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Interaction, Collaboration, and Improvisation in the Intersection of Jazz and Poetry Vilde Aaslid Trondheim, Norway Bachelor of Arts, University of Washington, 2002 Master of Arts, University of Washington, 2005 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Music University of Virginia May, 2014 ii ABSTRACT Interaction, Collaboration, and Improvisation in the Intersection of Jazz and Poetry By Vilde Aaslid In the simultaneous performance of poetry and jazz, artists bring the interactivity of jazz to texted music. This dissertation examines jazz poetry intersection as musicopoetic object and cultural practice. In improvisation, I argue, jazz poetry performance asserts an affinity between music and poetry—a bond based on sound and syntax rather than semantics. Jazz poetry intersection pushes at the boundaries of the music’s generic boundaries, and the performances often challenge barriers to artistic mobility that have emerged from discourses of genre, race, and cultural hierarchy. Four chapters put the overarching themes in dialogue with specific cases. In chapters on Charles Mingus and Vijay Iyer, I consider how two jazz composers structure the combination of music and word in improvisatory contexts. I examine the gendered politics of language in jazz in a chapter on Black Arts poet Jayne Cortez, reading her performances as a black feminist revision of the role of jazz singer. In the final chapter I survey the relationship between poetry and jazz in New York City between 2012 and 2014, situating the form within the jazz scene and the broader cultural landscape of the city. This study of “intersection” bridges disciplines. Texted jazz has been marginalized in Jazz Studies, and this project brings deep analytical engagement to text in jazz. Further, the detailed study of how music and language intersect in performance has iii been entirely based in notated traditions; I ask what the inclusion of improvisation brings to the understanding of musicopoetics. The fundamentally interactive nature of jazz practice has shaped jazz poetry intersection and in this dissertation I listen for the resonance of that interaction in the musicopoetics and the cultural practices of the form. In analyzing the diversity of jazz poetry performance, I recuperate the format; the poetry- read-to-jazz fad of the beatnik era has dominated the form’s reception, occluding other examples. Writing against this erasure, I assert the richness of expression—personal, political, artistic—in jazz and poetry intersection. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Examples, Tables, and Figures .....................................................................v Acknowledgements ................................................................................................ vi Introduction ..............................................................................................................1 Chapter 1 Charles Mingus and Texted Jazz Composition ......................................................24 Chapter 2 Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd in Conversation: Collaborative Tex and Music Interaction in “Color of my Circumference I” .......76 Chapter 3 “Flying Through Porthole of her Shipwreck:” Jayne Cortez and Feminist Jazz Poetry Performance ..........................................119 Chapter 4 A Scene in the City?: Jazz Poetry Intersection in New York City, 2012-2014 ......................................164 Appendix A Selected Discography of Jazz Poetry Intersection ...............................................201 Bibliography ........................................................................................................204 v LIST OF FIGURES, TABLES, AND EXAMPLES EXAMPLES 1.1 Alto saxophone transitions, “Scenes in the City”/ “Colloquial 47 Dreams” 1.2 Measures 9-10, strings, String Quartet No. 1 60 1.3 Measure 84, strings, String Quartet No. 1 61 1.4 Measures 1-8, String Quartet No. 1 62 1.5 Measures 40, 32, and 135, String Quartet No. 1 63 1.6 Measures 94-114, String Quartet No. 1 70 1.7 Measures 61-66, String Quartet No. 1 71 1.8 Measures 115-135, String Quartet No. 1 72 2.1 CoMC meter with ostinato 99 2.2 Figuration against ostinato, CoMCI cycles 12-14 101 2.3 Transitional windows between rhythmic cycles 5,6, and 7, 106 CoMCI 2.4 S texture, rhythmic cycle 15, CoMCI 115 2.5 S1 texture, rhythmic cycle 25, CoMCI 116 TABLES 1.1 Selection of texted works by Mingus 26 2.1 Personnel in addition to Iyer and Ladd 84 4.1 Selected jazz and poetry performances and recordings, 2012- 182 2014 FIGURES 2.1 Full text of “The Color of My Circumference I,” Mike Ladd 96 2.2 Transcription of pitch stacks and rhythmic cycles, CoMCI 104 excerpt 2.3 Distribution of poetry across rhythmic cycles, CoMCI 107 3.1 Poetry distribution across blues form, “In the Morning,” live 152 version chorus 6 3.2 Poetry distribution across blues form, “In the Morning,” studio 153 version choruses 7-8 3.3 Poetry distribution across blues form, “In the Morning,” studio 155 version choruses 5-6 3.4 Poetry distribution across blues form, “In the Morning,” live 157 version choruses 3-4 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS When I visited the University of Virginia before beginning my degree, I felt instantly at home in the department. I have been truly fortunate in finding a program that both suited my interests and pushed me beyond them. The faculty has offered a diversity of intellectual frameworks for thinking about music. I have been the grateful recipient of Scott DeVeaux’s steadfast support and guidance. Sometimes challenging, always insightful, each of our conversations about this work (and beyond) prompted me to keep striving for richer and more sensitive analysis. The courses I took with Michelle Kisliuk and Melvin Butler quietly shaped this project in ways that I did not recognize until it was nearly complete. I am grateful for Bonnie Gordon’s professional and personal mentoring. Many thanks are due to my committee, Richard Will, Bruce Holsinger, and Claudrena Harold, for their thoughtful and consistent support of this project. The musicians and poets I spoke with, formally and informally, guided the development of this project. I am particularly grateful to Mike Ladd and Vijay Iyer for their generosity and openness. Thanks, especially, to Mike Ladd for permitting me to reprint his poem “The Color of My Circumference I” in chapter 2. I have had the extraordinary fortune of landing in a warm, supportive, and inspiring community of graduate students and I am indebted to every single one of them. Special thanks to Matt Jones, Allison Robbins, Sarah Culpepper, Wendy Hsu, Nick Rubin, and my cohort: Kirstin Ek, Jason Kirby, and Peter Tschirhart. Mary Simonson, Shana Goldin-Perschbacher, and Elizabeth Lindau were my panic-mode wonder team, each bringing her own style of support to those crisis moments. Emily Gale’s vii encouragement, wit, and warmth brightened every day of the final year, and I am greatly indebted to her kind and incisive reading of work in progress. There simply aren’t words adequate for thanking my friends and family for making the impossible possible. Jen Diamond often paused in her own busy life to remind me of things I had forgotten about myself. Leilana Vargas-Marrero brought daily optimism, flexibility, and stability to my family. Both of my parents led by example, and I grew up watching what could be accomplished through persistence and patience. And when I was certain I couldn’t wring out another word, my mother’s unwavering cheerleading was just a phone call away. My sister, Ive Covaci, has been a lifelong inspiration, and in this PhD process I have benefitted, as always, from her experience and wisdom. My children, Anders and Ingrid, have shown patience beyond their years as they waited for mama to finish her big project. When all seemed lost, stacking a few blocks with my two littles put everything back in place. And finally Alex, who has shouldered our family’s load; for all the late night talks, the weekend zoo trips offering precious quiet work hours, and for making me feel that no matter how rough it got, we were in it together: this is for you. 1 INTRODUCTION You find relationships between the rhythms of poetry and the rhythms of music, they can be indirect relationships or kind of complicated relationships…I just like that sound. It’s a human sound. It’s humans interacting with forms. -Vijay Iyer It’s sound. It’s about sound. The sound of the poetry against the sound of the music. -Jayne Cortez A poem, like a melody, is a sounding phenomenon, and it is as both sounding phenomena and syntactical orders that poetry and melody engage one another. -Leo Treitler When speaking to artists about the intersection of jazz and poetry, it is clear: for them, poetry and music are not divergent artistic activities. Instead, both arts reside in the realm of sound. This view is nothing new; it dates to at least Aristotle, for whom music and poetry were both rhythmic, melodic, sounded arts. But this affinity did not last long, in either theory or practice. As Leo Treitler writes of the poetry of the troubadours, “Poetry withdrew from its cohabitation with Music in Song – that is, in the human voice – and bedded itself down in books.”1 Music, too, retreated from the pairing, becoming increasingly focused on its own complications. Disciplinary boundaries asserted fundamental distinctions between the arts. By the advent of modern musicology, a seemingly unbridgeable divide had developed between music