple spiral,
dive and pirouette to ground –
hours of raking pyramid after
pyramid, the tedium of stuffing
bag after bag, the impulse
to light a match, to resurrect
the late fall smells from boyhood –
April 3rd, 2013
BURGLAR
Two days ago
the sun caught me stealing
the cardinal’s song
to construct a melody,
demanded restitution,
then reported me
to Mother Nature
April 1st, 2013
THE SAINTS LIVE
Live from Lincoln Center New Orleans jazz
reaches for higher ground.
Musical dynasty family Marsalis
Show the world that Dixie still lives.
March 28th, 2013
Tommy
Tommy sweeps the floor
Content at his task
Is it wrong to ask
For a little more
A temporary worker at minimum wage
Not exactly where you’d expect to find
March 5th, 2013
Hudson and Landry 45, 1973 (drunks is funny)
Bowling alley lounge
Liquor license
We’re served our burgers
Served our cokes
We laugh and horse
Enough to be warned
We’re not one-tenth as loud as the adults
We also did not vanquish Hitler,
Precious quarters, Vegas addict,
February 26th, 2013
Footprints ( for Wayne Shorter )
you speak no evil
when you talk about the miles
you traveled, the
way your sax sounded
like a thunderstorm
or spoke like a child
November 22nd, 2012
Scales
My fingers flying like the wind
Dexterous and all so disciplined
From the bottom to the top and back
In a flash and right on track
November 7th, 2012
The Jazz Singer
Looking over some old tapes.
Is that really me on the stage?
The Peoria boys jazzing away behind,
performing for a village hall audience.
A monthly gig that, for a short while,
takes them back to the time when…
April 22nd, 2012
MONK WAS RIGHT
( A letter to Thelonius Monk )
Dear Thelonius,
I first heard you
In the darkness of stinky music rooms, toe-tappers’ tombs
where out-of-tone tunes played,
and where you prayed to the God of old blue smoke
to please choke the life out of those who said jazz was a joke,
February 22nd, 2012
Special 20
A breath in the silence
Playing on the silver
Wailing the words of lost souls
Notes burning like a fire
Under molded hands
Moving fingers
Reed notes risin’ like the wind
February 20th, 2012
Minstrel
North Beach evening
Listening to Lonnie Johnson
Through an open door
I didn’t have enough money
To go in
Car noise took away
Many of the notes
February 17th, 2012
ELEGY FOR HART, IN THE KEY OF CRANE
The pipe-organ sea on-drones a dirge for you
as it will for the last whale’s final soundings.
Deep in the ocean’s heart, Hart has found a home.
Before his final voyage, from the shore he watched
the breakers as they slipped each blow, master
February 10th, 2012
MY GRANDMOTHERS WAR
It was the war
She said,
As she laid her head
On the pillow next
To my fathers bed
In a raspy voice
From her cigarettes.
How she loved all that
February 1st, 2012
Naming of Hops
(July 30, 2009)
Today there will be naming of hops.
Today they’ll have a beer outside
the oval office of the White House.
Likewise our planet rotates with an oval orbit
around the sun of no determinate God,
whose purity and innocence informs
the white bars on the American flag.
January 12th, 2012
JUST ANOTHER PUNK ROCKER WRITING ABOUT JAZZ
They must have materialized at the open mike
out of carbon and nitrogen in the air,
those poets you’d never see in a jazz club.
A guy in Roman-helmet-like Mohawk
reads three-chord rhymes about Mingus,
an MC in Phat Farm jeans
November 14th, 2011
Blues Man
His calloused fingers fret the chord
The juke-joint crowd is hushed and still
His song is beautiful reward
He plays it with such easy skill.
November 14th, 2011
A game of cards
If you ever wanted to know about my grandfather
and his three younger brothers,
you should have paid a visit while my grandmother still lived.
All you had to do was ask.
November 13th, 2011
I Dreamt I Was Here
Yes, I’m here in this hospital bed
But not having breakfast, like my dream said
I was sitting having Bran Flakes
And hot toast and tea
Twice I woke up having dreamt I was here
‘Twas beginning to quite confuse me
November 3rd, 2011
Chopin: Heroic Polonaise
It may be all
we’re looking for
It may be as simple
as that. As cramming the
sky into a jar, as catching the
milky way in the palm of your hand
October 31st, 2011
Untitled
God was laughing when he made you.
He held you up and pressed his lips against your skin
till you laughed, too.
October 20th, 2011
Ignition
my friend,
how you want to see the light
…be the light
but everyone that shines
dines with the whore of envy
October 19th, 2011
Comprehension of Music
You understand me
every emotion that’s buried into my heart
that lives in my soul trying to find
the right way to express itself to a world
that lacks true understanding of someone’s feelings
so I turn to you to create life into misunderstanding
and o how I love how you grasp it
September 7th, 2011
Singularity
That morning, you were overwhelmed
by the crunch of dawn
beneath your feet;
you wouldn’t believe me when I said,
...August 6th, 2011
And Now I Know
You just don’t do that! my daddy would say,
defining the line between father, son.
No new learning could change or make him sway
from using words like, Yisstidy, and Yurn,
July 17th, 2011
THE PENCIL OF NATURE
Imagine Talbot walking into a museum today-
how his eyes would pop at a toy fork
stuck in a cardboard refrigerator
or a towering hotel lobby,
its plaza digitally erased of people
and its colors pumped up
July 8th, 2011
Crouching Sofa, Hidden Remote
Culprit Philosophy our kids behold
Media shuns us into our cold world
Therapeutic weapons couldn’t wrestle them all and
The broken lids, Therapeutic guns penetrate
Their anti-establishment walls, which crawl
With love shattered kids
June 19th, 2011
The Trip
we used to pile into my dad’s van, drive
all the way from Nebraska to Texas
mostly in
silence, because complaining about the unbearable
heat would just make my dad turn the car back
around, and home
April 8th, 2011
Impromptu Blues
The bass player was out of synch
tonight while the singer was on fire.
But she had to wait while he shuffled
through page after page of music;
the drummer tap tap tapped his drum
...March 29th, 2011
MYSTIC
Jam on
she said, and
I played until night suffocated my trees
the garden was weary
and the sun had just died
March 29th, 2011
¡Oh, Put On Another Record And Bring Me A Drink!
I like The Jazz
We listened to Roland Kirk
and Eric Burdon sing of
Roland Kirk
March 2nd, 2011
Mist Past:
put tears of sun into glass of tears
raining impoverished soliloquies
balance falling curious symbols
slice the sea into
symmetrical colors
while you rip apart elastic
February 28th, 2011
BLUES AT SUNRISE
Sunrise Thinking of you
Slowly rising from sleep
All my thoughts irrational
Waking dreams
Farewell
To daft wishing
And hopes of one true love
All I’ve known and seen before
Fades away
February 22nd, 2011
ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE: THE APOTHEOSIS OF MARY LOU WILLIAMS
It’s light on silver-black and white,
Grainy footage of a smoky room,
A woman at the keys. A spotlight
As perfectly round as the moon
...January 15th, 2011
Drunk
She was whiskey to him.
Swirling around him.
Curving over his tongue
and into him.
The wicked spiciness burned his throat.
January 15th, 2011
PLANTATION TOUR
“They had so many slaves to take care of”
the matronly guide reverently explained
imploring our understanding of hardship and pain
Faced by gentlemen owners in those early days
We paid admission to be moved from our time
...December 29th, 2010
I Am Late at My Singing
As I was waiting,
flowered buds shriveled.
Tangerine daylilies burst.
Too late, too late the music.
December 23rd, 2010
Melancholy Rare
Exhorting remedies of suave chameleon song, by the
Tabby’s table in hypnotic grins and memorizing
Heartbeats in pause, in silent calm broken only by
...November 19th, 2010
Memories
Meema’s singing in the kitchen
Chicken frying
Greens simmering
Pies smelling
Chitlins boiling
October 29th, 2010
Feel It
You have to FEEL the music rush through your veins
And STEAL their hearts away as you dance off the chains
You have to FEEL the rhythm dance through your feet
As you STEAL the stage with your rhythm and beat
October 8th, 2010
FULL MOON OVER BENSONHURST
Ralph Kramden pushes through his day
Like the Madison Avenue bus
At the height of evening rush,
Impeded by vehicles
Of lesser size, strength
And importance.
August 4th, 2010
Music
Does god play the ribs of a starving infant
In the Sudan like the kalimbe you
Can buy in the gift shop in the airport
Where tourists, doctors, murderers come and go
And we know nothing of their destinations or their
Motivations? Does god play on the bald head
July 4th, 2010
At the Mission
Yeah…
It was just another day at the mission.
The bums, smelling like the seats of their pants
Were stacked like a roll of wooden nickels
Under a sky with mixed feelings.
...May 13th, 2010
VINTAGE GRAY
The morning glory —
another thing
that will never be my friend.
— Basho
Rain has a way of darkening the bark on trees,
...April 9th, 2010
Terry on Bass, 1974
Tall
slim straight
long red hair
that cops and rednecks hated
he’d stride to his deep honey bass
feel its pleasure in his big hands
urge out music that turned souls to listen
his freedom plucking up down strings
April 2nd, 2010
Blizzard
Baffled sound distinguishes each instrument.
Oblational as bread and wine, the symphony is offered up
Daliance with obligatory matters has no place here.
Abiotic as a stone, the tone still is lively:
cabaret saxophone and trumpet indiscretion.
February 2nd, 2010
Moon Ode (for Congressman Sam Farr)
Shall I trust the moon?
She flirts behind purple clouds
Veiling her luminous face
Like a naughty trickster
January 22nd, 2010
Something You Can Count On
I had, once, a Captain Midnight ring
that told the weather, or so they said.
Frankly, I don’t remember Captain Midnight,
didn’t listen to him much.
Don’t know what made him special,
what made him Captain Midnight, for that matter.
But I didn’t need to, knew in my 1947 heart of hearts
December 27th, 2009
TRIMMING THE UNKNOWN
I open the door to the jetsam of black curls
Cast into a linoleum sea
As fluorescent light glints off scissors and smiles.
Smelling the shaving cream and my own fear,
I sit in a distant chair and pick up a magazine,
Glance up from time to time
December 22nd, 2009
Letters
Sometimes the shy miss
with cat eyes
put feather to paper
scratched and restored
worlds of politics
June 1st, 2009
A big mind
Think of One with rare flat-fingered technique,
Hat and Beard gave you a distinct mystique;
Evidence early of genius unique,
Let’s Cool One while your sweet glissandos peak.
April 20th, 2009
Flash Cards
Someone’s gonna be in trouble.
Some kid’s Spanish flash cards
strewn along Maple Avenue
blown down the sidewalk,
lodged in ivy ground cover,
stuck under decrepit concrete
April 12th, 2009
Crazy old man walks up to me
I said, a crazy old man walks up to me
Tells me what to see
He calls to me
Makes me an offer I can’t refuse
Washes out the flames in my eyes
Burns a hole through the fabric in my clothes
April 7th, 2009
Pantoum: Carson McCullers and Misanthropy at Yaddo
An odd child, I sprawled in bed, conjured her square pale face,
Propelled myself into her enormous dark eyes
And imagined, for years, that I curled inside her mind.
At Yaddo I drank sherry from a thermos, strode lank-legged
March 22nd, 2009
jazz jam
so this is what no lessons gets me –
a melancholy jazz blues progression,
transgressions and mistakes.
the melody hidden in the missing bass line.
the absent drums beating paradiddles to variation.
a theme within a theme.
March 8th, 2009
What’s Ours
it may be that a long time ago, as a baby,
we chose the way we tasted sugar
felt cotton and heard Bessie Smith
at 3 a.m. in the back of a dream
February 25th, 2009
THE BUNKER
An overgrown trail is abruptly halted by a set of rusting metal gates,
Secured to a crooked post by a battered padlock and feeble chain.
A grey guard tower lies out of sight, studying the unfolding scene intently,
From the dense undergrowth where fresh raindrops glisten in the new-born sunlight.
January 22nd, 2009
Pondering the Musical Style of Thelonious Monk
The-
lon- i-
us-
Monk- plunk!
makes- one-
think-
plink!
his-
next-
note-is-
sunk-
January 4th, 2009
Jazz Climax
for Sony Holland
The room hauntingly still
with mosaic tiles staring down
upon the audience.
Pink and red lights glare
like the eye of a storm
August 25th, 2008
My father was a Catholic jazz musician
Say one Our Father, two Hail Marys,
and listen to twelve recordings of John Coltrane.
Dip your fingers in the font of holy water,
cross yourself,
make your way to a pew,
genuflect, take your seat,
and meditate on the perfection of Thelonious chords.
August 6th, 2008
November 14
I have to admit. this
is a new one. playing baby-sitter
to a girl, barely
reaching my hip holster. when
she comes to the door, toast
May 27th, 2008
LIPS OF ORPHEUS
Orpheus-
that bony black Jazz player
inhales slowly, his aged, tarred lungs
sip the pre-melodic air,
he fingers the cold brass scythe,
prolonging the moment
for his lips to buzz;
and they will, Emily,
they will.
April 19th, 2008
Piano Rain
Cut-crystal 16th notes
scamper and dangle
drop
splink
twinkly-plink
splank
...April 15th, 2008
“Ms. Cynthia Jazz”
Obese peacock clouds
Waltzing free from oil paintings
Summer flamboyance bristles
Under skies of no particular color
...March 30th, 2008
Hip Hop Flavored Preachin’
Ya’ll better check your roots
You bunch of brutes
Cause you ain’t got no soul
Respect and you don’t roll
This is rhythm and blues?
Man, I don’t know
Back when we had dancin’ shoes
And things to lose
March 22nd, 2008
Beat
Mad jazz singers blaring,
the gathered dance and bop
Tossing ladies between their legs,
hair slicked back and eyes shimmering
March 9th, 2008
The Crossroads
The Mississippi midnight sky was clear
As one determined man had journeyed far
With nothing but his clothes and a guitar,
To speak the incantation all men fear;
February 14th, 2008
The road to Giverny,
winter, 1885, by Claude
Monet, looks sad.
It looks like the
twisted road to San
Quentin, where an
execution is planned
before Christmas 2005.
January 29th, 2008
Listening to Trane
Madman rages burst
from his golden horn-
Through John’s mouthpiece
galaxies of enlightened energy
were born-
Trane’s band wailed
in dissonant bawling
January 19th, 2008
BLACK SONG FOR BILLIE HOLIDAY
The night the blue saxophones died
You still remain in the spotlight’s ivory heat
A riddle that puzzles the heart
Snatching from the soil of catastrophe
A nugget of perfect sound
Glowing like an iridescent candle
January 5th, 2008
War as a playmate
Look at the pretty girls, pouting
and coloring their pink lips with a reddish hue.
Embellishing their glossy gossamer hair
Saturating themselves with perfume.
October 29th, 2007
The gift
The day my mother dropped a net
of oranges on the kitchen table
and the net broke and the oranges
rolled and we snatched them,
my brother and I,
peeled back the skin and bit deep
October 18th, 2007
COUTURE
stained
this is
pale
yellow brown
along
the hem
but
too nice
August 30th, 2007
CONVERSATION ON ROUTE 23 NORTH, NOVEMBER 1987
He leans on me like a rusted bicycle,
Tires flat against the weathered south wall
Of a lonesome, abandoned barn
Slumps into the rear seat of his old Ford
Station wagon, no longer capable of riding
August 23rd, 2007
MATCHBOOK: The Spinnaker (Sausalito)
in memory of Bill Evans
by Michael Harper
Adrift in your own spittle
(eyebrows on vibrato knuckles)
we are across the bay
from reality;
but reality hits in waves
...May 22nd, 2007
Morning
From the center of our body
Come the bright flowers.
Draw open the curtain
...April 29th, 2007
“To a Flower”
Garden rose
My perfumed lover
Porcelain daughter of the summer
Your blossom is my red maiden
April 27th, 2007
TATTOO
featuring Dexter Gordon
by Michael Harper
Though a simple rose under your skin
I look up the bugle ritual of recall
for sailors to regroup — soldiers at parade rest
and your sister who could not read as a child
April 25th, 2007
FOR COUNT BASIE
On this day, your birthday, I want
to celebrate, although you passed last
century. I crave some birthday cake,
so I put on “One O’clock Jump”
one more time to soothe my soul, allow
your fingers to loosen my tight, sore
muscles that have taken hold, the ones
February 22nd, 2007
10’S & THINGS
in memory of Carmen McRae
by Michael Harper
Fingerings,” she says, a nobody,
intermission pianist
February 22nd, 2007
9 23 99: Coltrane Notes on the Millenium
by Michael Harper
“Alabama”
no protection still
that is not churchdriven
James Weldon Johnson’s alternate tune
January 22nd, 2007
Blues for Red
I’m looking in crowds
where you won’t be
looking for you
strolling with Raphael
...December 29th, 2006
Scarecrow Gardens
Late-summer squash put out to sea
in coastal storms. All day, wet
leaves let go. I cut down three
...August 31st, 2006
Rhythms Of Life
The ferment of storm to seas
The seas’ mad tides
Our savage hearts to spawn
In the wild shoals of swollen rivers
Druid fires – spiraling discs
Raspy winds and blind/blue passions
August 22nd, 2006
The Life of Jackie Mclean
by Michael Harper
A critic trying to pass writes me about crossover played some
couldn’t make it got his Ph. D
(he’s onto new changes an advance man now active in grants
from corporations)
August 8th, 2006
TATUM
by Michael Harper
I have recovered from your blindness
so fast your arpeggios
the world of Toledo is in slow motion
for you are holding back
May 22nd, 2006
Election Day, 1984
Did you ever see someone coldcock a blind nun?
Well, I did. Two helpful idiots
Steered her across the tarmac to her plane
May 21st, 2006
Kind of Blue
New York
&
cross
the
Lincoln
tunnel
expose a city
through
fish eye lens
May 2nd, 2006
ON MEETING ERIC DOLPHY
Between sets at the Five Spot,
She and Dolphy would
walk and talk
April 1st, 2006
dear jesse helms
something is happening.
something obscene.
in the night sky
the stars are bursting
March 15th, 2006
The Poet’s Heart
Think of the buddhist monks
who sat in the road
at the start of the war,
saffron robes soaked in gasoline,
and set themselves on fire
January 29th, 2006
From “Back to the Valley”
I guess mebbe you better be getting me home
now, it’s getting pretty late
and I’m getting pretty drunk
and tired
I got to get back on that swaker tomorrow
September 29th, 2005
S’monka Tetes
These sounds forever
begin with a few off key
notes. A funny dance
and like Joseph’s coat many
September 22nd, 2005
“Born Into a World Knowing”
This will happen
Oh god we say just give
me a few more
breaths
and don’t let it be
August 1st, 2005
Because I Am
In mem. Sidney Bechet, 1897-1959
Because I am a memorious old man
I’ve been asked to write about you, Papa Sidney,
Improvising in standard meter on a well-known
Motif, as you did all those nights in Paris
And the world. I remember once in Chicago
June 29th, 2005
SO WHAT
Baptized by vodka cleansing my throat
Baptized by sweat dripping from Tony Williams’ sticks
Thick  Summer Sunday Afternoons
at the Vanguard
February 4th, 2005
Soul Make a Path Through Shouting
for Elizabeth Eckford
Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957
Thick at the schoolgate are the ones
Rage has twisted
Into minotaurs, harpies
Relentlessly swift;
So you must walk past the pincers,
October 17th, 2004
Click here to read about plans for the future of Jerry Jazz Musician.
“Paul Desmond” by Tim Maloney
The Sunday Poem is published weekly, and strives to include the poet reading their work....
Tim Maloney reads his poem at its conclusion
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