klezmer

This corner of the Diaspora (PoemTalk #121)

Jerome Rothenberg, 'Galician Nights' from 'Poland/1931'

From left to right: Al Filreis, Jake Marmer, Maria Damon, and Frank London.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

One Sunday afternoon at Kelly Writers House, Jake Marmer, Frank London, Al Filreis, and Maria Damon ducked into the Wexler Studio to talk about Jerome Rothenberg's Poland/1931. The group chose to focus on the section of that book entitled “Galician Nights, or a Novel in Progress” — on, in particular, a 2002 performance in which Rothenberg chanted the text while backed by the Klezmatics (the band including one of our interlocutors, the Hasidic New Wave eminence Frank London, on trumpet). The recording — which lasts six minutes and twenty-six seconds — can be found at Rothenberg’s extensive PennSound page

First reading of Cecil Taylor's '#6.56' (2)

Jake Marmer

[LISTEN TO “#6.56”]

Harvesting in Cecil Taylor’s Chinampas

1. Fred Moten had it: “I’ve been preparing myself to improvise with Cecil Taylor.” Or something like that. I’m not looking it up. Have I been preparing, and with what? That, perhaps, is the quintessential question that comes up when one listens to Cecil Taylor, kids are climbing walls downstairs and I need the question, that comes up, is who you be, listening — not so much, as Baraka had it, “how you sound” but who you be, or more precisely, pass/assist how, listening, to INCARNATE THYSELF.  

2. Overdub is palimpsest in heat. My headphones are not blocking out the noise enough. I am having a good time. I am easy.  

3. There’re two voices in this poem, one is melancholy, musing, marveling, fingering some dictionary, the other is more demonic easy more detonated, more disintegrated. Are they talking to each other absolutely not but TO INTERSECT well then if that’s the case, it’s something to aspire to.

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