“Faces in the Jazzamatazz” by Ken Nordine [1959]

An Exploration of Music and Poetry, Day 9: Poetry and Jazz

To describe to another person the experience of listening to a certain song or genre is rather difficult. Most of us simply lack the vocabulary to convey well an idea as abstract as music. Instead of using creative similes and metaphors that express the web of associations we experience while listening, we rely on flimsy comparisons to other genres, other musicians, or other songs.

In other words, saying Ken Nordine is “poetry meets jazz as spoken by the guy who narrates movie trailers” might be perfectly accurate, but it fails altogether to communicate the way the spoken word artist annunciates, the way his pace changes, his many uses of onomatopoeia, or his wide cultural references. I, for one, can’t do it (which is why I run a blog where you can hear the examples). One can only listen to Ken Nordine for a short time because his phrases are so thick with both imagery and linguistic flourishes.

Though not in any way tied to the beat poets, outsiders grouped Nordine’s Word Jazz albums with the beats’ own poetry and jazz output (for example, Kerouac’s “American Haikus”). For our purposes, Nordine and the beats were simply two avenues through which the same artistic impulse found an outlet in the late 1950s.

A final note: The following lines from “Faces in the Jazzamatazz made it a perfect post for last Saturday (the day of the supposed rapture), but I have been too busy to post until tonight.

Have another drink baby! Live it up!
Lets have a ball …. before the great big all,
goes up in fire and brimstone…

Doomsday boys and girls of dust,
come blow your horn for Mr. Must.
Full circles roll in spiral down,
into the fright of the thinnest town.