Poetry and jazz

Abstract

Recent research on jazz history has disproved the widespread belief about jazz being exclusively a music genre. My explorations have revealed evidence for jazz also embracing poetic and dramatic genres, which has not only resulted in novel vocal-instrumental 
forms but has also integrated several contrasting aspects: cosmopolitan with national (e.g., jazz renditions of poems in national languages), improvisational with compositional, jazz polyrhythmic structures with the rhythm of the verse, or sound qualities and the meaning of lyrics. Present-day discourses on ‘the death of jazz’ consider vocal instrumental genres as one of the directions for the future path of jazz. Hence, a question arises as to whether such genres constitute a violation of the jazz canon, or whether this is a view maintained only by conservative adherents to the stereotypical conventions which still hold sway. What might the collaborative possibilities between the jazz artist and poetry reader be, and what kind of inventive outcomes, employing past creative practices, could new fusions of improvised jazz and poetry bring? Foremost contemporary American jazz vocalists revive, for instance, blues, vaudeville, cabaret, and chanson. Particularly noteworthy are the free improvisations by the Russian artists Vladimir Tarasov and Alexey Kruglov (on their 2015 Sound Spaces album), as are the 2017 jazz rendition of Julian Tuwim’s poems by the Czech trumpeter Štepánka Balcarová and the Polish vocalist Malgorzata Hutek, and the 2021 project of the Slovak musicians František Báleš and Matúš Uhliarik based on the Sonnets by the revered Slovak poet Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav. To what extent do their creative thinking and identity transform when jazz performers are drawn into the lyrics’ meaning? Whilst the epistemological possibilities concerning jazz structural foundations (e.g., melody, harmony, and rhythm) have already been exhausted, boundaries in the understanding of improvisation and sound are expanding, thus offering new formal and contextual inspirations.