Jazz Poems
MAY 12
From The Daily Mirror
A book could be written on the moment swing turned into bop the moment Lester Young, Roy Eldridge, and Teddy Wilson gave way to Bird, Dizzy, Miles, Bud and Monk in fact it would be a great movie at least the sound track would be “beyond category” as Duke Ellington would have put it the life of a jazz musician (about which I know so little) is the life for me I felt on the afternoon Jamie and I visited his father who sat at the piano and talked and played I was tongue-tied and wanted him to play a song as if Helen Merrill were there and her voice and his fingers were about to have an intimate talkDAVID LEHMAN | 1948
from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
More Posts: book,classic,collectible,history,jazz,library,poet
JAZZ POEMS
ONE O’CLOCK JUMP
Still tingling with Basie’s hard cooking
between two 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
before going off with friends
to leave me in that state of grace.
A year later I was renting rooms
from a woman named Tillie who wanted
no jazz in her dank, unhallowed house.
Objecting even to lowest volume of solo piano,
she’d puff upstairs to bang on my door.
I grew opaque, unwell,
slouched to other apartments,
begging to play records.
Duked, dePrezed, and unBased, l
onging for Billy, Monk, Brute, or Zoot,
I lived in silence through
that whole lost summer.
Still, aware of divine flavor, I bided time
and waited for the day of reckoning.
My last night in Tillie’s godless house,
late—when I knew she was hard asleep—
I gave her the full One O’Clock Jump,
having Basie ride his horse of perfect time
like an avenging angel over top volume,
hoisting his scotch and milk as he galloped
into Tillie’s ear, headlong down her throat
to roar all night in her sulphurous organs.
PAUL ZIMMER | 1934
American Society of Journalists and Authors Open Book Award
from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
More Posts: book,classic,collectible,history,jazz,library,poet
Jazz Poems
ALMOST BLUE
Chet Baker, 1929-1988
If Hart Crane played trumpet
he’d sound like you, your horn’s dark city
miraculous and broken over and over,
scale-shimmered, every harbor-flung hour
and salt-span of cabled longing,
every waterfront, the night-lovers’ rendezvous
This is the entrance
to the city of you, sleep’s hellgate,
and two weeks before the casual relinquishment
of your hold—light needling
on the canal’s gleaming haze
and the buds blaming like horns—
two weeks before the end, Chet,
and you’re playing like anything,
singing stay little valentine
stay
and taking so long there are worlds sinking
between the notes, this exhalation
no longer a voice but a rush of air,
brutal, from the tunnels under the river,
the barges’ late whistles you only hear
when the traffic’s stilled
by snow, a city hushed and
distilled into one rush of breath,
your, into the microphone
and the ear of that girl
in the leopard-print scarf,
one long kiss begun on the highway
and carried on dangerously,
the Thunderbird veering
on the coast road glamor
of a perfectly splayed fender,
dazzling lipstick, a little pearl of junk,
some stretch of road breathless
and traveled into… Whoever she is
she’s the other coast of you,
and just beyond the bridge the city’s
long amalgam of ardor and indifference
is lit like a votive
then blown out. Too many rooms unrented
in this residential hotel,
and you don’t want to know
why they’re making that noise in the hall;
you’re going to wake up in any one of the
how many ten thousand
locations of trouble and longing
going out of business forever everything must go
wake up and start wanting.
It’s so much better when you don’t want:
nothing falls then, nothing lost
but sleep and who wanted that
in the pearl this suspended world is,
in the warm suspension and glaze
of this song everything stays up
almost forever the long
glide sung into the vein,
one note held almost impossibly
almost blue and the lyric takes so long
to open, a little blood
blooming: there’s no love song finer
but how strange the change
from major to minor
everytime
we say goodbye
and you leaning into that warm
haze from the window, Amsterdam,
late afternoon glimmer
a blur of buds
breathing in the lindens
and you let go and why not
MARK DOTY
from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
More Posts: book,classic,collectible,history,jazz,library,poet
Jazz Poems
BLUE IN GREENMiles’ muted horn penetrates
like liquid, melancholy medicine
to the pinched nerve
of an old misery. I’d hit
the winning shot at State that night;
teary-eyed, Tina kissed me—
way past any doubt, then
wore distance like
a torn red dress the next day.
I feel the rend again–in the piano,
I hear her long, practiced excuses
in Coltrane’s troubling tenor—
mixed with the loneliness
I’d felt at seventeen, standing
between rusted railroad tracks
in July.
I turn the lights off–
they go black.
Spare, midnight tones tug at me,
I lean back hard into the past:
I see that winning shot go in,
I see her run at me, again,
and for a moment—she’s there
mingled in Coltrane’s tenor.
What if
I never get past this pain,
just then Miles wavers back in
with an antidote—
traying eights behind
the ivorys. It works
this time, if I only knew
how it means.
DARRELL BURTON
from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
More Posts: book,classic,collectible,history,jazz,library,poet
Jazz Poems
LESTER YOUNG
Sometimes he was cool like an eternal
blue flame burning in the old Kansas
City nunnery
Sometimes he was happy ‘til he’d think
about his birth place and its blood
stained clay hills and crow-filled trees
Most times he was blowin’ on the wonderful
tenor sax of his preachin’ in very cool
tones, shouting only to remind you of
a certain point in his blue messages
He was our president as well as the minister
of soul stirring Jazz, he knew what he
blew, and he did what a prez should do,
wail, wail, wail. There were many of
them to follow him and most of them were
fair–but they never spoke so eloquently
in so a far out funky air.
Our prez done died, he know’d this would come
but death has only booked him, alongside
Bird, Art Tatum, and other heavenly wailers.
Angels of Jazz–they don’t die–they live
they live–in hipsters like you and I
TED JOANS
from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
More Posts: book,classic,collectible,history,jazz,library,poet