Jazz Poetry

For Yoko Miwa She knocked me out for a year took me to the tombs of Egypt, where she embalmed the brains of the first tribe of jazz... with kindest care she put them in their jars labeled calligraphically with multi-colored letters indicating Duke and 'Trane in a quicksand ...

Carlos Santana turned me on to him in an article in Guitar Player magazine I read at the Hingham library, at 14: spiritual center of his Baja brain, and mine now, for 35 years, in Boston, in the rain after a storm... the storm--it lasted years, years when I ...

[Written during guitarist Stian Westerhus' solo show, June 4, 2012 at Green Hours Jazz Fest, Bucharest.] I see things, scary things, wars and ghosts, planes and meadows. I hear my pulse and the blood rushing through my veins, I see an old clock on a marble mantelpiece and I see ...

On the ebony off-keys, your hands, your head in a veil of black mist, tonic to your turquoise evening gown.

Poised as a turtle dove on an eave, you press an index finger on the ivory, liberating a passel of scales zooming

down like falcons in a swarm, your ...

Shimmering behind Bill's subtle reharmonies of the Gershwin tune LaFaro's pungent doublestops and even that asshole girl's phony laugh at the climax is your intelligence I've never heard nor ever will hear the like it's only Sunday night at the Village Vanguard but I feel it's the garden ...

I have seen the stage lights play the sly sagacity of Henry's smile: the lightning on his lips, decades dark with spattered starlight

coming back to his eyes. To win words from that smile that opens like a jackknife drawing blood from parchment

spurting the sanguine melody the black ...

for Forbes Graham Arc shoots to treble tongue trip fingertip tapping valve tops traps the sinuous sound round

the quartet's quartal vibe, tribe of truth, sooth of soothing tunes turned back on themselves

lost in vertical vertigo. Then the trumpet picks them up, passes brass baton unto

the soldered sound ...

Spring was the sweat running down the back of her legs. It is the pack of young dogs running down the street in their best clothes, new haircuts and fresh packs of smokes always kept in the left pocket of their sports coats. Ready to offer one up to a beautiful or willing lady, unwrapping the ...

The last words of his hero still echoed in his ear but they brought no inspiration as there was a fear he had misinterpreted them. I met myself ten years from now on the Rue Grand Augustin.

He did not have the patience to answer questions that he thought unimportant. Rolling his eyes at me; yes, ...

I play the folk song twice once to ring out the singed changes, again in order that

nothing comes between you and me, however the notes pound for release from a cage...

A piece by Cage, you know the one, the 4' 33" of silence

for Louis Armstrong

I saw the Satchmo's shack of brick needle stopped on record warped humble as a corona with a cognac

fixtures plated gold reflecting me, directing me to the “s'all" in early fall stilling solos beat out on the balcony,

to the ...

Dolphy

What I hear is gone, playpens clattering

with rattles like drums, hum of heater on the floor--

I remember this as I tap the tones out of the

bass clarinet bell. I yell, Hell! I can tell ...

Every person, friend, family, enemy and lover is a string, one end attached to you. Tethered to life.

We go through our lives getting all tangled up. When someone dies the cord is cut. Gazing down, your hold the severed line in your hand and wonder about the cut. Even with the courage to go back ...