Kind of Blue

 ("Kind of Blue," Miles Davis album, 1959)

kind of blue, sweetly

  sad, tart despair.

kind of blue, like

  you, when you don't

know what to do or

  how to stop or slow

the world's deluge

  of evil but must step

around deep inert

  blue to finish chores,

open doors, lend a

  hand. kind of blue--

like a lonely, thoughtful

  trumpet blown

by a man deep 

  inside the music--

a spirit inside

 an ear-shaped cave.

hans ostrom 2024

From the African 6:8 rhythm to the American shuffle

Upright Bass

The bass: like an agreeable, plump mayor
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."

hans ostrom 2023

"Jazzanatomy," by James Emanuel

 A poem by poet, scholar, and professor James Emanuel (1921-2013). Reading/video:

link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNd4hncy9vo

"Four Letter Word," by James A. Emanuel

A 20-second music/poetry video of James Emanuel's "Four Letter Word." As far as I know, Mr. Emanuel conceived of this form--the "jazz haiku." His collected poems: Whole Grain: Collected Poems  (Lotus Press 1991) is available on amazon.com and elsewhere.

Link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QP2eM6xsygU

Clark Terry's Ballads

(recording: Clark After Dark)

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

Saxophone Sunset

(Ben Webster, "That's All")


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

Salamander Row

I'm going down to 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

The Fiddler's Response

The absorption of music operates
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

Duke, Again

With Ellington, never
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

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

Something It Did Not Used to Be

Especially confused by things he understands,
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



div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">

Apples of the Ear

The apple doesn't fall far
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

"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

"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

"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.

"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

People Are Disappointed

When I say "October" I feel
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

In the Chambers of the Sounds

Hearing the off-off-beat rhythms,
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

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