Ode On Jazz

The Ode On Jazz was written in the autumn months of 2002, in a spirit of cosmic balance and harmony: things had settled into a comfortable groove with Mary H, and I was splitting my time between Logan Square and West Philadelphia. I was boning up, as I did periodically in those days, on the jazz of John Coltrane, Sun Ra, and the rest; and also in hot pursuit of John Keats and the English Romantics. The idea of an odal poem on this form of music, jazz, necessitated more looseness & a greater sense of improvisational freedom than Keats' wonted odal forms would allow. Once I had more or less finished the Jazz Ode, it began to follow me around, from Bob Perelman's Advanced Workshop at Penn, to another workshop with Joan Larkin in Henniker at NEC. More importantly, I got to perform the Jazz Ode at Live at the Writers House at the Kelly Writers House on the Penn campus (4-05-04), and it was broadcast on Drexel's popular WXPN radio station (later to be placed on my PennSound author page). By 2006, it had receded slightly in my oeuvre, but Steve Halle published it, in honor of my first visit to Chicago, on his 7C site. In the Teens, the Ode On Jazz made a lively comeback, on a number of sound/mp3 repository sites; a chart hit on hearthis.at (#7), featured by The Esthetic Apostle on Soundcloud. On Soundclick, the WXPN version was a #5 Podcast; and the This Charming Lab version a #2. French DJ Falki Hoz used the WXPN version inventively on his techno track Hipsters (Scotch EP, 2017), which appeared as Ode On Jazz 3 (with Falki Hoz) on Soundclick again, and elsewhere.