Talkin’ about Stompin’ at the Grand Terrace

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DS: Are you uneasy with that?

PB: No. If you go back to Langston Hughes’ “Weary Blues,” that was a call-out poem—this old black guy playing the blues. It’s a perfect poem, and it captures something that was immediately picked up by African Americans who read that poem back then, during the Harlem Renaissance. They understood what that poem was about. And the forward-thinking, progressive white writers also began to feel that there was a connection between the music and American literature.

DS: Is poetry in some ways a performance art, at least for you?

I think it should be. We had [poet] Ed Bok Lee on campus a month ago, and he was just fabulous. He can do straight poetry in terms of how we’ve looked at poetry over the past 50 or 60 years, where a guy gets up and reads his poem and everybody’s quiet. Then he can break out into a hip-hop, spoken-word poetry slam.

DS: Is that how poetry will stay alive?

PB: Oh yeah, I think everything cycles out. It will be revitalized and some interesting things will come out of it. I’m not sure what. I don’t think it’s forced; that’s just how young people are hearing the poems they write. The words are honest and come from an experience.

Click on the links below to listen to sample tracks from Philip S. Bryant's Stompin' at the Grand Terrace:

Prologue 

Stompin' at the Grand Terrace 

Saving the Trumpet Kings

Stompin’ at the Grand Terrace: A Jazz Memoir in Verse, published in 2009 by Blueroad Press (www.blueroadpress.com), includes the CD A Stompin Suite, featuring the music of Carolyn Wilkins and poems by Philip S. Bryant. Wilkins, a jazz pianist and vocalist, has been an active participant in the Boston music scene for more than 20 years, is an performer, composer, and Professor of Ensembles at Berklee College of Music. The following tracks compliments of Blueroad Press.

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