Whitney Balliett
Whitney Balliett (1926–2007) was the jazz critic of the New Yorker magazine from 1957 to 2001. This piece appeared in the New Yorker in 1958.
Kenneth Rexroth, the fifty-two-year-old poet, translator (modern Greek, ancient Greek, Latin, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese), anthologist, painter (abstract), and critic (literary, music), who has also been a hobo, range cook, horse wrangler, cab driver, and sheepherder, was born in South Bend, Indiana, but has lived for much of the past thirty years in San Francisco, where he has become a leader of that city’s ongoing poetry revival. He has also helped found a poetry-read-to-jazz movement there, and the other day he opened in New York at the Five Spot Café, a Saroyan bar-and-grill at the south end of Cooper Square, for a couple of weeks of readings with the Pepper Adams Quintet. I had lunch with him on the day of his début, and found him a nervous, medium-sized man with short gray hair, a mustache, a towering forehead, and eyes that slope like a sharply peaked roof when his face is in repose. He has a voice that is apt to move in mid-syllable from a whisper to a roar, and he often erupts into machine-gun laughter, delivered in a low monotone. He was dressed in a gray-black suit, a transparent white silk shirt, and a blue-and-white polka-dot string tie. After he had ordered oysters, shad roe, vegetables (“Waiter, I don’t care which vegetables, so long as they’re fresh”), salad, and dark beer, he looked down at the table and said, “I’ve been supporting myself since I was thirteen. I’ve only had five years of school. In fact, I’ve lived in the kind of world that Jack Kerouac imagines he has lived in.” His eyes shot up, and he sprayed a dozen rounds of laughter about the room. “A good many people, including the musicians I work with, think of jazz poetry at first as something only a weedhead would do. Not long ago, I worked with a symphony bassist, and he told me afterward, ‘You know, I was really scared, but it’s been one of the greatest musical experiences of my life.’ I didn’t start this thing. Renegade monks were doing it in the Middle Ages. Charles Cros, a nineteenth-century poet, read his stuff (things like ‘Le Hareng Saur’: ‘There was a great white wall, bare, bare, bare’—ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha) to bal-musette1 bands. There have been countless talking-blues singers in the South. Maxwell Bodenheim did it in the twenties and Langston Hughes in the thirties, and even I did it in the twenties, at the Green Mask, in Chicago, with Frank Melrose, a K.C. pianist. I’ve been reading poetry to jazz for two years now, starting in The Cellar, in San Francisco, with a quintet. Since then, I’ve done all of the West Coast, St. Louis, Chicago, Minneapolis. The most important instrument in my accompaniment is the bass. The bass goes right up your leg and sends out the voice. Modern jazz has outgrown everything. The audience can’t get into the music without verbal contact. The poetry gives you that, and the jazz gets the poetry out of those seminars taught by aging poets for budding poets in corn-belt colleges. I plan a good deal of the musical accompaniment, which isn’t all jazz by any means. I use bits of Satie, Webern, Boccherini. Each musician has a copy of what I’m reciting, with cues and musical notations on it. I read Ruthven Todd, Larry Durrell, Ferlinghetti, and some of my own stuff, including a lot of translations. A friend warned me about New York. ‘You’ve got to be careful, man,’ he said. ‘They’ve been having meetings to keep Rexroth out.’ Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
Rexroth asked me to stop in at the Five Spot before his first show that night, and I was met there by Ivan Black, a stocky, black-mustached representative of the Five Spot, who ushered me to a table near the bandstand, a raised platform roughly the size of a large window seat. “I’ve got to go and wake Rexroth up,” he told us. “He’s sleeping at a friend’s, over on Second Avenue. I’ll be right back.” The Five Spot is long and narrow, with a bar, sheltered by a fringed canopy, running down most of one wall; three gold-colored macelike objects suspended from a maroon ceiling; and the rest of the wall space spattered with posters and programs of various sorts. “He wasn’t asleep at all,” Black’s voice said after a while, in a relieved way, and Rexroth, wearing impenetrable dark glasses, sat down beside me. “These shades protect you in a club,” he said. “I’ve decided they relax you. I read my stuff. You can’t do it out of your head. You get swinging, and you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Rexroth then said it was time to begin. Black excused himself and, while squeezing onto the platform to introduce Rexroth, accidentally brushed a thick sheaf of manuscripts off a wobbly music stand.
“Damn it, Ivan! What are you doing?” Rexroth bellowed as Black backed and filled on the manuscripts.
5
The manuscripts were replaced, a drum roll crashed out, and Black introduced Rexroth as a horse wrangler and the Daddy-O of the jazz-poetry movement.
Rexroth got up on the platform, plunged his left hand into his left coat pocket, took as wide a stance as space permitted, stuck his stomach out, and read, in a strong singsong voice, a Ruthven Todd poem; Carl Sandburg’s “Mag,” accompanied by an Ellington blues; a poem by Pablo Neruda; a poem of his own; and a twelfth-century Chinese poem, accompanied only by the bass, which played long passages between such lines as “But why do the birds all hate me?,” “Why do the flowers betray me?,” “Why do the peach and cherry blossoms prostrate me?”
(1958)