Tag: Jazz
Horn
By Robert Pinsky
Featured Image: Music by Thomas Wilmer Dewing 1895
This is the golden trophy. The true addiction.
Steel springs, pearl facings, fibers and leathers, all
Mounted on the body tarnished from neck to bell.
The master, a Legend, a “righteous addict,” pauses
While walking past a bar, to listen, says: Listen—
Listen what that cat in there is doing. Some figure,
Some hook, breathy honk, sharp nine or weird
Rhythm this one hack journeyman hornman had going
Listen, says the Dante of bop, to what he’s working.
Breath tempered in its chamber by hide pads
As desires and demands swarm through the deft axe
In the fixed attention of that one practitioner:
Professional calluses and habits of his righteous
Teacher, his optician. The crazed matriarch, hexed
Architect of his making. Polished and punished by use,
The horn: flawed and severe, it nestles in plush,
The hard case contoured to cradle the engraved
Hook-shape of Normandy brass, keys from seashells
In the Mekong, reed from Belize. Listen. Labor:
Do all the altered scales in the woodshed. Persist,
You practiced addict, devotee, slave of Dante
Like Dante himself a slave, whose name they say
Is short for Durante, meaning Persistent—listen,
Bondsman of the tool—you honker, toker, toiler.
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Piano Lesson
By Gregory Djanikian
Featured Image: Ella at the Piano by Donald Shaw MacLaughlan 1876
My teacher is looking at me sadly
as if with the large droopy eyes
of a basset hound.
I’m stumbling through “Naima”
transcribed for piano,
my fingers tripping badly over
the minor 3rds, the flat nines.
On his face, such longing,
as if it’s the end of jazz,
we’re saying farewell.
I’m ready to start from the top
playing all the changes, the repeats,
and he’s holding his head in his hands,
swiveling slowly in his chair.
The song is full of smoke and aching,
like a woman in a shiny dress
walking through a dark hallway
haunting the man she’s loved.
I can already feel the nostalgia in it
for what has never happened.
There are so many gray clouds here
I should play “Blue Skies,”
or “Mountain Greenery,” their upswings
rising like colorful balloons.
Now I see my teacher lying on his couch,
cupping his forehead in his palm.
It must be raining in his heart
for a love of something so perfect
there’s no place to find it
not in this room anyway
where I’m bent over the keys,
the rapturous jazz
just out of my reach
and my teacher is closing his eyes
and I’m closing mine
and we both might be imagining
Coltrane behind us breathing into his tenor
a song of love and departure
so fluent it feels like rain
falling into a lake
and maybe whatever is lovely
and improbable is always floating away
down a rivulet of dreams
where my body is falling
and my hands are reaching out,
and I am almost touching
something like water, like silk.
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