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TESTIMONY
A TRIBUTE TO CHARLIE PARKER
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA
Including the complete
Australian Broadcasting
Corporation audio
recording with music
by Sandy Evans Not included in this ebook
Commentaries
by Sandy Evans,
Sascha Feinstein,
Paul Grabowsky,
Christopher Williams,
and Miriam Zolin
Project Editor, Victoria Stahl
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown, CT 06459
© 2013 Wesleyan University Press
© 2013 Poetry by Yusef Komunyakaa
© 2013 Foreword by Sascha Feinstein.
© 2013 The Ties That Bind by Miriam Zolin.
© 2013 Composer and Musical Directors Notes by Sandy Evans.
© 2002 AAO Artistic Director’s Notes by Paul Grabowsky.
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill
Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro
Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green
Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data available upon request.
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“Yusef Komunyakaa’s ‘Testimony’ and the Humanity of Charlie Parker” first appeared in Callaloo 28.3 (2005) 521–530 © 2005 Charles H. Rowell. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
“Survival Masks: An Interview with Yusef Komunyakaa” first appeared in Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature 2:1 (Winter, 1997). Used by permission.
“French Flowers Blooming: The Music for Testimony” first appeared in Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature 2:1 (Winter, 1997). Used by permission.
“Togetherness” from The Chameleon Couch, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
“Twilight Seduction” from Taboo, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.
“Gingkoes” first appeared in The Worcester Review, vol. XXXIII, nos 1 & 2 (2012).
“Cante Jondo” from Taboo, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.
“The Same Beat” first appeared in Callaloo 28:3 (2005).
“To Beauty” from Taboo, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.
“Ignis Fatuus” from The Chameleon Couch, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
“Satchmo USA” from Taboo, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.
“Speed Ball” from The Second Set, The Jazz Poetry Anthology, 1996.
“The Story of a Coat” from The Chameleon Couch, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
“Testimony” first appeared in Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature. 2:1 (Winter, 1997).
PHOTO: Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker, La Crescenta © 1951
Photograph by William Claxton / courtesy Demont
Photo Management, LLC.
PAPER TEXTURE: Maciek905 | Dreamstime.com
Original recording of Testimony (P) 2013
Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
RECORDING LICENSED COURTESY OF AUSTRALIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION.
Cover illustration: Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker, La Crescenta © 1951 Photograph by William Claxton / Courtesy Demont Photo Management, LLC.
FOREWORD
Sascha Feinstein
In 1997, the same year Yusef Komunyakaa completed “Testimony,” his libretto for Charlie Parker, he flew to Chicago to perform live with a jazz sextet led by multi-reed instrumentalist John Tchicai and bassist Fred Hopkins. Released the following year on the CD Love Notes from the Madhouse, the session would go so well that Tchicai later gushed, “There might have been angels among us.” The group opened with the poem “Ode to a Drum,” the first few words a cappella, Komunyakaa’s tone like rum-soaked chocolate: “Gazelle, I killed you / for your skin’s exquisite / touch.”
Incremental accompaniment—drums at first, then bass—allowed the group members to introduce themselves. But Komunyakaa’s first words, just a grace note over two lines, also provide an introduction for the jazz poems collected here. The physicality of jazz—touching drum skins, plucking strings, pressing lips onto mouthpieces—matters a great deal to Komunyakaa, but to an even greater extent, so do the multiple implications of imagery. In this particular case, the slaughtered gazelle evokes so much complexity inherent to the instrument: sacrifice, beauty, sensuality, sound. Once touched, the nature of this skin becomes as elemental as its voice, in keeping with the heartbeat of this book’s opening poem, “Rhythm Method”: “oh yes / is a confirmation the skin / sings to hands.”
Other jazz poems by Komunyakaa expand on this imagery of body and soul. Skin provides mystery, as seen in “No-Good Blues” (“this secret song from the soil / left hidden under my skin”) and “Gerry’s Jazz” (“each secret / is buried beneath the skin”). In “February in Sydney,” a related allusion speaks to tragic realities of abuse: “A loneliness / lingers like a silver needle / under my black skin”—an image that prefigures the refrain in “Tenebrae” (“You try to beat loneliness / out of a drum”). In “Twilight Seduction,” the reference evokes sexuality and touch: “The drum / can never be a woman, / even if her name’s whispered / across skin.” And such references and experiences are never exclusive; in these poems and most others, Komunyakaa has mastered the art of braiding emotional extremes.
That ability has been evident from the start of his prestigious career. Consider, for example, poems reprinted from his first full-length collection, Copacetic—the “senseless beauty” in “Elegy for Thelonious” (similar, of course, to Monk’s tune “Ugly Beauty”), or the echo of “hard love” in “Copacetic Mingus.” Any blues artist will tell you that the most significant details in sung lyrics—the time of day, a train whistle from the hills, the flight and sound of a mockingbird—inhabit the duality of the blues, which is to say, not one meaning or another but a fusion of opposites. Joy married to longing. Departure as a form of arrival. Independence a mirror image for isolation. To categorize emotions is to betray our humanity—and every poem by Komunyakaa denies such simplicity.
The title “February in Sydney,” for example, conjures duality because of Australia’s seasonal inversion to the Northern hemisphere—summer for winter—and given that geographical displacement, the speaker in