Musical Review of Jazz Solo #2 from Snake-Back
Uploaded by spootyhead on Apr 18, 2007
Musical Review of Jazz Solo #2 from Snake-Back
Quincy Troupe is world-renowned for his love of jazz music and for his poetry, which reflects that love. The rhythm and meter of his poems lend themselves easily to live readings, and have a very solid musical quality about them, reminiscent of the very songs that he has listened to his whole life. In his Snake-back Solo 2, he references several famous Jazz artists, including Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong and Miles Davis, two of the most famous jazz artists in history. The structure of this poem, when read aloud, sounds like it could be a jazz song from that era years ago when jazz music was the most prevalent in American culture, especially in New Orleans, widely considered to be the birthplace of jazz music.
The rhythm part of any jazz song is usually very repetitive, pushed steadily along by the bass and backed up by the drums. In early jazz recordings, the only rhythm heard was the bass (either a double-bass or stand-up bass) with no drums, or the drummer tapping on the floor or the table. The reason for that was because the drums were too loud and overpowering for the primitive recording devices commonly used back then. The loudness and dominance of the drums and the bass is what drives a jazz song, and is what drives Troupe’s Snack-Back Solo from start to finish.
Readers can see Troupe’s prominent use of repetition throughout the solo, signifying the rhythm section of his song. In the first stanza, “mojoin / on in, spacin on in on a riff full of rain / riffin on in full of rain & pain / spacin on in on a sound / like coltrane” (ll. 3-7) is full of repetition (“on in”) and rhyme, setting the reader (or listener) into a rhythm right from the start. Even the use of hard consonants can make the reader feel the bass pushing and the drums kicking: “boogalooin / bass down…/ up & under, eye come slidin…” – the second stanza repeats the phrase “to see” several times, which can bring to mind the sliding of a hand up the fretboard of the bass accompanied by the crash of a cymbal.
A jazz solo, usually played by a trumpet or a coronet, would try to bring such soul out of those instruments that it could sound almost like a human...