Celebrated Poet Nathaniel Mackey Talks About the Deep Connections between Jazz and Language
On Friday, February 14 at 7:00 p.m. in Schoenberg Hall, Salim Washington, professor and chair of global jazz studies at The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, will stage his concert “In the Beginning Was the Word.” The concert will feature some of today’s finest jazz musicians and compositions from Washington’s most recent recording project.
Joining the musicians, via zoom link, will be the celebrated poet and author Nathaniel Mackey. Currently the Reynolds Price Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University, Mackey was a longtime professor at UC Santa Cruz and has been an intellectual and creative force for five decades. Mackey’s poetry has always born a kind of mystic relationship with music. In the words of his editor Jeffrey Yang, it’s as if he “is writing English in music.”
Mackey has long worked with jazz musicians, but his collaboration with Washington signals a fresh approach, both in terms of its content and its form. Mackey sat down for an interview to talk about jazz, poetry and language as music.
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You’ve written much about your long relationship with jazz music and how it has influenced your poetry. Which came first, music or the word?
I started listening to jazz in junior high school, I guess it would have been around seventh or eighth grade, and I didn’t start writing poetry until late in high school, in my senior year. And then I continued writing in college and I have continued since.
Did you see connections as early as high school between jazz and poetry?
I wanted there to be a connection, because the music spoke to me so forcefully and so deeply. I remember in high school writing a story called “But Not for Me,” – it wasn’t a very good story – but it was prompted by my listening to a very famous album by Ahmad Jamal called Ahmad Jamal Live at the Pershing. I was very taken with it. I wrote a story that wasn’t about the music or about musicians, but it tried to do something with that title and that mood that the music conjured for me. So, early on, I was looking for this connection and I was seeing it in some places, just the connection between jazz and literature. One of the early records I bought was Modern Jazz Quartet called The Sheriff, which has a piece on it called “Natural Affection,” which was written for the production of the play Natural Affection, written by William Inge. So, I went to the library and checked out the play.
You were looking for the connections even before you were writing?
Yes. Very early on, I was taken by this trope that is used very often in jazz, which is the trope of speaking. That connection between words and music became an obsession of mine.
There is a famous story about you and Don Cherry [the legendary experimental jazz musician] appearing on stage together. How did that collaboration come about?
Pure happenstance. Don Cherry was there to perform with Allen Ginsberg, and I’d gotten very excited when I found out Don Cherry was going to be there, and I was reading from a series of poems that take their title from a couple of recording of his, “Mu, First Part” and “Mu, Second Part.” And someone must have told him. So, he just came up on stage while I was reading. I wasn’t all that aware of his being there, and he just started playing on the flute. And I knew who it was, right away.
Did that alter—in that moment—what you were reading or how you were reading your poetry?
It didn’t alter what I was reading because I’d already selected what I was going to read, and I didn’t have a great deal of time—there were five or six of us on the program. But it did alter the way I read. I had to listen to him and make my reading, the way I read, something of a dance, a sonic dance with what he was playing. It was different.
I read a little differently when I’m reading with musicians than when I’m alone. It’s as you would expect, I guess. It’s interactive and you are supposed to be interacting with one another. You leave space, you learn not to feel like you have to fill up the space by yourself. That’s one of the big differences about reading poetry with music, with musicians.
It’s not even about finishing the poem. Especially for me, because I write long poems. Early on, I would rush to make sure I got it all in. I remember working with a colleague at UC Santa Cruz, Karlton Hester, and we did a concert where I was reading with his band, and when we were rehearsing, he just said—try giving it more space. Try letting it breathe a little more. He said: “you don’t have to finish the poem.”
I’ve never heard anything like that from a poet or author.
(Laughs.) I mean, my poems are serial poems, and there is a kind of ongoingness about them. So, it may be more true for my poems than other people’s poems, because of the approach to poetry that I take. I mean, I’m not the only one who approaches poetry this way, of course. One of the poets who I really love, Robert Duncan, out of San Francisco, he got this long poem, serial poem going, and he called it “Passages.” He numbered them, for a while, and then he got to where he didn’t even number them. They were just passages of a larger poetry that’s not captured or contained by the particular instances of poetry that you have in the book.
And that makes sense to me. So, I say, “yeah that’s right.” I’m in this long-going work anyway. Let’s see how much of it fits with what we are doing here musically, and let that be the focus of attention, rather than getting to the end of page three.
That was very liberating. I enjoyed the gig more. It felt more interactive. I was listening to other instruments a lot more closely, listening to the spaces, to where I could step back and listen for openings to come back in. I liked it.
How did you meet Salim Washington?
We were in a program together in Boston, I think it was in the early 90s, and that’s how we became aware of one another’s work. And we also had some friends in common and there was a jazz study group at Columbia University and Salim was sometimes a part of that. I was on the West Coast so I didn’t get to their meetings very often, but a couple of times I went out. We were aware of each other, I know his music and he’s been reading my work, it turns out.
How did this collaboration with Salim Washington come about?
At least a couple of years ago he contacted me and said he would really like to do a collaboration and be a part of this larger work that he was making. I said sure, I knew his music. We think alike in some ways. I could see why my writing would interest him. It draws so much on the same art form that he practices in that world and tradition that he knows so well.
How did you choose the poetry?
Well, in this case, I’m doing something that is different, which is that I’m letting him choose the poetry. I have a book in progress. I sent him the typescript, and I said, “why don’t you choose the places or passages from this book for the music that you are going to be performing, and you figure out where you want them and let me know.”
He liked the idea. And it relieved me of the very question that you asked, which is an enormously difficult question to answer for yourself. What am I going to read? Well, let’s have the musician think about passages or even complete sections of a poem that interacts with the music in an interesting way.
I’ve worked with lots of musicians, but never in this way before.
What do you hope audiences will take away from this show?
To hear the poems as a kind of music. I think that’s important, to hear the human voice as a kind of instrument. And to appreciate a kind of dance of fragments that is going on.
It is not just that not all of the poem will get read, necessarily, but all of the solos by the instrumentalists, those are all fragments, those are all pieces of a larger whole that is left to our imagination, and the way the different tonalities that are available to the different instruments converse with one another, contrast with one another maybe even contend with one another is something worth hearing and learning something from. And the way in which the words interact with this non-verbal speech that is going on and coming out of the instruments is also something I want people listening to take note of. And just getting an appreciation for the musical roots of language.
We hear language every day, and we don’t think of ourselves as conservatory trained, but we are. We start our training when we were babies when our parents started talking to us. We learned this miraculous thing that we come to take for granted called language. Poetry is one way to remind ourselves of that miracle and that mystery and putting it in the context of music, I think underscores that fact even more.
We forget how close language is to music. I like to say that, when you learn a foreign language and you speak it with an accent, what that means is that you’ve learned the words you’ve learned the rules of grammar, but you haven’t gotten the music yet. Your marked by not having picked up the music or learned how to speak it, with that music of a native speaker. That’s one of the ways we know how important tone and cadence and all those terms we use to talk about music are part of this whole project of communication and making meaning that we are involved with as speakers and writers. So, I hope they get some appreciation of that.
I don’t know why Salim felt he needed poetry in the piece, but more power to him. But it probably has something to do with that, especially in the jazz tradition where instrumentalists so often seem to be trying to speak with their instruments, to imitate human speech. And often in poetry, the poet is trying to be a musician. The instruments are trying to speak and the speaker is trying to be an instrument, and there they are. There will be plenty of food for thought, and the feeling in your body that tone and rhythm creates.
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In the Beginning was the Word will take place Friday, February 14, 7:00 p.m. Schoenberg Hall at The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Visit the event page for more information, and to register via Eventbrite. The program will feature the brilliant Japanese-born pianist Yayoi Ikawa, Michigan-based bass player Rodney Whitaker (noted for his “distinctive, bear-sized sound”), drummer Taru Alexander, known for his brash eclecticism. On trombone will be Ku-Umba Frank Lacy, whose career has included collaborations with Lionel Hampton, Dizzy Gillespie and Elvis Costello, and who has been recorded on 5 GRAMMY Award-winning jazz albums.