It’s been a pleasure to see the differences and commonalities shared between the art of the poet, the skill of a jazz improviser, and a composer’s creativity.

Last night in Round Top, Texas, at the 16th Annual “Poetry at Round Top”, John Mills and I joined the nation’s most exciting and prominent poets for an evening of collaboration in art.

More and more, the kinship between poetry and music, especially jazz, has grown in understanding. In 2014 Harvard University appointed Herbie Hancock the Norton Professor of Poetry. Luminaries like Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot and Leonard Bernstein have held the honorary professorship. And for the last 3 years, jazz has been a new addition to the Poetry at Round Top annual festival.

So how do jazz and poetry talk to each other? In some ways, a poet and a composer both deal in perfection, working days, months, even years to create, revise, and perform a finished work. But in jazz, improvisation is at the center of the art form. Unlike the poet or the composer, the jazz improviser can’t go back and ‘get it right’. It has to be ‘right’ the first time. And it’s not written down. The one very deep commonality between all three art forms is it is a deeply personal thing. And all three share the importance of tradition in their art form. There is a component of rhythm that is a shared love between the three, too.

So want happens when poetry, composition, and jazz are asked to collaborate? The history goes back to the 40’s and 50’s American Beat poets like Jack Kerouac, for example. We viewed the music as a support and an intensifier to the poetry rather than the poetry’s being an addendum (or introduction) to the music.

jazz/poetry collaboration has a long tradition, going back (albeit patchily) some 70 years or so. There is no reason why these two forms, currently enjoying greater-than-usual popularity, should not combine more frequently.

Poetry and jazz speak to things deep in our human psyche: a love of patterned language and a love of the unpredictable, for a start.

I am sure John and I hope to do this again!