Mike Westbrook's Blake with Phil Minton on vocals
About twelve years ago I thought I
might write something (a book, I supposed) on the relation of poetry to jazz.
It seemed an apposite subject. I’d noticed that among the poets of my
acquaintance, of the linguistically innovative persuasion at least, those who
did not listen to jazz could be counted on the leaping fingers of the left hand
of a stride piano master. One of my favourite poets, Roy Fisher, one of the two
I’d written about in my PhD, was a jazz musician talented enough to have
accompanied Bud Freeman.
So there was an
interest and, of course, the connection was stronger with the jazz poetry
phenomenon: from Kenneth Rexroth and Langston Hughes through to Amiri Baraka
and Christopher Logue. Jazz musicians like Cecil Taylor and John Coltrane wrote
poems. (See the former’s magnificent ‘Garden’ in Moment’s Notice edited by Art Lange and Nathaniel Mackey, 1993.)
Mackey’s own CD work is interesting, sections of his work Songs of the Andoumboulou. Steve Lacy set Creeley and Raworth poems
to music. And poets wrote about jazz. Coltrane I thought, from the evidence of
David Henderson’s 1960s anthology, was the most written about musician. Henderson had worked with
Ornette Coleman, who in turn was married to Jayne Cortez. Etc etc. With connections
like this, the ghostly project proliferated through a wild set of connections.
Charlie Parker carried a copy of the Rubiyat
with him! Do with that fact what you will. (I gave it to Michael Zand who
is working on Omar Khayam; I’ve no idea whether he used it).
I bought albums
without guilt: the New York Jazz Quartet with Baraka; Mingus’ The Clown; Michael Mantler settings of
Beckett with Jack Bruce (and Robert Wyatt). I joked with myself that this was
advantageous self-deception: that I maintained the interest long enough to buy
loads of albums that I simply wanted and then decided that I couldn’t write the
project!
I learnt about
groups of poets I wouldn’t otherwise have encountered: the Umbra group, for
example, largely through the pioneering critical work of Aldon Neilson. Two
spirited sequences, both with graphological deviation, also come to mind: Kenneth
Rexroth’s late ‘Written to Music: Eight for Ornette’, written in lower case and
Langston Hughes’ late Ask your Mama: 12
Moods for Jazz, which is all in upper case, and refers to Dolphy and Monk! I’ve
never heard anyone mention them. I’m grateful for the widening of my poetic
horizons. Here's Hughes in a more conventional mode.
More recently, I
even taught an MA module on poetry and jazz with my colleague Mary Hurst – and
I keep up the interest. Recent examples include Simon Nabatov’s re-workings of
Danil Kharms (with the marvellous Phil Minton on vocals, he who had worked with
Bob Cobbing and he who had sung William Blake unforgettably with the Mike
Westbrook orchestra, music originally written for Adrian Mitchell’s play about
Blake; Mitchell, himself a poet of jazz, makes the comment somewhere that one
day ‘Billie Holiday’ will need a note like ‘Achilles’ in editions of his poems;
teaching the MA suggests that’s true).
See what I mean?
On and on.
But the meaning
of this has eluded me (perhaps on the shifting scree of this associative
landscape). As does my ability to find a language with which to speak about music.
My own musical abilities were a long way from the atonality and polyrhythmic
world of late-Coltrane: I could sing the blues and blow some thrash harmonica
(I have in the last two years properly taught myself to strum passably on the
guitar: Dylan, Cohen, country and blues, not jazz). I have a secret desire (maybe
it’s not so secret) to be a crooner: Sinatra sang a Kipling poem, remember! But
none of this provided me with anything approaching the musical knowledge
necessary for such a task. The nearest would have been the dance-poetry-music collaborations
of ‘Killing Boxes’ undertaken with the improvising bass player Gus Garside (of Ark and other groupings in Brighton).
But that was practical poetics, useful elsewhen.
Look at the
language I use above: ‘favourite’, ‘magnificent’, ‘marvellous’; it’s a
belle-lettrist vocabulary of impression and adulation. The language of a fan,
as I am, and as is appropriate. I feel that swelling of fandom as I summon up
these nuggets of nerd-speak on the subject. I recently wrote a poem for Philip
Jeck’s birthday, ‘Spectres of Breath’ that played around with the curious (but
inventive) language you find in the impressionistic music reviews in The Wire (a journal that I have been
subscribing to for a couple of years and which only provides further examples
of poetry-music interactions). One verse runs:
Washed-out
melancholia with junkyard jams alternating with palm-muted bleeps &
trickles plangent bird calls & fluttering wings
I don’t want to write like that! But
this does not drive off the thought that this is still a fruitful area of
scholarship. That there is a formal relationship to be discerned in this
strange interinanimation of art forms that happens in so many variegated ways:
but I had always thought I could hand these references over to somebody else to
make sense of. Perhaps someone has, or will.
But
I keep drifting back. Perhaps there are poems
to be written out of this. The best I managed was to rescue an early poem,
which I posted here to commemorate the life and work of Stan Tracey (he of the Under Milk Wood Suite of course!) and
one about Ray Charles. And maybe I shall. I still have great admiration for Ken
Edwards’ late 70s Drumming and other
poems which uses music (named tracks, some of them jazz) as formal
structures or analogues to compose poems about other matters), and I may return
to those to propel me to write a jazz series (and there are plenty of flat
anti-models scattered among the anthologies of poems that don’t work at all). I
still like my little i.m. to Miles: ‘Improvisation
Upon a Remark of Gil Evans, for Miles Davis (1926-1991)’.
Twentieth Century Blues
11
Duocatalysis
6
Midnight Ride 1
IM 2
Soleà
2
Put your flesh on
a note, a bone
to be feathered for
flight on the midnight
ride beneath my skin
: ecstasy bites
in the fast lane
put your flesh on
I
can even sing this (and did, publicly, once). But I don’t want a book
of them. (Another of my ‘Petrarch 3’ poems is a
country blues to be sung by Little Albert when he’s ready, but that’s largely a
joke about the formalism of the blues and the conventions of the sonnet.)
Over the summer I wrote two reviews
for the music-loving poet Rupert Loydell’s magazine Stride: of Juxtavoices, the anti-choir led by Martin Archer and
Alan Halsey and the latest release by Julie Tippetts and Archer. I wanted the
albums, had seen the choir and loved it, had seen Tippetts and admired her, and
was moving towards writing on the work of Geraldine Monk (who is in the choir
and has written for it, and who has worked with Tippetts on two Archer CDs). I’d also seen Tippetts, Monk and
Archer perform together in Liverpool. The
review is here and it’s fine. So is my collection
of videos here, to constellate these performers and performances.
I have been written on form and poetics,
and have written at length on the poetics of form as revealed by the Geraldine
Monk piece Insubstantial Thoughts
on the Transubstantiation of the Text and I posted the (exhaustively) long
version on Pages (first instalment here) before
condensing the piece for the book in progress on form (its working title is The Meaning of Form). The last, fifth,
poem in the sequence announces its performative focus as ‘Fused sonics
(interaction)’. An incarceration metaphor, one that surfaces throughout the
poetics, enters first line: we are ‘Released from solitary’, for purposes of
collaboration, into the custody of musicians. Their fetishistic fiddling and
fastidious preparations, confusing to the non-musician, are the price to be
paid for the promised ‘interaction’:
Musicians come with-wires
attached
ill fitted plugs
miscellaneous black boxes
far too many knobs &
forgotten amps behind their
frosted doors.
Obdurate objects of
professional mystification threaten to delay the encounter of voice with music.
As part
of the piece I want to describe the fusion and interaction at work in one of
the manifestations of the ‘Fused sonics (interaction)’ experiments that Monk conducted
with Archer. The compacted songs of Angel
High Wires are attractive attempts to emulate or update or springboard-off the
song-cycles of Schubert but the singers (Tippetts is one of them) are given the
improvisatory freedom to create the melodies themselves over (or under)
Archer’s electronics. This makes for a satisfying encounter. Chris Goode
remarks that this studio-based process (performers not necessarily meeting) is
unusual in improvised music for it is more usual for the performers to be
co-present in a real-time exploration of their interactions, as in the choir
live, but it is not unknown in the worlds of sampling and electronic
manipulation. However, I think I want to write on the much more demanding text and
Discus CD Fluvium (that’s not a value
judgement but a register of the difficulty for the critic). Formally, this is exciting, since the text is
demanding and the involvement of Archer and Tippets close. The track ‘Aftershock’
is a remix, mash-up, montage, re-forming of parts of ‘Fluvium’, which speaks to
my formulation of form as the extistence of forms in the plural in acts of
performative forming. (I got the word form in five times there.) Very
interesting. A leaflet falls out of my copy of Monk’s Noctivagations (which collects both texts) and informs me that I
saw a live performance of some of the songs, plus ‘Fluvium’ and ‘Aftershock’.
However,
I have the CD and – despite my reservations about my ability to do this – I will
attempt to offer a reading of these works, but I am guided here by my sense of
form as forming and by the poetics of ‘The Transubstantiation…’. I shouldn’t go
wrong. Read it here and here, but don't forget here.
Live am Schiff bei Imago Dei, Krems,
2012.
Songs of Innocence nach Texten von William Blake, von Hannes Löschel (rhodes) mit Exit Eden feat. Phil Minton (voice): Matthias Koch (drums), Michael Bruckner-Weinhuber(guit), Clayton Thomas (bass)
Video: Christine Schörkhuber, Kamera 2: Florian Fennes
