POETRY AND JAZZ

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29902, 16 August 1962, Page 17

POETRY AND JAZZ

Interesting Experiment On jMtx and poetry be combined? Their fitful meeting at the end of the Universities Arts Festival's “jazz workshop” yesterday afternoon rather suggested that they could, although there are certain problems of adaptation foe which answers have yet to be found. On the surface, there is no reaeoa why these two arts should hot be complementary. Jazz, after all, is a music which depends heavily on vocalised inflexions. and rhythm is an essential element of poetry In general, however, the demands of the two are quite different. Whether the amalgam can be successful depends on how much poetry and how much jazz one knows. The rhythms of poetry essentially are much more delicate than those of jazz; the problem is how to make the two interdependent without allowing them to obscure each other The answer is not. as perhaps yesterday afternoon’s student readers discovered, easy to find, particularly in the work of p'ets such as Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, and T. S. Eliot in which the literary content is familiar enough to submerge any unfamiliar musical accompaniment. It did seem yesterday that some of the student readers had too slim a knowledge of jazz, and that the musicians were sometimes quite unfamiliar with the poems being read. As an experi(ment, though, it was fascinThe only reader who really got “inside” the poetry was Dunstan Ward; his voice was slight, but his phrasing was good and he reproduced Eliot's taut rhythms admirably. Another interesting reader was Mike Noonan, who rolled his voice in suitably melodramatic fashion around a poem by Peter Porter, which described the proper procedure for citizens to observe in the event of a nuclear attack, while a snare drum throbbed in the background Fascinating. —D.W-R