Jazz Poems
PARKER’S MOOD
Come with me,
If you want to go to Kansas City.
I’m feeling lowdown and blue,
My heart’s full of sorrow.
Don’t hardly know what to do.
Where will I be tomorrow?
Going to Kansas City.
Want to go too?
No, you can’t make it with me.
Going to Kansas City,
Sorry that I can’t take you.
When you see me coming,
Raise your window high.
When you see me leaving, baby,
Hang your head and cry.
I’m afraid there’s nothing in the cream, this dreamy town
A hinky-tonky monkey-woman can do
She’d only bring herself down.
So long everybody!
The time has come
And I must leave you
So if I don’t ever see your smiling face again:
Make apromise you’ll remember
Like a Christmas Day in December
That I told you
All through thick and thin
>On up until the end
Parker’s been your friend.
Don’t hang your head
When you see, when you see those six pretty horses pulling me
Put a twenty dollar silver-piece on my watchchain,
Look at the smile on my face,
And sing a little song
To let the world know I’m really free.
Don’t cry for me
‘Cause I’m going to Kansas City.
Come with me,
If you want to go to Kansas City.
KING PLEASURE (CLARENCE BEEKS)
from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
More Posts: book,classic,collectible,history,jazz,library,poet
Jazz Poems
CHARLES PARKER: ALMOST LIKE BEING IN LOVE
These are the shadows of water when water
is thick and no longer transparent
They are everywhere–on the walls
across the ceiling.
It was always this good.
One night you undressed me in your sleep.
Very slowly, you told me later. You said I smelled good.
The sweater i said I’d taken it
out of the drawer where I kept
my winter clothes.
It smelled of pine and a long summer.
No, you said. Not wood.
More like the inside of a saxophone case,
all velvet and sweet regrets.
All blues, I said. Blues
and whatever shadows are made of,
I said, falling on you like slow water.
DIONISIO D. MARTINEZfrom Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
More Posts: book,classic,collectible,history,jazz,library,poet
Jazz Poems
CHARLES PARKER 1920~1955
Listen
This here
Is what
Charlie
Did
To the Blues.
Listen
That there
Is what
Charlie
Did
To the Blues.
This here,
bid-dle-dee-dee
bid-dle-dee-dee
bopshop
have you any cool?
bahdada
one horn full.
Charlie
Filled the Blues
With
Curly-cues.
That’s what
Charlie
Did
To the Blues.
Play
That again
Drop
A nickel in,
Charlie’s
Dead
Charlie’s
Gone,
But
John Birks
Carried on.
Drop
A nickel in,
Give
The platter
A spin,
Let’s listen
To what
Charlie
Did
To the Blues.
WARING CUNEY
from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
More Posts: book,classic,collectible,history,jazz,library,poet
Jazz Poems
ELEVEN
From Velvet Bebop Kente Cloth
There ain’t/No word
I ain’t/Heard
ain’t/No word
Bird/Ain’t heard
Language is an/Inventor’s
>Privilege
I/Blow psalms.
I/Blow sinners’ deeds.
I/Blow prayer before death.
I/Blow curses.
I/Blow laughter.
I/Blow vocabulary of my axe.
You can’t/Hold
folks/Down who Be-Bop
but you/Kin hold
them/Up.
Every Be-Bopper/Renew
his/Subscriptions
to/Genius when he riff some
thing/New on his axe.
STERLING D. PLUMPP
from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
More Posts: book,classic,collectible,history,jazz,library,poet
Jazz Poems
IN PRAISE OF BUDDY BOLDEN
- You have shown me dissipation, the tome, the rhythm, and cool sonorous blue…
- The right consciousness is always dream, it wakes in us ideology and topos.
- Not only the blues like melic, like persimmon and soda.
- Not anything, just blonde sorrow.
- I can’t wait to choose my own fall, the bass and pica.
- Did you taste the drug, the white words of sound…
- Nothing will prepare me, not even drums and delusion. I wander in their halls, their tantrums. But mine was apparatus and rebellion. The plumb edifice of transgression.
- When we play, nothing else matters, not the placards on the train, not the yet and the how. We find plums and pendulums.
- I told them that this was not enough. No horses, no shoulders, no fields to drown, only blankcotton testimony and confession.
- When we leave, we leave the pipe and parts of the body. You whistle like a factory. Me, like an empty room.
- I would like to test myself, and remove these old tunings and feathers, these tulips.
- Do it then. Leave for the salty tincture of the city, the North.
- The leaves were all cankered when I returned. Like a salvo I burned. Not for them. Not for this place. But for this rotten reflection. The only true rejection of process.
- You meant to leave the phonetic terror of the moon, the New Orleans horn of sand and distraction.
- Leave me to fall. For this is all that I know. I accept, I accept this black stone of mine, mine own three lives, my crime.
LUCIEN QUINCY
from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
More Posts: book,classic,collectible,history,jazz,library,poet