Jane Cortez and her band blend music and words. GWEN ANSELL interviewed them at the Arts Alive festival
So what’s a “jazz poet”? Some bearded dude in shades spewing Kerouac sentiments in a cellar while a cool vibraphone tinkles? Some other bearded, shaded-and- dashiki-wearing dude declaiming angrily in a loft while a hot saxophone wails? Jane Cortez is neither of these.
For a start, she’s definitely not a dude. She’s a tiny lady making the hotel armchair she’s curled into look distinctly overstuffed. Firmly, she asserts the role of women as writers: “A poet … is a poet and in that sense you can’t compartmentalise women’s writing. But a lot of women are finding their own voices today and their work plays a serious role in cancelling out the silences that have existed in literature about our lives.”
Those jazz-poet ghosts of the Fifties and Sixties wouldn’t have said that. But Arizona-born Cortez, in Johannesburg with her band The Firespitters for the poetry component of Arts Alive, is very firmly grounded in the Nineties, poetically and musically.
Cortez started working with music way back, taking the politics and passion of her involvement in the US civil rights movement into performance spaces across the country. “I grew up in a household full of music — jazz and the blues — so it felt very natural to put words and music together.”
She’s worked with musicians whose outlook is predominantly modernist, including Horace Tapscott and Arthur Blythe. Her current band comprises drummer Denardo Coleman, guitarist Bem Nix, bassist Al MacDowell and reedman Talib Kibwe. Cortez’s political involvement has extended to years of work with the US anti-apartheid movement, although this is her first visit to South Africa.
Her modernism extends to the way words and music are fitted together. Whereas many performance poets use music to accompany their words — filling in spaces, providing illustrations — Cortez and her band strive to create a seamless synergistic whole, with interaction of both sound and image.
“It works on many levels,” says Coleman. “Jayne is like another musician”. There’s much nodding of band heads, and the players constantly emphasise how much the collaboration with Cortez is, in Kibwe’s words, “more like working with a singer; we all feed off the interplay.”
Says Coleman: “What’s she’s saying creates another element in our interpretation. We listen to the words, and they inspire images in our playing. While there’s a fairly light structure of tempo and key; there’s spontaneity in how we vary the timing to help her express the meaning of the words”. Nix adds: “And then there’s her inflection, the pulse and rhythm of her speech. We’re reacting spontaneously on all those levels while we play.”
In the same way, Cortez, improvises. “Just as the musicians play from the chords which give them a base to move around, so I may decide during a performance that I’m going to play with certain words or take off in a new direction from certain images. It often depends on the atmosphere of a live show, on what you give to and take from the audience.”
Jazz is Cortez’s music of choice precisely because it allows such flexibility. She’s reluctant to provide a hard definition of genre: “Jazz is life. It holds all of my history from the traditional beat of the djembe right on to the future of electronic technology.”
And she’s uneasy about the tight jazz academicism which is beginning to dominate at important American venues like the Lincoln Centre. “I think certain kinds of musical packaging have to do with selling the music, rather than with its spirit. And I think its limiting to define jazz too narrowly. Some of what I’m hearing needs to loosen up, to practise more democracy.”
Those interactions between politics and music, ideas and music, words and music, are the recurring motifs of Cortez’s work. On Friday and Saturday at Carfax, she’ll share the stage with South African poets and deliver a dozen poems with the band. Their sound, as sampled on the album Everywhere Drums, is strong and powerful.
“We allude,” says Nix, “to everything that’s happened with the jazz tradition — and a few other things besides.”
MacDowell adds that the band’s strongest focus is “probably on the blues”.
But perhaps, Cortez herself puts it best in the song Adupe, laying down the ghosts of more effete poets- with-music with the assertion that the Firespitters’ sound is “not tweet-tweet but mau-mau”.