One of the reddest of herrings to distract the occasional traveler along the pathway to understanding "poetry & jazz," "jazz text," or whatever other uncomfortable name we might use for this particular performance genre, has been left by poets (from Kenne th Rexroth right on into tonight's set at the Nuyorican Cafe) who have insisted on giving elaborate explanations of their adaptive methodology. Having heard these explanations, an audience might well expect poets who have recorded with musicians to sound considerably different from their solo performances. Most clearly do not. Poets who ordinarily read in that annoying "poetic" voice we have all come to recognize from the reading circuit, as well as the most "out" of performance poets, tend to perform the ir verses pretty much the same way whether accompanied by musicians or only by the music of their own muses, and it's about time that everybody concerned finally recognized that there's nothing wrong with that.
Nathaniel Mackey, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Jayn e Cortez are all poets deeply influenced by music; influenced in that strictest and most beautiful of dictionary senses, they have experienced an "inflow," have felt the authority of often invisible means. While they may have much to say about the particularities of fitting their voices among the other instruments of these recordings, most of the work of "the music," as we used to term it, had already influenced the writing of the verses before anybody brought out a microphone. The poets' idioms were already organized around the rhythms they had felt in the inflow, as can be heard most immediately in those poems of Komunyakaa's recorded without musical accompaniment. His reading of those poems is much like his reading when Tchicai and company play alo ng with him, but that's because he'd heard them before he wrote. And they had all heard the blues. As Kalamu ya Salaam says in his own recent recording, My Story, My Song, "the blues is our birth certificate."
There is no mistaking the parents of these ly rics. Love Notes from the Madhouse underscores this theme by beginning with the human voice, which is slowly joined by percussion and the distinctive bass of Fred Hopkins. This set was recorded live in Chicago in 1997, and it stands as one of the most successful live recordings of poetry and jazz to have been released. The risks of live recording are somewhat lessened in this day of easy digital correction, but there is still the sense in listening to these tracks that the poet and musicians were, aft er years spent deep in the shed, ready for whatever their audience and venue might provoke. In the tradition of acknowledging jazz tradition (ever listen to one of those long Sonny Rollins solos?), the poetry and the instrumental passages all summon a host of lively spirits. Komunyakaa asks if a $500 suit would keep him from standing in Robert J ohnson's shoes. (To judge from the cover photograph, this is an amusingly rhetorical question.) John Tchicai's bass clarinet (he's holding it in the cover photograph) mimics Eric Dolphy's flights of bird calls on "Dolphy's Aviary / Malachite." The classic tenor opening on "Blood Count," a Billy Strayhorn composition, recalls the era of "classic jazz" while the ghostly keyboard effects on "Hypothesis" sound like the specter of Sun Ra.
Komunyakaa's readings on the disk are uniformly effective, with and without the music, and the sheer sense of the event has been captured by this recording as effectively as earlier recordings caught the greatest live moments of Dolphy and Mingus. Tchicai has long experience working with text, going back more than thirty years to his recordings with Amiri Baraka and the New York Art Quartet, and that experience is evidenced by the great responsiveness of his playing to Komunyakaa's words. The other musici ans are equal to the leaders on this date. Hopkins is as lyric as ever he was with Air or with his own later groups. That's Margriet Naber-Tchicai behind those eerie keyboards, and Jeff Parker plays a great, harmolodic-sounding guitar feature on "Finding the Path." The only sour note to my ear is a spoken chorus at one point that sounds a bit too much like the responsive reading in a church that isn't sure of its text, a bit of groping for the right rhythms that is in sharp contrast to the incredible ensemble passag es elsewhere (the tight guitar and winds that roar in after Komunyakaa's reading in "Dolphy's Aviary / Malachite" or the tight interplay among reeds, keys, and guitar on "Hypothesis").