Duke Ellington’s career looks grim. The money isn’t coming in, and his band members are on the way out. Once an astonishing figure in the jazz world, Old Duke is now reduced to booking gigs at obscure ice shows. Because he needs cash.
Enter a promoter for the Newport Jazz Festival. He takes a risk on Ellington, who composes a special piece of music for the occasion, knowing this might be his last chance.
But the restless crowd heads for the parking lot, in 1956, even before his band finishes its final number.
Desperate, Ellington takes a risk on stage and changes his set list, at the last moment, asking his musicians to drum up “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue”, an old tune from 20 years ago.
Elaine Anderson feels the key change. Down in her spine. She jumps out of her box seat, dancing — crimping and curling her small frame — as if she’s dodging fiery brass flames. Crowd members abandon their reserved seats to gather around this heady platinum blonde in the black evening gown. Everyone loses it.
Including Ellington, who orders his tenor saxophonist to stay with his solo, no matter what. Don’t worry about the time, he tells him, though the festival promoter fears a riot and motions to Ellington to wind things down. But New Duke wouldn’t do it. In the end, his band plays through the chorus nearly 30 times and then obeys a roused and feverish crowd through four more blazing encores.
As artists, if we’re going to keep the crowd moving, then sometimes we need to slip on something new, like a little risk, even if it fits like a see-through gown, at first, stretching our vulnerability. As we surrender to our public performances, we’re more likely to give birth to new dances.
Looking back over his life, Duke Ellington said, “I was born at Newport in 1956.” But Duke wasn’t the only one. An entire audience was delivered during that historic performance. Jazz is what happens — to all of us — when somebody jumps out of her box.
And just dances.
Let’s Play June Jazz!
All month long we’re swinging with poetry at Tweetspeak. We call it June Jazz. We write found poems and share them on Facebook, Twitter and personal blogs, though we always link back to here. Last week we wrote to the tune of “O Solitude! If I Must With Thee Dwell” by Mr. John Keats.
With Newport and risky dances on my mind, a few of your poems from this past week really jived with me.
Grace Marcella Brodhurst-Davis writes,
Treasure
To him, it seemed he had to stumble from
The shy observatory he stood upon
To seek that secret soul’s pleasure
To be everyone’s idolized treasure
He opted for the liquid measure
Tasted highest bliss in his endeavor
Down murky halls he slithered anew
After drinking the witch’s bold brew
Atop the smoky, jumbled heap he drew
Crowds of kindred spirits to woo
‘Mongst age-old musical souls he crooned
The musky notes of a jazzy blues tune
Connie Cornwell Chipman offered an impromptu dance during a key change in the comment box. She writes,
Daddy-O
It’s gonna be a good show
let it not be
among the jumbled heap.
Give me daddy-O
until that happy morning.
Here’s how June Jazz works …
If you haven’t already, please consider subscribing to Every Day Poems.
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1. On Mondays, the Every Day Poem in your inbox becomes a chord progression. Find your own tone. Build an idea around a single poem line. Just let yourself go and write a found poem, baby.
2. Tweet your poems to us. Add a #junejazz hashtag so we can find it and maybe share it with the world.
3. Or leave your found poem here in the comment box.
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We’ll read your tweets and share some of your weekly play each week. At the end of the month, we’ll choose a winning poem and ask the playful poet to record his or her poem to be featured in one of our upcoming Weekly Top 10 Poetic Picks.
Here’s today’s Every Day Poem. Now go jazz it up.
Photo by Alex Dram. Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Matthew Kreider.
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Buy a year of Every Day Poems, just $5.99— Read a poem a day, become a better poet. In May we’re exploring the theme Trees.
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- Journey into Poetry: Matthew Kreider - July 23, 2012
SimplyDarlene says
Jazz
like honking
geese
rattles me;
too
much. Noisy
ruckus flung
on saxophone
songs
Floats like
fire; feathers
smoldered tip to
end
Pierced eardrums
vibrate. Eyebrows
furrow, squint into
sun.
I shy
away and run
as ash scuttles
spirals
ground-ward.
Downward
feet
stay stoic
until
Hillbilly songs
chip concrete into
bright
shades
of fiddle shale
Yes! I dance with
Jazz’s
kin –
cousin
father
or maybe mother.
Oh, brother,
my sister’s reeling
with
the African
banjo;
bouncing off
the ceiling
We land
soaked clean
through
dresses cling skin. Tight
stomps smother
guitar strumming
covers
hovers –
I don’t
care. No matter
no wonder
I’m crazy
wild over
backwoods
Hillbilly
music.
John says
*Beverly Kenney was a jazz singer who rose to prominence in the late 1950s…critics felt there was finally a voice to rival Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, and Ella Fitzgerald…Kenney committed suicide in 1960, she was 28.
THE LAST KIND
Men, women, and girl singers –
of the three kinds of humans
you were the last. You loved jazz
and the smoky little rooms
where the tunes got played. They
took note of your crusade, your
scat without scatting, your
vibrato-less gee-whizzy Fifties cool,
plus this pluperfect female shape
even George Shearing could see.
But they kept listening because
of your uninhibited phrasing,
your mad human offerings
of punctuation: semicolons where
men could breathe, commas to
put women at ease, parentheses
that gave girl singers courage.
That you always sang haunted
was widely-felt, but the ghosts were
only known by a few. Born to
be blue was always more than
a song. Then rock-n-roll invaded
our land and the loud was too
much, so you made yourself silent,
an esoteric casualty of war.
There will never be another you
is always more than a song.
Rosanne Osborne says
Fledging
Leaving home strips the money tree
of its husks, lays bare notions of plenty
revealing unquenchable thirst.
First, there’s the thrill of accomplishment,
the illusion of a self-sustaining organism,
and then the odds that young buds
will flower beneath the sweltering rays
of summer heat, that the earth’s moisture
will sustain the herbage, nourish the tree.
Finally, the reality that dicing nature
whirls the wheel while roots struggle
to compete for footing beneath the turf.
Charity Singleton says
Matthew – I love the connection of poetry to jazz. I think another really strong connection between the two is the sense of collaboration and group creating that happens on stage when jazz musicians give and take and play music WITH each other. I think we writers can learn a lot! I’ll have to see what poems I can find!
davis says
march
we gonna go
marcnin’ in
in a new york
minute
a horn blowin
drum rollin
parade
into the light
Tracy Seffers says
Understory
(Red in the Bud)
This is our time, declare the small quiet ones.
When those known for grand gestures clutch about themselves
their demure greens, their
virginal white wraps, their
thickest robes of clouded blooms
to veil late-winter nakedness,
we stand and declare our lines in fire,
line them out clearly so that you might
sing them too. Trace each knot and broken place—
see last summer’s heat run along the limb,
woven like silk, branches draped with the desire
of winter’s long-pent waiting.
This is our time. We know that soon enough,
we again take our place in the understory,
unseen, unmarked in the green season.
This brief moment when we sing our story,
brightflame licking along the bones:
it is all we are, all we have to tell. A poet her words.
A singer his song.
Donna says
Matthew… I feel I am there as I read this piece, wishing I had been even though I normally don’t seek out jazz – but this – this is the kind of music that seeks US out. Thank you for the dance.
Rosanne Osborne says
Silver Secrets
My computer allows me
to peer into an osprey nest
high above birches
in an Estonian forest.
Celebrating life, I remember
death. I see only my mother,
cold and lifeless at three a.m.,
in a hospital room across town.
The irony of time haunts
my enjoyment of the intimacy
of nature—a mother tending
her hatchlings–oblivious
to the miles that separate
watcher and watched, and I
wonder if she sees them, too.
How she loved driving
by the osprey nest high
above the road, straining
to see the bird she’d only seen
in pictures in her worn book.
Transported from Missouri
to Minnesota, she still marveled
that she had traveled, had
summered out of state.
And now, I can see what
she would have loved to have seen.
The unfairness of time’s advance
causes me to look away, deny my gaze.
Megan Willome says
I’m listening to jazz right now, while working. It’s one of the few types of music I can edit to (as long as there are no words).
Matthew Kreider says
Whenever someone listens to jazz, an angel gets her wings.
Matthew Kreider says
So glad to see the enthusiasm for jazz here! It’s such an intriguing language.
John – I was happy to see you drop by here in the comments! I’ve been following your poems, always enjoy them.
Charity – and it’s always good to see you, friend! 🙂
Matthew Kreider says
Rosanne – It was VERY cool to see one of your poems featured in my inbox this morning — via my Every Day Poems subscription!
Rosanne Osborne says
Yeah. It was a fun way to wake up. Thanks for the cool or Kool, as the case may be.
Rosanne Osborne says
Watershed
That bridge was a New York watershed
for Crane, an image both private
and public that determined his legacy.
Watersheds are like that. They stem
from images so ordinary, so likely
to be dismissed by others,
so random in the scheme things.
Until the pen pulls them out
of the riffraff of sights and sounds,
the bell jar that separates their sample
for closer examination, the probe
of penciled dissection and brooding.
Connie Cornwell Chipman says
Word taken from American Beech Trees
Festive Forest at Twilight
Paper lanterns hang
suspended, from fanned
out branches,
casting their glow
on the forest lawn
at twilight.
While jazz members were smokin
people were bobbin and weavin…
losing their inhibitions and saying
“Don’t let the music die.”
Rosanne Osborne says
Reflection
Early March seemed almost mine
when I was twelve. All the world
revolved around my world
like the globe on its axis spinning
to my fingered motion.
Emerging from childhood, marking
the years by St. Pat’s day,
I half-believed myself
to be Irish, half-believed
the day was wholly mine.
When March came, I began to sense
in the winds an inclination
for decided metamorphosis,
larva to chrysalis, mitosis
to strongly patterned wings.
The day of my birth, the birth month,
has the stain of narcissus echoing
in its streams, on the hillsides
the cone-shaped blooms emerge,
petals from poisonous bulbs.
path of treasure says
Lanterns
They do not sleep;
they hide silvery secrets
under thick, worn skin
A whisper emerges
from shadows, Americans
standing in rows of granite–
their quivering souls, still;
the spirit of the outstretched
hand shakes in all seasons…
I feel the grip of hope and place
my hand to my heart , salute
the courageous, the lanterns
on the way. They do not sleep,
these everleaves, these heroes
stark and tall, like the tree.
Rosanne Osborne says
Accords
The pine trees have been on a lark,
a near-drunken orgy
of dropping their needles.
Swaying to the changing chords,
a riff their roots absorb
from the land itself,
they’ve become a festive forest
of greens and browns. They celebrate
the changing seasons, happily mixing
resins of their own concoction.
Their multimodal whorls
and fertile candles improvising
on the harmonies of life and death
that they intuit from the humans
that dance under their boughs.
Maureen Doallas says
In winter’s twilight
spring-lit forsythia march,
shining like lanterns.
March in cold season:
forest stripped, trees’ trunks black,
snow almost festive.
Ice-cold New York night
slowly secrets winter’s trees
in snow like paper.
Connie Cornwell Chipman says
Mountains wearing snow caps
like sleep bonnets
in twilights bedchamber,
slumber under evenings glow…
as the man in the moon
holds his lantern o’er the
quiet summits.
Casting silhouettes on mountains sides,
as if natures blanket…from
tall pines, that are gently swaying to the sound
of soft jazz being played in the foothills.
Rosanne Osborne says
Tempo
Slowly he drives, irritating
those whose reflexes are quicker,
those who want desperately
to get wherever they are going.
Most things are slower now.
Deliberation replaces desperation
He reaches things just beyond his grasp,
knocking over what’s nearer at hand.
Reaching lengthens cramped
arthritic joints, brings its own purpose
to the table. Senility sits to the left
of dementia–domino tiles click–
as they shed the extra coats
they’ve worn as winter turns
to summer and they lose
the board on which they play.
Rosanne Osborne says
The Hunt
Lanterns almost white
against the blackness of the night,
carbide hissing, igniting
the burn of youthful desire.
Boys like miners thread
their way through the dense
undergrowth, listening
to the distant bay of hounds.
Raccoons scurry from tree
to tree, testing the dense foliage.
Climbing high, they hear danger
in canine cries, and their hearts
beat against the sudden stillness
of the night. The forest sniffs
acetylene burning and knows
its vulnerability as boots
crackle across the leaf-laid pattern
of the flooring. The imminence
of death drips against the earth’s
elements, and life trembles
as the dogs move in to tree
their prey. A rifle cracks and the thump
of furred life descends in the false light
of reflected lamps and panting boys.