I spent a lot of time today at the Cape, working on research for my paper on Anthony Braxton, one of my favorite saxophonists/composers (and someone I had the pleasure of playing with under bizarre circumstances about twelve years ago). Got my brain working on some poems, lemme tell you…

I’m going to have to post some of what I read regarding cultural biases toward reading music and not reading music, because I think it has some bearing on the poetry page/stage debate.

In a nutshell (and I’ll do a better job with this later) Braxton talks about a prejudice many jazz critics have against African American creative musicians who read music, write music with some degree of attention to European-derived musical theory, and yet maintain the spirit of jazz improv in their work; it’s complicated and I’m not doing it justice, but an example would someone saying that Braxton’s music is “too cerebral to be jazz.” Judging all jazz against a standard of it needing to come from some deep emotional core, spontaneously generated. primitively originated (yeah, that directly stated — there were plenty of examples given).

Interestingly, one of the critics most taken to task is Amiri Baraka, who has attacked Braxton’s music as not being “black enough” because Braxton identifies the composer Webern as an influence and has played with Warne Marsh and Paul Desmond.

Anyway, the poetry angle…

Braxton makes an interesting point about the idea that the score for a piece of music is, in Western tradition, seen as a text to be followed and reproduced; this is what leads people to believe that written music that represents intelligent, pre-planned creation of the work is the antithesis of jazz.

Braxton points out that his view and the view of many other creative musicians is that the notation provides the basic framework, the trellis upon which the music can grow — it offers ideas, suggestions, etc; but that it is written does not extinguish the necessity for spontaneous creation during the performance.

This seems obvious to me — my poem onstage is rarely an exact duplicate of the one on the page, certainly isn’t a duplicate of the last time I performed it. I’m assuming that’s true of others…

I wonder, though, how much of that spontaneous creation sometimes vanishes during the runup to a slam, as poems are honed to milliseconds of perfection?

Not really arguing anything here; just musing on a stimulating essay. Any thoughts?