Poem: "Four Sides Live"

With this post, I am getting closer to being caught up on collecting my currently published pieces here. Today's poem is "Four Sides Live," a kind of ode to jazz I wrote a couple months ago.

Anyone who knows me knows how important music, and jazz in particular, is to me. I began listening to jazz purposefully in the latter half of my highschool years, beginning, as many do, with albums like Kind of Blue and A Love Supreme. This poem references two giants of the piano, Bill Evans and Chick Corea, as well as the drummer Jack DeJohnette, who joined Evans' trio in 1968. I hoped to capture the timelessness of their music, timelessness being a remarkable achievement given the particularity and inimitability of these musicians' signature sounds.

"Four Sides Live" originally appeared in Jerry Jazz Musician, a one of a kind outlet for lovers of jazz and literature. Jerry Jazz Musican will be featuring its fall/winter poetry collection sometime in January and its jazz haiku collection in February or March of the coming year, so be on the lookout for those as well.

"Four Sides Live" can be read here.

Here is a sample of the first few lines:

It tickles my fancy the way

francophone announcers

ornately say the names

of jazzmen in those live recordings

put to reel in Montreux...