Poets and jazz artists find rhythm and rhyme

NEW YORK -- Poet Charles Simic grew up in the former Yugoslavia, where his family listened to jazz over a "fantastic radio" whose dial told them where to turn for stations from Paris or Oslo, though he later figured out that an American Armed Services broadcast from Italy was the source of the Big Band music he heard in 1944, when he was 6. "To us, jazz meant America," recalled his younger brother Milan, "freedom and America."

Robert Pinsky did them one better, however -- he dreamed of being a jazzman himself, a saxophonist -- and still plays, at 67, in the privacy of his home, using those pre-recorded rhythm tracks as accompaniment.

But neither man was carrying a horn, or any instrument, when they arrived Tuesday at the Jazz Standard club on East 27th Street. The nation's current poet laureate, the 69-year-old Simic, and its former poet laureate, Pinsky, were there to do their practiced thing, read poems. And while they'd share the stage with three jazz musicians, it was still undecided, two hours before showtime, whether the two groups would perform together. In the best jazz tradition, the night was going to be an improvisation.

"We've never done this before," Pinsky told the evening's drummer, Andrew Cyrille, who at 68 has only about five decades' experience freelancing with the likes of Cannonball Adderley.

"No worry," Cyrille said.

The "Words & Music" event was the brainchild of Milan Simich -- the two brothers spell the name differently -- who is a veteran jazz producer but admitted to apprehension about "being a little too '50s."

A tight end-sized figure with a shaved head and gray beard, Simich was worried that having the musicians play and the poets recite at the same time might seem like a stilted return to the drugged-out days of Allen Ginsberg and other beatnik poets.

"They had that kind of mad genius then, that was the idea," he said of those poets. "Now they're all college professors."

Pinsky, who proved to be a populist poet laureate by inviting Americans to send him their favorite verses, indeed teaches at Boston University. But the plan did call for him to try one exercise out of the jazz world, not academia: a round of "trade fours" with the drummer, Cyrille. Normally, musicians throw a few bars back and forth, "just have a conversation," the drummer noted, the wrinkle here being that Pinsky would throw him couplets instead, two-line rhyming poems, such as one by J.V. Cunningham that went, "This Humanist, whom no belief constrained, / Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained."