Jazz and Poetry - Part 2 - Tonight's Performance

Santa Fe's most versatile horn player Arlen Asher

Performing with musicians is an unexpected thrill. For a poet, hearing your words with even more melody and actual sound than you ever could have in your head or at your desk is an unparalleled experience. 

I look for opportunities to do this as often as I can. I crave the improvisations that musicians create in different configurations, and I am always looking for a way to bring my medium into that kind of musical group interaction.

In the last post, I mentioned the next jazz/poetry performance in an ongoing, loosely biannual series.

I'm the only female, very musical but with no direct understanding of music. When we rehearse, I talk to the musicians about what I want using my poetic vocabulary instead of their terminology: I need more energy here. Could you do something  angular or anxious at this part of my poem?

Somehow our languages meet, and they give me a sound that makes my poems more alive, more real, darker, more potent, more dramatic. I slow to meet the music, my voice deepening or reaching; or I stop in places and let the musicians stretch out on their instruments, play a coda, or the head of the tune. I breathe deeper, and they play. 

Please join us!

Chris Ishee - piano, Arlen Asher - reeds, Paul Brown - 

bass/oud, 

Lauren Camp and Richard Atkinson - poetry

Co

unter Culture, 

Santa Fe, New Mexico

March 22 - 7PM