By Jon Garelick

PoemJazz is a project where music and poetry reinforce each other, where the declaimed poetry works like the sung line of a song — though Robert Pinsky never sings or pretends to.

PoemJazz, at the Regattabar, Cambridge, on January 18.

Robert Pinsky performing PoemJazz at the Regattabar. Photo: Eric Antoniou

When I took my seat at the packed Regattabar for Robert Pinsky’s PoemJazz, the old skepticism grabbed me: Was this going to be any good?

I’d seen Pinsky’s band a few times before, and it had been good. But it had also been a while. And the old doubts lingered — bathetic poetry “slams,” the cringeworthy awkwardness of too many open mic nights, a whiff of old beatnik movies.

“Bongos and the whole Dobie Gillis, coffeehouse stereotype,” pianist and longtime Pinsky collaborator Laurence Hobgood offered when I interviewed him and Pinsky separately more than a dozen years ago, before the project’s Regattabar debut. Pinsky, for his part, said that when he looked out at the audience, “I can always see that people are afraid it’s going to be embarrassing.”

Not to worry. From the first notes — a gentle swaying vamp grounded by pianist Hobgood and bassist John Lockwood — PoemJazz was in flight. With Pinsky — who is distinguished among other things as three-term Poet Laureate of the United States — reciting an English translation of “Caminante, no hay camino,” by Antonio Machado (“One of the great poets in the Spanish language”), the band moved in and out of solos, Hobgood, Lockwood, cellist Catherine Bent, Stan Strickland on flute, and “special guest” drummer Francisco Mela. They all came together, taking turns with obligatos and solos as Pinsky bobbed to the beat and declaimed, “off book,” as they say in theater:

“Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.

As you walk, you make your own road,

and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.

Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship’s wake on the sea.”

Pinsky returned to the page on his music stand to read in Spanish. “No hay camino!” Hobgood took off into florid elaborations from the vamp, and then the Cuban-born Mela dug into the implied mambo, making his snare and its rim pop like timbales. As Pinsky’s recitation returned for the out chorus, Bent bowed an obligato under him, and Pinsky amended Machado with his own elaboration: “You are on the road alone.”

The band had been introduced by Pinsky’s friend, the distinguished historian and sociologist Orlando Patterson, who invoked the long symbiotic relationship between modern poetry and jazz: Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He might have added Hughes’s collaborator on the album Weary Blues, Charles Mingus, or Javon Jackson’s work with Nikki Giovanni in the past few years.

Other than the Hughes/Mingus and the Giovanni/Jackson, there have been other mixes of poetry and jazz I’ve enjoyed, like flutist composer Jamie Baum’s Bridges (one of the best jazz releases of 2024), or, in a couple of live shows at Cambridge’s Lilypad, the Bert Seager quartet’s collaborations with the poet Alison Luterman.

Pianist Laurence Hobgood performing in PoemJazz. Photo: Eric Antoniou

But too often, my impulse is to flee. It’s not just the Dobie Gillis/bongos thing — when musicians use poetry the words either get buried in sound or the music itself devolves into bland noodling. It’s also true on otherwise admirable recordings where music and words — especially historic “drop-ins” — act as a distraction from each other. (Musical settings of poetic text are another matter.)

I’ve never found that to be a problem with PoemJazz (there are now two recordings available). It’s one of the rare cases (Baum, Jackson/Giovanni, Seager/Luterman) in these projects where music and poetry reinforce each other, where the declaimed poetry works like the sung line of a song — though Pinsky never sings or pretends to. Something is always happening in the music, which benefits especially from the sensitivity of the musicians. There’s always a musical framework — spoken poetry performed as a piece of music.

At the Regattabar, the framework usually started with a vamp — as in the funk Hobgood laid down on electric piano for Pinsky’s “Proverbs of Limo.” But the vamps always went somewhere. Pinsky’s take on a José Martí poem “Yo No Puedo Olvidar Nunca” (“I swear I won’t ever forget,” spoken in both Spanish and English) led to Mela playing wood flute and bass drum and breaking into chant — the most African of Afro-Cuban tropes, and then gesturing to Bent, who took up a melody, with Pinsky coming back in, more guttural now in his delivery, perhaps picking up on Mela’s timbre, then Strickland on bass clarinet, followed by an interlude where Mela had the audience singing along to an improvised melody with Strickland beating claves. Everyone had added new improvised lines of music to the lines of poetry.

Another surprising turn came when Strickland took Pinsky’s recitation of Ben Jonson’s “His Excuse for Loving” (“Of whose beauty it was sung,/ She shall make the old man young”) into a West African vibe, plucking gentle kalimba thumb piano as he sang. (Probably the most unlikely turn you could imagine for 16th-century English verse.) For the finale, Pinsky read a poem “nobody here has seen” — “the band may or may not decide to join me.” The poem, “Izzy Kasoff,” was about a childhood ride to the cemetery for a funeral with a relative he hardly knew who lectures the 12-year-old about “the faults of Peggy Lee.” Before long, Bent ventured into this poem she’d never seen with a lilting dance-like theme, then Strickland’s soprano sax, then Hobgood and Lockwood, with Mela on soft brushes, the tune eventually fading to a lone low bowed bass note. Pinsky has invoked his youthful aspirations as a saxophonist, and his “readings” in PoemJazz are always reinforced by refrain-like repetitions of lines and even occasional verbal improvisations. He said before that last tune/poem at the Regattabar that, when he first got together with Hobgood over a decade ago, the pianist brought the poet’s books, expounding on themes and meaning. That was all well and good, Pinsky had told him, but forget it. “Think of them as tunes, the sentences as melodies.” And then they were off. The project now works as both poetry and music, as one.

Set list:

1: “Caminante, no hay camino” (Antonio Machado)
2: “At the Sangoma” (Pinksy)
3: “Proverbs of Limbo” (Pinsky)
4: “The Want Bone” (Pinsky)
5: “Yo No Puedo Olvidar Nunca” (José Martí)
6: “Antique” (Pinsky)
7:“His Excuse for Loving” (Ben Jonson)
8: “Samurai Song” (Pinsky)
9: “Izzy Kasoff” (Pinsky)

Jon Garelick can be reached at garelickjon@gmail.com.