Wild words and free jazz

Wild words and free jazz

Song of Baobab
Vernon Frazer with Thomas Chapin
VFCI
Send US$20 to Echolaia Press, 132 Woodycrest Drive, East Hartford, CT 06118, USA

Review by Norm Dixon

Song of Baobab is a challenging CD that combines Vernon Frazer's performance poetry (and a bit of bass) with Thomas Chapin's innovative free jazz, using saxophone, a bowed saw, whistles, flutes, jaw harp, a khaen (Laotian mouth organ) and a myriad other unconventional "little instruments".

Frazer's agitated verses are a clever and wild word play that seems to just balance between realism and surrealism, sanity and insanity. The attraction of it is the challenge of figuring it out (not helped by not having the words in the liner notes).

The poet's cadence and musician's improvisations evoke a mental image of '50s beat poets and '60s Greenwich Village cafes — new-age Kerouac meets Archie Shepp.

This is not necessarily light listening. It takes some effort absorbing Frazer's word storms and Chapin's fascinatingly visceral music, including several brilliant solo tracks. Nor could you listen to it all in one sitting either.

The CD documents some of the poetry and music performed by the pair at some of New York's best known clubs — the Knitting Factory and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe — since 1986. Frazer's subject matter leans heavily towards explorations of states of mind, pain and tragedy.

Other poems are tributes to those who have influenced the poet, positively and negatively.

If you like your poetry and jazz on the avant-garde end of the spectrum, Song of Baobab is worth a listen.

From GLW issue 285