I hear someone whispering,
"Without this music,
Life would be a mistake."
In the poem quoted above, the musical referent
is the sublime jazz created by saxophonist/flautist Charles Lloyd and his group.
The poem is one of "Two for Charles Lloyd" that appear in the liner notes of the
newly released CD "Rabo de Nube" by Lloyd’s quartet. The poet is Charles Simic,
a 1990 Pulitzer Prize honoree who was named the nation’s poet laureate by the
Library of Congress[1]
last August. This most recent honor occasioned the publication last month of
"Sixty Poems," an anthology of the author’s best-known verse.
The artistic intersection at which a
groundbreaking jazz musician and a poet who marries dark surrealism with playful
irony converge presents a wonderful and too-rare opportunity for freedom-loving
cultural devotees to celebrate. Not only do these artists share the same year of
birth, 1938, but both witnessed firsthand the dramatic changes that roiled their
respective worlds afterward — life under Nazi and communist rule in Yugoslavia
for Simic and the civil rights and other socio-political struggles in the United
States for Lloyd. In their respective fields, Simic and Lloyd chose oppression
and freedom as their defining themes.
In a 1984 Missouri Review interview with
Sherod Santos, Simic declared: "I’m the product of chance, the baby of
ideologies, the orphan of history. Hitler and Stalin conspired to make me
homeless." In a New York Times interview last August, Simic described Hitler and
Stalin as his "travel agents."
Enduring the upheavals caused by two of the
20th century’s most notorious tyrants becomes, in Simic’s poetic universe, the
basis for an underlying distrust in nearly everything — even the most seemingly
benign inanimate objects. For example, his early volume, "Dismantling the
Silence," includes poems entitled "Spoon," "Knife" and "Fork." Rather than
presenting versified still-life snapshots of kitchen utensils, however, Simic
imbues each with sinister qualities. The spoon is "polished to an evil/Glitter;"
the fork "This strange thing must have crept/Right out of hell;" and, in
"Knife," he conjures the potent image of "the sound/Of marching boots./You hear
the earth/Answering/With a hollow thud." As Thomas Jefferson reminded us, "The
price of freedom is eternal vigilance."
He and his mother left Yugoslavia to join his
father in New York City when Simic was 16. The family eventually settled in
Chicago, where an excursion to a jazz club with his father to see legendary
saxophonist Coleman Hawkins cemented Simic’s American identity. "You could say
the kid was hooked," Simic told Santos. "Jazz made me both an American and a
poet." It is noteworthy that a writer of Simic’s caliber has risen to the top
tier of public and literary recognition when one considers that he learned the
English language as a teenager in an era when assimilation was still encouraged.
Lloyd’s musical career is no less impressive
than Simic’s. Born in Memphis, he began his career backing such blues musicians
as Bobby "Blue" Bland and B.B. King. By the mid-1960s, he had formed one of the
first true jazz fusion bands, featuring drummer Jack DeJohnette and pianist
Keith Jarrett — both of whom participated on Miles Davis’ more celebrated fusion
outings several years later.
On the title song of "Rabo de Nube,[2]"
Lloyd revisits a composition that he featured on the 2002 CD, "Lift Every
Voice." On that album, he attempted to make sense in a musical fashion that
which he could not comprehend rationally — the evil of the Sept. 11 hijackers,
which was also the date that Lloyd and his group had been scheduled to play the
Blue Note in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Lloyd said in an e-mail that the
song "says something along the lines of: ‘If I could tell you what I would like
to be — it is the tail of a cloud, with a clear rain, that could come down and
sweep away your tears and sorrows.’ I feel the world needs much clear rain to
come down, and there is much to sweep away. The beautiful melody … gives us one
way to express this."
Simic recognizes the same quality in Lloyd’s
jazz. In the "Rabo de Nube" liner notes, he conjures the sense of freedom evoked
by Lloyd’s flute playing: "The instrument of/Lone shepherds/Sitting
cross-legged/Nomads setting out in their caravans/Under a sky full of stars./The
mystery of this moment,/That sudden realization/That we have a soul."
Simic’s poems
about Lloyd echo James Baldwin’s depiction of the jazz combo in his classic
short story, "Sonny’s Blues," which offers a fitting conclusion to any essay on
poetry, jazz and freedom:
He and his
boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness,
and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of
how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it
always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light
we've got in all this darkness.
#####
Bruce Edward Walker is communications manager
for the Property Rights Network at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a
research and educational institute headquartered in Midland, Mich. Permission to
reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author and the
Center are properly cited.
[1]
According to the New York Times, the United States has had a poet
laureate since 1987. The poet laureate is awarded $35,000 and a $5,000
travel allowance.
[2]
The composition "Rabo de Nube" was written by Silvio Dominguez
Rodriguez, a writer of hagiographic ballads about the Cuban butcher Che
Guevara as well as many songs extolling the supposed virtues of
communism. However, there is no evidence to suggest that Lloyd is
sympathetic to Rodriguez’s revolutionary views. When I posed my concern
to Lloyd’s publicist at ECM Records, she obtained the following e-mail
response from Lloyd: "My attraction to this song has nothing to do with
politics, but for the Sentiment of the lyric and the beauty of the
melody." In any event, Rodriguez has ironically found his music banned
from broadcast outlets under several socialist regimes, including
Venezuela, because of its overt American influences.
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