The Book Cooks
Excerpt from
Journeys to the Bandstand: Thirty Jazz Lives in Vancouver
Chris Wong
(Chris Wong; Vancouver)
Excerpt from Chapter 4:
Far Out: Al Neil
Al Neil, Bob Frogge, Freddie Schreiber, Bill Boyle, and John Dawe, the original Cellar, circa 1958. Photographer unknown. Courtesy Walley Lightbody.
Kenneth Patchen was an important American poet who was underappreciated during his lifetime. He had a distinctive voice – both in his poetry and deep-timbred spoken delivery. Patchen was also an early officiant in the marriage of poetry and music. He collaborated with avant-garde composer John Cage on a radio play in 1942, and fifteen years later, released Kenneth Patchen Reads His Poetry with the Chamber Jazz Sextet. While the recording was an intriguing early example of jazz poetry, there was no direct interaction between the group and Patchen, as they were recorded separately.
Enter Al Neil. In his authorized biography of Patchen, Kenneth Patchen: Rebel Poet in America, Larry Smith wrote that John Grinnell was a Patchen fan and arranged for the poet to perform in Vancouver and Victoria with Neil, alto saxophonist Dale Hillary, bassist Lionel Chambers, and drummer Bill Boyle.[i] Neil’s memory of how he connected with Patchen was different. Neil: “This is one gig that I myself put together. Somehow, I got in touch with Patchen, probably through his publisher. When I heard that he’d made a poetry-jazz record, and I heard it and I felt that the jazzmen were just playing what they’d ordinarily play, and I thought because I had an interest in this poetry, I might be able to come up with something a little closer to what he might want.”[ii]
So Patchen went to Vancouver, and on February 12, 1959, as recounted by Smith, he sent a note to his wife Miriam about a rehearsal the poet had with the band at the Cellar: “Worked out a lot of material, and things should pan out pretty well as far as readings-band combination is concerned. Neil is very versatile and quick, full of hero-worship of me; and [Hillary] the alto sax player (18 yrs. old) is almost as talented as Modesto [Modesto Briseno, who played on the Kenneth Patchen Reads album] ...”[iii]
In Victoria, they performed at Victoria College and the Scene, a club that Cellar co-founders Ken Hole and Walley Lightbody started. Future visual artist Eric Metcalfe, who was eighteen at the time, was at the Scene for the show with Patchen and Neil’s quartet. Metcalfe loved what he heard at the performance, which he found “tremendously influential.”[iv] Then it was back across the Strait of Georgia to Vancouver for gigs at the Cellar and some other performances.
Patchen and the quartet were booked for a radio broadcast on February 17, 1959. Neil and the other musicians showed up at the CBC studio in the Hotel Vancouver’s basement expecting to rehearse with Patchen for three hours. When Patchen arrived, he informed them that he had an appointment with a dental surgeon to fix a broken tooth – in an hour. “Well, Patchen had a major tooth surgery right on the spot as I waited,” recalled Neil. “It was much more serious than any of us could have imagined. His jaw had to be chiselled away at, literally gouged out in an excruciatingly painful operation that took almost an hour.” Patchen emerged from the dentist’s chair with his mouth bleeding through cotton plugs and his face drained of colour. Yet after they got back to the studio, miraculously, Patchen was ready to do the session.[v]
Among the tunes/poems they did was “Four Blues Poems.” It starts with Neil and the band playing the melody to “Laird Baird,” a blues tune by Charlie Parker that the alto saxophonist recorded in 1952. As Patchen unhurriedly recites the four poems in low tones, Hillary solos in a straight-ahead bebop style while Neil and the rhythm section steadily swing. It was a fitting choice of music to accompany Patchen because Parker was a big fan of the poet. According to lore, Parker carried around Patchen’s poems and recited them at some performances. Patchen and Neil’s quartet also perform the slow “Four Song Poems” and jaunty “As I Opened the Window.”
All of this builds up to “Glory, Glory,” arranged by Neil, which features speeches from a play Patchen wrote: Don’t Look Now. The piece begins and ends with the band briskly playing the melody of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” In between, as the band improvises over the chord changes to Parker’s “Confirmation,” Patchen delivers a rousing ten-minute spoken word tour de force. “In these times, when the only thing which circulates freely is a lie calculated to hurt all human beings, you’re glad that the light is out, because today only in the dark, human beings still see one another for what they are: human beings, no more, no less. Glory, glory.” Patchen recites/shouts those words, and others in the piece, with immense feeling, sometimes hectoring, sometimes lamenting, as the musicians’ intensity rises and falls and rises yet again.
After the session, Patchen and the players had the energy to put on an unadvertised midnight show at the Cellar. An ad that ran in the Vancouver Sun three days later, promoting previously scheduled shows, said “HEAR … KENNETH PATCHEN READ HIS POETRY TO JAZZ AT THE CELLAR.”[vi] Sun reporter Mac Reynolds got in the poetic spirit when he reviewed the first night of the weekend Cellar shows: “He was reading his own stuff, about the lips of the moon and buttered Rolls Royces and landladies carrying sackfuls of smiling flies, to jazz that was cooler than the fishes that sleep in the grove.”[vii] Trumpeter John Dawe was at one of the Cellar shows, but he wasn’t nearly so enamoured with Patchen. “I can remember that voice droning on and on and on. I was looking up at the ceiling and thinking, ‘Let’s go, man. This is not our scene.’ That was the beatnik scene.”[viii]
For Neil, however, the experience with Patchen was meaningful because he connected with a like-minded creative soul. The feeling was mutual. On March 5, 1959, from his home in Palo Alto, Patchen wrote Neil a letter in big blue marker that said: “My pleasant memories of that [Victoria and Vancouver] jaunt fall into two categories 1) getting to know you (even under somewhat trying and confused circumstances), and 2) ‘working’ with that fine band you put together.”[ix] The same month, Patchen performed for two weeks with Charles Mingus and his band at the Living Theatre in New York City. Patchen was clearly at the epicentre of jazz-poetry.
But the Patchen-Al Neil Quartet collaboration had one more act. Just over five months later, a prominent New York City-based label, Folkways Records, told Patchen it was interested in distributing the CBC recording on vinyl. Patchen, stressing that it was a non-commercial label, told Neil that he suggested to Folkways owner Moses Asch that each musician receive $50 for the record. Patchen also asked if Neil could write liner notes,”[x] which he did. Folkways released Kenneth Patchen Reads with Jazz in Canada, featuring the “Alan Neil Quartet,” in October 1959.
The Billboard gave the album two stars, saying “it is no more valid than any of the other attempts” at fusing jazz and poetry. “However, the set does feature some good jazz by the Alan Neil Quartet, especially the work of alto sax man Dale Hillary, who is outstanding.”[i] [xi] Ira Gitler gave it three stars in Down Beat. While Gitler wrote that “Patchen has a forced, somewhat melodramatic reading style,” he also asserted that “Patchen’s railing at the Atomic Age and the complacency and corruption in our society really generates some emotional power, and the group catches fire behind him.”[xii]
Despite the mixed reviews, Kenneth Patchen Reads with Jazz in Canada was one of the most successful jazz poetry recordings of its time and beyond. Patchen’s poems, his singular voice, and the interplay between poet and musicians, elevated it from other efforts in the subgenre. For Neil, the experience reinforced his positive feelings about the poet’s artistry and the music he and the band were crafting. In his creatively literary liner notes, Neil vividly described the recording of “Glory, Glory” and the resulting satisfaction he and his bandmates felt. It was a satisfaction he wouldn’t always feel in his career as a bebop musician:
We had all been caught up in the reading from the start – we knew that something was happening, that this was “something else” – but now he really went for it, he wailed! With our nerves, our hearts, we heard him coming on, ringing the changes, threading and pulling us in and out of the light – the King Cat making his scene! And on his face we could see that what we had to say back to him was making the same kind of “heart-sense.” It was there.[xiii]
Notes:
i. Larry Smith, Kenneth Patchen, Rebel Poet in America (Bottom Dog Press with a Consortium of Small Presses, 2000), 240.
ii. Al Neil, interview with Jane Gowan, May 22, 2000.
iii. Smith, Kenneth Patchen, Rebel Poet in America, 240.
iv. Eric Metcalfe, interview with the author, May 9, 2018.
v. Alan Neil, liner notes, Kenneth Patchen Reads With Jazz In Canada, Kenneth Patchen With The Alan Neil Quartet, Folkways Records, FL9718, compact disc, 1959.
vi. The Cellar, advertisement, Vancouver Sun, February 20, 1959, 21.
vii. Mac Reynolds, “Jazzy Evening Had By All,” Vancouver Sun, February 21, 1959, 11.
viii. John Dawe, interview with the author, July 17, 2013.
ix. Kenneth Patchen, letter to Al Neil, March 5, 1959.
x. Kenneth Patchen, letter to Al Neil, August 14, 1959.
xi. “Kenneth Patchen Reads With Jazz In Canada,” The Billboard, 71, no. 46 (November 16, 1959): 50.
xii. Ira Gitler, “Kenneth Patchen Reads With Jazz In Canada,” in Gene Lees and Don De Michael, eds., Down Beat’s Jazz Record Reviews Volume V (Chicago: Maher Publications, 1961), 151-152.
xiii. Neil, liner notes, Kenneth Patchen Reads With Jazz In Canada, Kenneth Patchen With The Alan Neil Quartet.
© 2024 Chris Wong