I'd like to thank Burt Hatlen for his piece. The discussion of African
Amercian poetics and Pound puts me in mind of the question, which music
may be best associated with the Cantos. I wasn't folowing earlier
discussions closely but it seemed to focus on 20th century classical
modes of composition.

I would like to posit that there are similarities between the form and
execution of Pound's Cantos and improvisatory jazz especially as it is
expressed in post-bop experimental jazz. Whereas as be-bop innovation
exemplified in Charlie Parker has technical dimensions that in their
formal origins seem to reflect the same level of formal innovation you
find in Schoenberg's serial technique, experimental or free-form jazz as
performed by John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman,
Andrew White and legions of other jazz musicians beginning in the
mid-fifties, on the surface and without obvious contact reflect the
techniques and the structural imperatives of the Cantos.

The transition from an aural form to a language based one has many
caveats and blurred territories that even a Boolean aesthetics could not
surmount. So I'll simply address a few apparent similarities.

Coltrane had his famous sheets of sound which were based on the
manipulation of scales. Coltrane was notorious for putting in prodigious
amounts of practice time endelessly repeating and connecting the many
changes he was exploring. Yet, when it came to his performances the act
of performance and creation became one. After a brief thematic
introduction was played his ensembles would launch into improvisations
based on the theme but free to take the theme where ever the musical
imperatives might go. Musical scales like cited material are by nature
discrete. If you alter a note you are either in another scale or by
design or accident you have stepped out of that structure. Obviously
with all 'avant-garde' experimental jazz including Coltrane, the musical
imagination of the performer violated (or transcended) the accepted
structure of derived from western clasical musics. It did this in such
profusion that exceptions to traditional musical structure became part
of the canon, a practice that began with earlier improvisation found
prominently in musicians uch as Louis Armstrong, Art Tatum and Coleman
Hawkins. Jazz, especially improvisation created new imperatives that
eventually required a critical defense much like that applied to poetry.
A great musical from was born.

But it was always because of and in spite of, the core of western
musical structure that such improvisation and, finally, so-called free
form was able to flourish. It needed the structure.
I would posit that Pound used his thematic materials in much the same
way that experimental jazz musicians did and do. There are a number of
ways that Pound chose to play the material of the Cantos from tapping
its lyrical essence to letting quoted passages stand unaltered. The
drive behind this was Pound's ear, the equal to Eliot's and Yeat's and
second only to Joyce's in my humble estimation. In a Canto, the ear must
regulate content to a great degree or you drift toward prose which in
Pound's case as regards his cited passages would just be typing as some
critics have maintained. I believe Pound in the process of constructing
the Cantos took succour in his interpreatation that Chinese historians
had left blank what they did not know. Of course, his reasons were
different. The demands of a poem are far closer to music than they are
to history and to remain a poem must answer to these demands.

Coltrane and his fellow jazz musicians ran the risk of making "noise" if
they drifted to far from the structurally built in demands of their
instruments. Pound to walked that line in the Cantos. Philip Larkin
heard Coltrane et al as "noise" and had a similar literary opinion of
Pound.


In another vein, jazz critics such as Ben Sidran and poet Amiri Baraka
have pointed out the gradual change in audience participation (call and
response), posture (dancing to sitting) and attitude (shift to
avant-garde, mostly white classical based audience for experimental and
avant-garde jazz.) I once proposed to a local radio station that they
have a show that played 20th century classical composition and bop and
experimental jazz. Art Pepper meets Elliot Carter. Why not? I was
rebuffed.

Craig Hansen Werner writes in his book Playing the Changes: From
Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse, "Euro-Americam modernist poems such
as Pound's "In the Station at the Metro," [Can I get you all to ignore
Werner's choice here], Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways to Look at a
Blackbird," and Eliot's Wasteland support Richard Poirier's definition
of modernist performance as "an exercise of power, a very curious one.
Curious because it is at first so furiously self-consultive [think
Trane's scales], so even narcissistic, and later so eager for publicity,
love and historical dimension. Out of an accumulating of secretive acts
emerges at last a form that presumes to compete with reality itself for
control of the minds exposed to it." You may dispute Poirier and
Werner's interpretation here, but these criticisms have been leveled at
both High-Modernism and experimantal and avant-garde jazz. Mel Tolson's
work is a valuable lynch pin here. So I'm going to break off for now and
go buy the relatively new collection of his work. Carlo Parcelli