"Jazz opera poet jams with the Bird"
The late great jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker has become something of a talisman for American poet and writer Jusef Komunyakaa. Along with other legends such as Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie, the "Bird" provided an inspirational soundtrack for what could have been a difficult childhood: that of a working-class black kid growing up in segregated Louisiana in the 1950s.
And four decades later - after a stint in Vietnam, factory jobs, mature age university study and a distinguished career as a poet - Komunyakaa was working on a piece about Parker when he learned he had won a Pulitzer Prize for his poetry.
That evocation of Parker, titled Testimony, was originally commissioned by the ABC as a radio spectacular with original music by Australian jazz composer and performer Sandy Evans. But their joint effort will undergo a reincarnation next week, when it emerges as a live performance piece for the Sydney Festival and, in October, for the 2002 Melbourne Festival.
The piece's re-imagining, from a 1999 pre-recorded radio special to the 2002 multimedia performance event, did not involve any new work for Komunyakaa. His libretto made the transformation intact. It was director Nigel Jamieson who came on board to turn it into theatre. The production includes a four-storey-high set with platforms for 30 musicians and singers positioned around a screen projecting images of the life and times of Parker.
"But, you know, that's always what I thought should happen," says Komunyakaa. "When you think of a libretto, you think of live performance. I wasn't sure how it could be done. But I think it is the sort of piece that can expand with each new artistic vision."
Jamieson's vision sounds like a variation of one of Philip Glass' cross-media transfers; like a reversal of Glass' approach to Jean Cocteau's 1946 movie, La Belle et la Bete, which he turned into an opera by adding musicians and singers in front of the screen.
As it happened Jamieson's wildly innovative shadow puppet drama, The Theft of Sita, was part of last year's Next Wave Down Under at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Komunyakaa says he knew Testimony was in good hands when he caught a performance of Sita at BAM. And the man who did the music for Sita, Paul Grabowsky, will be wielding the baton with the Australian Art Orchestra for the Testimony performances.
"I tend to trust artists, especially if they've been around for a while as they guys have," he says. "They gave me some idea of what they had in mind. But the bottom line was that Sandy was involved I really trusted her expertise."
Back in the early 1990s, Komunyakaa was not exactly a cold call for Christopher Williams. Williams, an ABC radio producer, originally came up with the idea of producing a radio piece on Charlie Parker. In the 1980s Komunyakaa married an Australian woman and spent two 12-month stints here. During those sojourns he did some readings of his work for the ABC and revealed his passion for jazz.
The relationship, in other words, was there prior to Komunyakaa's 1994 Pulitzer Prize for his anthology, Neon Vernacular. Winning the Pulitzer gave the Testimony project added heft. The fact that Komunyakaa subsequently became professor of creative writing at Princeton University in New Jersey, adding scholarly lustre to the proceedings.
Komunyakaa is unable to attend the Sydney performances due to work commitments at Princeton. But he hopes to make it to Melbourne for the performances in October.
"Was I surprised that I was asked to get involved in an Australian project about an American jazz saxophonist who never visited Australia?" he says. "Not really. Australia takes its jazz very seriously, particularly in Sydney, and there are some very good players there. It wasn't the fact that they wanted to do it that was surprising, but that they had this very interesting creative vision about how they wanted to do it.
"Contemporary jazz is pretty international and I don't know that you can pick national origin from the sound any more. Sandy's work is an exceptional modern jazz composition and the national origin of the composer is not really relevant."
Still, there is no denying Parker's particular American pedigree. He was a man of prodigious talent and appetites who, on the saxophone, galvanised audiences at the end of World War II with a virtuoso approach to jazz. It was called bebop.
Before his death, at the age of 34 from a heroin overdose, he and his contemporaries had changed the face of jazz.
Parker's legendary status remained intact because he never lost his youthful promise and vigour. The fact that he died of a drug overdose created a fascination about how the rest of his life may have unfolded.
His life has proved irresistible to writers, film makers and, now, serious musicians. Clint Eastwood's 1988 film Bird, was a loving ode to the high points of his career and didn't dwell too much on the mess of his personal life.
One of the criticisms of Bird is that it sanitised the heroin addiction that ultimately killed Parker in the New York apartment of his friend, Baroness Nica de Koeenigswarter. Komunyakaa, who certainly has the ability to confront in his verse, doesn't beat around the bush here, either. As the Baroness puts it in Testimony: "Yes, they had him with a needle in his arm, dead in my bathroom."
The original idea, as Komunyakaa recalls it, was to take a more conventionally operatic approach to the piece. But after doing extensive research, Komunyakaa decided that a structure involving "testimonies" to Parker's life - a total of 14 each in two verses of 14 lines a piece, as it turned out - was the way to go.
They have titles like "Boxcars", "Chicken Shack", "Black Cockatoo", "Deep South", "Cain and Abel", "Baroness Pannonica".
The 14 line sonnet structure seems to be a preferred Komunyakaa format: it's the prevailing format in the 132 poems of his current anthology, Talking Dirty to the Gods, which also happens to be his 11th collection.
Komunyakaa's word portraits of Charlie Parker are richly evocative. Parker would "go inside a song with enough irony to break the devil's heart." And his playing was so hot that he "left ash in the bell of his horn."
For Komunyakaa, growing up not far from New Orleans's Basin Street in the 1950s and 1960s, race and jazz were integral to his existence. Jazz happens to be a potent entree into the African American experience of the 20th century. It addresses racism either through songs such as Strange Fruit, the Billie Holiday song about lynching, or the humiliations heaped on its black practitioners in the days of segregation.
It certainly helped shape his own identity and consciousness. As a writer he took his ancestral African family name, a decision which angered his father, a man with a practical approach to getting by as a black man in the Deep South. In one of his more autobiographical verses Komunyakaa wrote: "My father could only sign his name but he'd look at blueprints and say how many bricks form each wall."
Komunyakaa dabbled in writing in his youth. But it was the military in the draft-mandated 1960s that provided the teenager's ticket out of Bogalusa, Louisiana.
One of Komunyakaa's first paid writing gigs was as a reporter on a US Army newspaper while stationed in Vietnam. He read poetry between his deadlines. His experience as a reporter was good background for Testimony. Because the libretto is very much a poetic reconstruction of Parker's life: full of colour and details. As Komunyakaa puts it: "Little bits of information are important to me."
But having done his research, Komunyakaa felt it was important to "pull back from it".
Since his chosen format was a sequence of reminiscences and recollections by people in Parker's life, he wanted to also let their perspectives percolate.
"I didn't want to write straight away," he says. "I wanted to put the information aside. I wanted to remember parts and pieces of the story. That's why I used the title Testimony. I wanted a number of testimonies actually."
While Komunyakaa's two post-Testimony theatre projects involve black characters, including an 18th century slave in a piece titled Slip Knot, he is inclined to emphasise the universality of the themes he addresses.
"I don't really define myself as a jazz poet either but being born in Louisiana and growing up with the more classical form of the blues and then coming to modern jazz, there was something there," he says. "And what I wanted to do with the libretto is create a certain feeling of the time. I had listened to Parker on record but there were so many others that I had listened to as well, like Monk and Gillespie."
The ABC's recording of Testimony has not been released in the US yet. Nor are there any plans to mount the stage version. Komunyakaa hopes the Australian performances will change that. As he says: "It affects people. Whenever I play the recording for my friends, they seem to get pretty swept up in it."
Testimony is at the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall on January 16 and 18, 8pm. Bookings on 1300 136 166, or the Opera House on (02) 9250 7777.
- Philip McCarthy, 9.01.02
