When you love jazz as much as A.B. Spellman does, it informs
just about everything you do. Starting in 1959 as a young Howard
University graduate, he reviewed jazz for Metronome and
Downbeat. Published in 1966, Spellman’s first nonfiction book
— Four Lives in the Bee-Bop Business — was an
intimate exploration of jazz greats Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman,
Herbie Nichols, and Jackie McLean. A member of the Smithsonian
Institute’s Jazz Advisory Group, the North Carolina-born scholar has
taught courses in jazz — as well as creative writing and poetry
— at Emory, Rutgers, and Harvard universities.
So it’s no surprise that jazz rhythms and jazz royalty strut and
fret through Things I Must Have Known, his new book of poetry
and his first book of poetry since 1965. Along with such poems as “Dear
John Coltrane” and “On Hearing Sonny (‘Newk’) Rollins in the Park on a
Hot Summer Night,” the volume includes “Groovin’ Low,” a meditation on
aging through a jazz lens: “my swing is more mellow/these days: not the
hardbop drive/i used to roll,” the poet muses; “i’ve learned/to boogie
with my feet on the floor/ … i’m the one executing the half-bent/dip
in the slow slowdrag/with the smug little smile.” Spellman, who appears
on March 5 as part of UC Berkeley’s Holloway Poetry Series in the
Maude Fife Room (315 Wheeler Hall), wonders how an
African-American artist of his generation couldn’t be influenced
by jazz: “Modern american culture was largely made by jazz,” he
reflects. Throughout the early- and mid-20th century, “all the popular
music, all the popular dances, were jazz dances. … The fact that jazz
gives the highest expression to the individual within the context of
the group is a very American thing — and the fact that it is
improvisation is a very American thing, because America is a country
that has had to make its culture very, very fast and make its society
very fast, and it’s constantly remaking it.”
In his poem addressing Coltrane, Spellman exults: “now it’s your
line that opens, & opens/& opens, and I’m flying that way
again/same sky, different moon, this midnight … /if i believed in
heaven i would ask/if you & bach ever swap infinite fours/&
jam.” He misses the music in its essential, experimental, experiential
form: “Jazz has somewhat suffered,” Spellman laments, in that “it has
become respectable.” 6:30 p.m. Holloway.English.Berkeley.edu
