Wednesday, November 29, 2023
Saturday, July 15, 2023
Upright Bass
who understands the city of music
from the streets down. Or a geologist
who's studied the strata
below the tunes. A cool cat,
looking through sunglasses at a smoke-
clouded jazz bar, plucking thick strings
that seem to mutter to themselves
the words, "You have to understand,
yeah, you have to understand."
And the mayor stands aside,
lets the drums attack, the piano
scales rush and crash, the sax flash.
The mayor turns to the bassist
and says, "Oh, I understand,
brother, I understand."
Friday, August 14, 2020
"Jazzanatomy," by James Emanuel
A poem by poet, scholar, and professor James Emanuel (1921-2013). Reading/video:
Wednesday, June 10, 2020
"Four Letter Word," by James A. Emanuel
Link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QP2eM6xsygU
Monday, January 13, 2020
Clark Terry's Ballads
Come inside, where it's mellow dusk
and bourbon brown. I can turn it into noon
at any time, then back to blurry twilight. All
right, come outside--look: red, yellow, and blue
blossoms still want your attention. Listen
to vespering birds, hear wordless
words of traffic, of trees in rustle
and streets in hustle. Back inside
we'll take note of desire, climb a set
of stairs, so easily. We might be
caught unawares by something sweet
smiling there in mischievous shadows.
It could be us in mirror. It could be
a woman or a man or a ghost. Or just
the house itself, itself, listening.
hans ostrom 2020
Sunday, September 2, 2018
Saxophone Sunset
Plump notes, tenor sax. Ripe
peaches, warm fuzz exteriorily
wry. Now
things must move uptown.
Phrases must front style.
Though even among neon
and hard traffic & hard lives
they do not lose
their memory of sunset.
Sweet, tart, sad, not bitter,
that's all.
hans ostrom 2018
Friday, February 10, 2017
Salamander Row
where the quick, cool creek plays jazz
of its running for ferns and moss.
I'm going down to Salamander Row
to lose my sense of loss.
Beneath overhanging branches,
the salamanders live moistly
as meditative creatures. They
aren't teachers, but I learn
from their calm there, and the
shaded ambiance of Salamander
Row creates a balm there.
hans ostrom 2017
Wednesday, June 1, 2016
The Fiddler's Response
individualistically, in spite of
communal structures, hitocracies,
group performance, and ubiquitous
corporate dispensers. Thus
was the violin-player in a four-
person acoustic jazz band induced
by the present music and her
personal compunctions to play
with her hair, twisting it with
one finger, then looking at it
as if it were a clue; this, as
she waited (was she waiting?)
for a guitarist to complete
his wailing interval.
* "wailing interval"--sometimes
used by Duke Ellington to refer to
an instrumental solo
hans ostrom 2016
Monday, December 14, 2015
Duke, Again
just one mood, ever
two or more.
State profoundly
something simple
but please
don't decorate.
Slip something
gut-bucket,
not quite profane
but close, into
urbane constructions.
Make smart choices.
Move efficiently
like a chess
assassin. The players
are the source:
so obvious, but
almost always
overlooked: Aristotle
understood. Remain
madly allergic
to cliche. Dodge in
and out of the fray.
hans ostrom 2015
Friday, December 11, 2015
Listening to Monk
("Well, You Needn't")
Concerted jazz effort produces
a jazzerted zephyr forthwith.
No frazzling in the port, no
impertinence in the fort. A
rush of notes arranged by
practice and intuition
suggests at least a nod to
the transience of people and things.
hans ostrom 2015
Sunday, October 18, 2015
Something It Did Not Used to Be
he finds himself in a recreated sector
of Oklahoma City called Bricktown,
which is cheek-by-jowl to Deep Deuce,
Charlie Christian's ground. Bricks
of the newly restored buildings to him
evince a muted somber red that alludes
to tragic mineral compounds
cooked hard and put up wet with mortar.
Restaurants, bars, and shops:
the holy trinity of tourism:
America, here is your culture,
kind of. He told this to nobody
but himself. And nobody
danced except in clubs, nobody
wove carpets, or improvised
sales negotiations, or read
poetry out loud. He understands
exactly why and remains puzzled.
Oh one more thing: "the martini"
had become something it did not used to be.
hans ostrom 2015
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Friday, July 24, 2015
Apples of the Ear
from the tree except in quantum summer
when Newton's head doesn't/does
exist and Atom & Eve
know what they don't know,
a good first step
into the wormhole of Paul
Gonsalvez's "Diminuendo/
Crescendo" solo at Newport,
1956, in that momentary era
wherein all the tightly knit
notes of Ellington's orchestra
became/become perfectly tart-sweet
apples in a God's-ear of time.
hans ostrom 2015
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
"Somber Hombre"
A somber hombre, Arturo
liked to listen to jazz
and drink lemonade after
a shift of welding ships,
his head behind the mask
all day, heat coming off
of steel. He liked the way
that jazz opened his mind
to night and let the starlight
fall down or seem to like fiery
bits of metal left over
from when the sky got welded.
Arturo found the music flexible
even when it was heavy,
and jazz wasn't made to be
anything more than what
it was, so it was free to be
a lot. Sometimes Arturo
listened so late to the vinyl,
he fell asleep on the Navy cot
he'd gotten from who knows where.
hans ostrom 2015
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
"After Listening to Music From Duke Ellington's Orchestra"
A few frozen pleasantries to begin--
then some roots cultivated in reverse,
starting with tendrils down deep,
ending where taproot meets trunk-tree.
Posterity. What do you mean? I told you
I might call. I told you in the Fall!
All I had was a pair of deuces. (This is
one of those stories.) Next thing
nobody knows, I'm on top of a brass casino,
which I own, watching hawks glisten as
they glide. Now everyone's showing up,
all black limos and white surfboards;
and robodots and king snakes, the red
and the black. If music isn't from God,
it soon will be. And the filigree.
You just knew we had to get muddy
and moody, and Jesus Muhammad Moses
Mary and the Buddha-man: here come
visions of a visage, Ellington's,
carved in black and tan marble.
Time never stops playing,
so why should he?
hans ostrom 204
Thursday, September 4, 2014
"Blues Talk," by Hans Ostrom
Blues talk, blues and talk, the need
to feel something, something real,
the want to break something,
to break what's learned by rote, take
the parts and heal them together
one time with the sacred and the frivolous
itch to play:
such is the incubatory campaign
that elected 12 bars
and gave jazz a lasting victory.
And you, you, you will want
to spend time with music made
by people with a freed inmate's
attitude, a worker's not a warden's,
and surely, surely not a guard's.
Thursday, July 24, 2014
"Sierra Buttes," by Hans Ostrom
The Sierra Buttes
are what Cubism
had wanted to be:
a multi-planed,
sui generis impro-
vization, a force
of nature admired
as an object d'arte.
Up were the plates
thrust in the patient
geological crash.
Then came the mother
tongue, ice, which
ultimately withdrew
(think how slowly),
leaving this grand
stone assemblage,
this blue-jazz
diorite peak
with no peak,
instead a bulbous
massif.
Every different angle
invents a new Buttes
(plurality in the
singularity of the
plural singular),
each resulting in
an entirely different
understanding of
"the Sierra Buttes."
Standing in the town
of Sierra City,
one notices that
looking up
creates in humans
uncomfortable planes
for the head and the
neck. And it is
no wonder that people
who live in
Sierra City and other
small mountain-towns
around our
geological globe
tend to
develop highly original
designs for calamity,
have crafted
grand existential comedies--
forces of life
that may never
be shaped into art.
For there is no answer
to the mountain,
there is no solution
to how the Sierra Buttes
trivialize
human endeavor,
or so think humans
(this is drama
on our scale)
as they consider
the mountain the
mountain.
hans ostrom 2014
Friday, September 27, 2013
People Are Disappointed
compelled to say "again."
People are disappointed.
A military aircraft flies overhead
and makes great noise as I try to teach.
People are disappointed.
Today somebody said, "I saw a scorpion in
my house,": and her friend said, "That's impossible."
People are disappointed.
In Syria alone there are two million
refugees. And elsewhere refugees. Refugees.
People are disappointed.
Over the years, several times, I've said,
"I can't influence anything political."
People are disappointed.
Into the o's of October, I stuff
my acrid outrages, what a joke.
People are disappointed.
I tried to tell someone about jazz,and the
person said, "You mean like Light Jazz on FM?"
People are disappointed.
I think I've died a hundred times, and yet
I still look forward to death.
People are disappointed.
hans ostrom 2013
Monday, September 23, 2013
In the Chambers of the Sounds
sonic schisms. Hear-
ing the syncopations out of
diasporic nations: ah, the
daughters sweat when they dance
and they laugh into lances of light. Ah,
the world, too much, in its trembling
under the weight and the hate
of its machineries: beat-
en down. One mind's
a mental gleanery, a picking up
of bits from a mowed-down
psychic scenery. Hear-
ing sounds made of sounds recorded
sounds effected now, an overlooping
digi-lapping mix-re-mixification,
queen and princess and
good king syntheslaus
at the feast of even beatsintune.
Hearing
the on beat, off-again
ch- ch- ch-echoing
in the chambered
arterials,
air-displaced materials,
endless musi-chilled imp-
rovisations,
hearing.
hans ostrom 2013
Monday, November 7, 2011
Playing a Landscape
*
*
*
Playing a Landscape
Landscape with musical notations:
a fine proposal: each time a squirrel,
toad, bear, bird, or lizard touches a note,
which could be masked as stone or leaf,
that note is played. Vast wild crops
of Be-bop! Seeds of salivation in
the breeze! Gusts rustle up cracked
chords and sprung melodies til air
is stoned with unchained jazz and
re-reverb-ed echoes. Hell yeah, painter,
paint me into this big picture. I'm
there, wet pigment in my hair;
me running around, stomping on
some quarter-notes, shouting
Hey now to all y'all, released into
a tunacy, far from this mausolemuseum
which I shall call today these Workaday Estates.
Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
McCoy Tyner
Tyner
Once
in Berkeley, smoke like Bay fog lay
over heads of cool-hip-jazz-club-clientele &
waitresses slivered through tables/bodies/chairs,
kept drinks coming, ice and glass and liquid held aloft &
McCoy
--he hit the mthrfckn keys
so hard one time strings
popped & whipped around like snakes out
‘the belly of the grand dark
piano
& the percussionist had some
weird shit hanging from racks—
bones, steel tubes, feathers—
all
humid and scratchy and knock-talk
click-back bicker-bock-a-zone
sounds, & McCoy was rippin and roarin,
working the shit
out
of keyboardedness. And the horns. It was a big
marrow-filling, ear-enlightening night. Night-outside:
cool, misty Berkeley. Had a look around.
Got in the ’67 Camaro, drove back up I-80
to plain brown-cow Davis,
brain
humming like the lowest pianoforte
E-note pedaled through the measures.
Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom