In other posts I've used her poem, "Jazz Fan Looks Back," and it is worth sharing again today:
I crisscrossed with Monk
Wailed with Bud
Counted every star with Stitt
Sang "Don't Blame Me" with Sarah Wore a flower like Billie
Screamed in the range of Dinah
& scatted "How High the Moon" with Ella Fitzgerald as she blew roof off the Shrine Auditorium Jazz at the Philharmonic
I cut my hair into a permanent tam
Made my feet rebellious metronomes
Embedded record needles in paint on paper
Talked bopology talk
Laughed in high-pitched saxophone phrases
Became keeper of every Bird riff
every Lester lick
as Hawk melodicized my ear of infatuated tongues
& Blakey drummed militant messages in soul of my applauding teeth
& Ray hit bass notes to the last love seat in my bones
I moved in triple time with Max
Grooved high with Diz
Perdidoed with Pettiford
Flew home with Hamp S
huffled in Dexter's Deck
Squatty-rooed with Peterson
Dreamed a "52nd Street Theme" with Fats
& scatted "Lady Be Good" with Ella Fitzgerald as she blew roof off the Shrine Auditorium Jazz at the Philharmonic
Two things strike me as worth emphasizing about this powerful and engaging artist:
+ First, she figured out how to integrate her art with the totality of her life - not just her politics - but her living and breathing and loving and walking around life. She embodied her sacred calling to make beauty, to open minds to new possibilities and to advance the cause of justice.
One of the central figures of the Black Arts Movement — the cultural branch of the black power movement that flourished in the 1960s and ’70s — Ms. Cortez remained active for decades afterward, publishing a dozen volumes of poetry and releasing almost as many recordings, on which her verse was seamlessly combined with avant-garde music.
+ Second, it looks like she also discerned how to do it all joyfully - even while confronting some of the worst horrors of human cruelty and oppression. If you've ever listened to the blues you know that both comfort and sorrow often reside right next to one another - embracing like lovers - so that you really can't have one without the others. Sometimes the blues make you cry, sometimes they make you smile when it feels like nothing else can and always they take you deeper into the hard truths of real life.
“Jazz isn’t just one type of music, it’s an umbrella that covers the history of black people from African drumming to field hollers and the blues,” she told The Weekly Journal, a black newspaper in Britain, in 1997. “In the sense that I also try to reflect the fullness of the black experience, I’m very much a jazz poet.”
She grew older and wiser - unlike so many old fools who never go deeper and just become cranky and mean-spirited - so that even at 78 she still had something to say. And people wanted to hear what it was, too. She was an integral part of Ron Mann's epic film about poetry - Poetry in Motion (check it out @ http://www.poetry foundation.org/article/243828) included among all the heavy hitters of our generation.
And if we don't fight
if we don't resist
if we don't organize and unify and
get the power to control our own lives
Then we will wear
the exaggerated look of captivity
the stylized look of submission
the bizarre look of suicide
the dehumanized look of fear
and the decomposed look of repression
forever and ever and ever
And there it is
We're playing two jazz gigs tonight ~ 5 pm at the Mission Bar and Tapas on North Street in Pittsfield and then a 9 pm show at the Yoga Center in Great Barrington ~ I hope to get a chance to share one of her gems. Thanks for the wisdom, the grace, the anger, the joy and the model you gave the world, Ms. Cortez. Rest in peace...
1 comment:
I hae never heard of her until the obit in the NYT, but was struck by her passion and integration as a person, points you made in your reflection, James.
Langston Hughes liked to have his poetry read with a jazz accompaniment--I wonder if the two of them knew each other?
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