A kaleidoscope of poetry and jazz
Last year's successful Boston Jazz Week, the first in 25 years, will be even more expansive this year, featuring more than 200 events. The centerpiece of the celebration is tomorrow's "A Kaleidoscopic View of Jazz in Boston," a concert to benefit several jazz outreach programs in the city's public schools.
Headlining this event is former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky reading to the accompaniment of renowned drummer Rakalam Bob Moses and talented young saxophonist Andrew Urbina. The concert also features saxophonist George Garzone and friends, the Coltrane EOP Quartet led by saxophonist Leonard Brown, singer Marianne Solivan's Quartet, and the Berklee City Music All-Stars Quintet.
As a teenager, Pinsky aspired to become a jazz saxophonist before he found his calling as a poet. Moses, who grew up in the same apartment building as the great bebop drummer Max Roach, was perhaps destined to be a jazz percussionist. Pinsky first publicly read his poetry to jazz accompaniment earlier this year in Manhattan. Moses last accompanied a poet in the early 1960s, when the legendary Langston Hughes visited his high school and Moses was drafted to provide vibraphone backing.
We recently sat down with Pinsky and Moses, who were meeting for the first time, as they tried out some ideas for the forthcoming concert with the able assistance of Urbina. Between musical-poetic explorations, we engaged in a freewheeling conversation about jazz, poetry, and tomorrow's performance.
Q: Let's talk about the differences and the similarities between poetry and jazz.
Robert Pinsky: They're both arts that feed other arts. That is, jazz music has had a tremendous influence on American popular music, on show music, on rock 'n' roll, and on American classical music. It's like a laboratory where ideas are discovered and things go out into other forms. Poetry, too. They both get adapted or diluted or incorporated into something else. I can't imagine [Quentin] Tarantino making "Pulp Fiction" if there was no poetry.
Rakalam Bob Moses: To me, the answer is more fundamental than that. To me, there is no difference. It's just expression, it comes from the one. All expression comes from spirit. It takes many forms, any form. Speech itself is music. When you hear a language that you don't understand, you're hearing it as music.
Pinsky: Maybe you all know that the word Rakalam used, "spirit," it's Latin for "breath."
Q: And you've got to express breathing on the drums as well.
Pinsky: It's air; it's hide, but what the hide is interacting with is air.
Moses: I try to sing on the drums. It's difficult when you play an instrument with your hands to make it sound of the breath, but that's the challenge. For me, the spirit is in not preparing. I'll put it this way: In my view, spirit burns the brightest when you're absolutely in the now, when you're not bringing anything from the past. That's why when people want to rehearse, I always say, "Well, the gig's on Friday? How can you rehearse Friday on a Wednesday? Friday hasn't happened yet."
Pinsky: At first you might think poetry is different, that the poem is fixed. But another thing the two arts have in common is to happen in time: It starts and it ends. A poem, each time any one person reads it aloud, it's a different poem. Each time you hear it, it's different.
Q: What are you guys going to do for the concert?
Pinsky: I'm very much in Rakalam's spirit. I don't like preparing too much, so whatever we say, I'm sure we'll end up doing something a little different.
Q: What do you hope people are going to get from this performance?
Pinsky: Pleasure. I hope they enjoy it. If they get some emotion out of it, if they enjoy it, if they feel like they'd like to hear it again or hear something like that again, I'm satisfied. There's this burden of poetry that people sometimes think it's an exam, so they have to say something smart. It's a curse. I don't need you to say some clever thing. I just want you to say you enjoyed it. It's like I cooked a meal for you; I don't need you to say, "I think you used some Caribbean spices." I just want you to say it's delicious. A poem is like I knitted you a sweater. You don't have to analyze it.
Moses: Sometimes when I play a gig, I can actually see the people in the audience over-thinking it. It's on their faces.
Pinsky: Try reading a poem to people! You want to get them drunk or something so they stop worrying about "is this an English class and do I have to go 'Hmmm'?"
Moses: When you read your poetry to people, especially with some music behind it - not that it needs it - people will feel the poetry more than think about it. Robert sent his poems to me, and I enjoyed them. When you have it on the page, you can linger on a line and see how that line goes to the next line and think, "What did he mean by that?" But when somebody is speaking to you from the heart, it's different. When Robert read, I felt it on another level. I enjoyed [the poems] on the page, but it was more visceral when I heard him. It does make a difference.
Pinsky: It makes all the difference in the world. You don't read the score before you listen to the music.
