Poetry & Jazz At Arts Festival ...

Russell Campbell

It was an Auckland art theatre, and it was the Arts Festival poetry and jazz session.

Attempts to mate poetry and jazz have been going on for a number of years now but so far without any significant success. The Auckland session did little to dispel the view that the coupling can only produce a worthless hybrid.

Various techniques were used. A vocal backing with chant-like intonations was used to create an air of remoteness with a poem by Walt Whitman, and an interesting effect was achieved at the end as it softened into a plaintive moan. With others, piano, bass, drums, saxophone, flute and also sax were used variously to create different effects—a mood of meditation, an air of strident assurance, a reflection of changes in tempo and perhaps repetitions of ideas in the poems.

The execution was fairly competent—though the reading and vocal backing could have been improved—but obstacles were inherent in the nature of the combination itself. In many cases, the natural rhythms of the conversational-style poetry conflicted with the more mechanical rhythms of the jazz backing. This could perhaps be overcome when music and poetry is specifically written for performance in combination, but it was only established poets—Whitman. Dylan Thomas. Tom Gunn—who were presented at Auckland.

A more serious and general criticism it seems to me is that good poetry requires intellectual alertness and concentration for its appreciation. While jazz relaxes the mind and transmits its warmth by sinking in through the senses. A mind attuned to jazz is certainly not in the critical poise that listening to poetry necessitates. So at Auckland we drank in the sound of the jazz band and the sound of reader's voice, but we could not concentrate on the poetry and at the end of a piece had only a vague idea of what it was all about In this respect, the experiment was a failure.