Jazz & Poetry
Jazz & Lyric is the attempt to combine jazz music with the performance of poetry in concerts .
First of all, the authors of the American beat generation worked with experimental jazz musicians such as B. Charles Mingus (albums The Clown , A Modern Jazz Symposium of Music and Poetry , both 1957) experimented accordingly. For example, Langston Hughes ( Weary Blues ) worked with Mingus . Other examples are the German-born beat poet Ruth Weiss , who began doing it in 1956 at The Cellar in San Francisco , or Kenneth Patchen with the Chamber Jazz Sextet by pianist Allyn Ferguson in 1957. Hornist Dave Amram performed with Jack Kerouac in the same year . The first German jazz & poetry event took place in 1952 in the Hamburg student cellar "anarche", where Peter Rühmkorf performed; In 1966 he took up the form again and recited together with Michael Naura's band on the Rödingsmarkt .
Since the end of the 1950s - in the Federal Republic (with Joachim Ernst Berendt as producer) since 1962 - records of these productions were also made. In 1963, Werner Josh Sellhorn initiated a series of previous events for Lyrik - Jazz - Prosa under the name Jazz und Lyrik . In Prague from 1963 relevant events, to which the bassist Luděk Hulan also contributed as a lyricist, took place in the wine bar Viola .
As far as poets themselves appeared as reciters of their poems, new syntheses arose in some cases in the musical and textual presentation. Peter Rühmkorf, who released several albums with Naura and Wolfgang Schlueter in the 1970s , said: “Our work together has also influenced me a lot to open up the forms of organization that I do in poetry.” With a similar understanding of the integration of Ernst Jandl combined poetry and music with jazz music in the 1980s , often together with the singer Lauren Newton or the pianist Hans Glawischnig . Until after the turn of the millennium, the Afro-American Jayne Cortez was one of the poets who regularly recited their own texts to live music. In Germany, Ingeborg Drews should be mentioned here ( Cascaden: Lyrik & Jazz ). The jazz musicians Günter Baby Sommer and Theo Jörgensmann worked for a time with writers. Younger artists who cultivate the genre include Eric Mingus ( The Dream Keeper 2012, with Dave Amram), Mascha Corman ( Schwanenkampf 2016) or Moor Mother ( Who Sent You?, 2020).
The fundamental difference between the rhythm of jazz and the rhythm of lyric is that jazz is characterized by polyrhythm , the superposition of different rhythms. In poetry, on the other hand, there is only one voice, a monorhythm. A meta-Jazz poem by Ernst Jandl, the It Do not Mean a Thing (If It Is not Got That Swing) of Ellington and Irving Mills mimics illustrated intermedia covers of lyrics and jazz. The poem addresses the constituent rhythmic phenomena of jazz.
jazz is jazz is jazz is jazz
[...]
and you call it jazz and it has no swing
without swing it is not jazz
jazz is swing
jazz is drive
jazz is jazz is jazz is jazz
(Excerpt from Ernst Jandl: jazz is .)
In the poem, trochaic and dactylic patterns are superimposed , as it is typical for jazz to superimpose two rhythmic patterns. Jandl dissolves the polyrhythmic here intermedially into a successive back and forth. The poem enters into an intertextual dialogue with jazz, which is lyrically defined and imitated intermedially.
literature
- Sascha Feinstein: Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present. Greenwood Press, 1997.
- Kevin Young: Jazz Poems. Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series. Everyman's Library 2006.
- Peter Rühmkorf, Michael Naura, Wolfgang Schlüter: Phoenix ahead! Rowohlt, 1987.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Jazz Poetry & Langston Hughes
- ↑ Hans-Jürgen Schaal Soaked in jazz / One of us: Peter Rühmkorf (1929–2008)
- ↑ Rühmkorf's exciting jazz-poetry experiments shz.de, December 19, 2009
- ↑ a b Frieder von Ammon: Abundance of sound. Performance and music in German-language poetry since 1945 . Ernst Jandl's work in its context. JB Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart 2018, ISBN 978-3-476-04596-6 , pp. 289–291 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
- ↑ Quoted from: Frieder von Ammon: Fülle des Lauts. Performance and music in German-language poetry since 1945 . Ernst Jandl's work in its context. JB Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart 2018, ISBN 978-3-476-04596-6 , pp. 289 ( limited preview in Google Book search).