The PoemJazz performances treat my voice speaking poetry as having a role like that of a horn: speech with its own poetic melody and rhythm, in conversation with what the music is doing. The variations in pitch and cadence are those inherent in the sentences of a poem. The words and lines aren’t “set” to music, so much as they are in conversation with music.
That idea requires that the musicians and I listen to one another, intensely and responsively. I respond to what each musician does, as they respond to my voice and to one another. My goal is for the poem’s idiom to be true to itself, undistorted, while adapting its rhythms and pitches to counterparts in the music.
The melodic arcs and contours of the grammar, the patterns of the consonants and vowels—all these in the poetry are in dialogue with the music: not sung, not acted, but spoken as verse, collaborating with the music. The music, in turn, is in conversation with the poetry, rather than illustrating it or interpreting it or setting it. The phrases of the voice are like the phrases of a horn—but spoken.
I love the arc of Ben Jonson’s sentences in “His Excuse for Loving,” the phrasing as it dances with the rhymes. I think that the musicians I perform with—Laurence Hobgood, John Lockwood, and Stan Strickland—attend to the rapids and silences of Jonson’s phrasing with a musical equivalent, and the two together make a beautiful third thing.