Today is the last day of U.S. National Poetry Month which has been given the additional observance of “Poem in Your Pocket Day” where poetry lovers are asked to carry and share a poem. Today is also International Jazz Day – and so I’ve chosen to share this poem by Langston Hughes, the pioneering Jazz poet. “Drum”   reminds all of us that the rhythm of life asks us to share our heartbeat, share our light, carry with our bodies the dancing words, and so with them, briefly shine.

I’ve written upwards of 20,000 words here this month, composed and recorded 13 new musical pieces presenting poets well-known and largely forgotten, all to celebrate the human sounds and experiences bound up on pages of books. Today is a day to celebrate taking a book off the shelf and giving a page within it your breath. Even if you just share it with yourself, out of loneliness, shyness, or embarrassment of pretension, I urge you to do so.

I suppose we to carry recorded Jazz in our pockets too, inside smartphones, even if a bass or a saxophone won’t fit.

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Music too is about expression – all music is – but Jazz is about American expression, expressing our particular place, a land taken from its natives and largely peopled with others taken or driven or fleeing here. What a strange place it is – yet and beside this history, we are filled with wonders, the freedom even of theft and exile, leavened with love of the variousness of all the ourselves found here. Jazz is a music residents here invented to express this, and Langton Hughes was early and important for recognizing and recording the experience of all these things.

To express “Drum”  I created a somewhat jazzy quartet track by track, limited by my lack of deep skills in that musical form, in order to play the underlying structure of the piece. Over and over this week, I tried to add saxophone and trumpet expressing more of the human condition over this music, and each time I failed to produce anything worthwhile, perhaps because I don’t understand well enough how to articulate those instruments voices – or it could be the virtual instruments I play with MIDI guitar or my little plastic keyboard are resistant to Jazz articulations. In the end I left it with the guitar voices I had already recorded, hoping they’ll suffice. Reflecting the dual nature of today’s observances, there’s one minute of music to begin, and then one minute of my performance of Hughes’ poem.

Gratitude to Langston Hughes for giving us his expression in words we can take with us. Thanks to all the poets, musicians, readers, and listeners who stayed with me on this journey this month. Wishing you all a wonderful spring or fall depending on your planetary hemisphere or position in life, or any such afterlife.

To hear my recording of “Drum,”  use the audio player most of you will see below. No player?  This highlighted link is an alternative which will open a new tab in your web browser with its own audio player.

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