My experience with jazz:

When I was a kid (1960s) I assumed that jazz was a music of the past. I didn't know that it was still an extant musical practice. My parents had some old records, one of the JATP sesssions with Illinois Jacquett honking away, for example. Coleman Hawkins' "Body and Soul" blew me away, especially when I learned it was improvised.

I used to listen to one of those hokey "music of your life" stations just to hear the occasional Armstrong or Tatum performance. I always loved jazz even before I had really heard much of it.

By the 1970s, when I was slightly older, I realized that there were still jazz musicians plalying. I could get KPFA in Berkeley from where I lived, although the signal would cut out once in a while. There was a woman who had an avant-garde jazz program, which would drive my dad crazy. (Everyone else in my family was into classical music.) I knew the Creeley had been into bebop, that Larry Rivers had been a jazz musician. I eventually realized that jazz was central to American poetry and culture generally. (I hated folk music, because of the anti-intellectualism implicit in it.) No one else I knew was into jazz, until I went to college.

I don't have much musical talent. I can play a blues chord progression on the piano in a couple of keys. I can also play basic jazz drums and various afro-cuban rhythms on a conga drum. I can pick out a melody on the piano by ear, but not without making some basic mistakes.

It bugs me when Charles Bernstein uses the name of Thelonious Monk to talk about the performance of poetry, but then never really says anything specific about Monk. The jazz reference is just for show; it's a teaser. I hate kitschy jazz poetry.

Culturally speaking, the young lions movement of the 1980s is reactionary. I always thought the Marsalis approach was dull. Q: What's duller than a Marsalis brother? A: Two Marsalis brothers. To be fair, Jason M. is supposed to be a pretty good drummer.