Listen & Be Heard Weekly Archives

The maxim “Form is just an extension of content” is attributed to the late American poet [tag]Robert Creeley[/tag], whose poetic forms were usually short, precise, and direct. He was a contemporary of the Beat and Black Mountain College groups of poets, mostly affiliated with fellow Black Mountain poet Robert Olson. Creeley’s work habits usually involved writing while listening to jazz. One of his poems, “I Know A Man,” contained a line that served as the source for the title of Jack Nicholson’s first directorial effort, 1971′s “Drive, He Said.”

Creeley died in 2005. His final project was a collaboration with the jazz bassist [tag]Steve Swallow[/tag] titled “[tag]So There[/tag]” on Watt/ECM Records. Released in 2006, the CD paired Creeley reading eighteen of his poems with Swallow’s musical compositions as accompaniment. The result is a suitelike collection of surprisingly wide-ranging emotional territory, considering the reserved collective tones of music, lyrics, and vocal presentation. Creeley’s spoken word style is more news anchorman than sensationalistic pitchman (there used to be a difference, remember?) as he reports on love and finality in the only real “no-spin zone,” the area where a person is left with the questions he or she may not want to acknowledge or answer while staring at the ceiling in the three a.m. darkness. And it’s funny, too.

Swallow is joined by Steve Kuhn on piano and a chamber string group known as The Cicada Quartet. The music is as spare as Creeley’s lyricism, matching it note for note. It ranges from joyful rhapsodic explorations to somber, funereal chords from both the duo of Swallow and Kuhn and the quartet, even as an occasional sextet. Creeley’s voice pops up in these pieces during mostly unexpected moments, like a car on a freeway that has been in a rearview mirror’s blind spot and suddenly becomes visible to the driver after a quick peek over the shoulder before a lane change. This CD is not a collection of songs with fifteen-second intros followed by the first verse. It is uninterrupted presentations of a poet’s work, not a few lines of verse inserted into a rhythm section followed by an instrumental break. After a few minutes of listening to this recording, form becomes less an extension of content and more of a completed work without having to make distinctions regarding who, what, where, why, or how. It just is.

Kuhn and Swallow’s work on this CD kept reminding me of Vince Guaraldi’s work on “A Charlie Brown Christmas” minus the drummer: not so much in the notes and phrasing, because Kuhn’s playing itself does not resemble Guaraldi’s and Swallow can be an extremely melodic bassist, but its thoughtfulness and suggestions of emotional landscapes. Schroeder would have loved playing this music, Linus would have loved reciting the poems, Lucy would have loved psychoanalyzing them, and Charlie Brown would have loved to play this CD for that red-haired girl. Charlie may not have gotten anywhere with her, but it would definitely be a step up from his kite-flying, football-kicking, and baseball skills. She may even have liked it. She would at least be able to identify him in the version of “I Know A Man” included in this collection, especially its final words: “drive, he sd, for christ’s sake, look out where yr going.”

To order “So There” and for additional information, visit www.ecmrecords.com.

[tags]cd review[/tags]

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