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