WEBVTT

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If I think about all of the--

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someone told me.

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I always say I don't
know the word for it.

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They don't want to say
"culture" or "history."

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Somebody told me that it should
be called "from someness."

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If I think of all the from
someness behind anything,

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and what my attitude
towards it is,

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I think of different
kinds of mastery.

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As a kid I played
the saxophone--

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you could say
professionally, in the sense

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that I played it and people
paid me money to play it.

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That is more
glorious than it was.

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But I did play it, and I
recently started again.

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And if you think
about the saxophone,

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it's an example of
what I'm talking about,

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because it's a European
instrument invented

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by a guy named "Sax."

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But it's not!

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It's not a European instrument.

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It's an American
instrument-- indeed,

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it's a Black American,
African-American instrument.

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It was made so by geniuses like
Coleman Hawkins, and Charlie

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Parker, and Lester Young,
and Ben Webster and so forth.

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Geniuses, artists-- some
of them great artists--

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made it theirs.

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And it seems to me the
return to determinism

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if I think what
would one like to do

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with the English
language, or with culture,

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or whatever-- wherever
this is, one would like

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to make it one's instrument.

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A couple of years
ago, I bought a horn

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and started playing again.

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And they now have
these wonderful CDs

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with sidemen on them, and
you can make a mistake

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and want to start over,
you can push a button

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and they go back
to the beginning.

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And they don't smirk
at one another.

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You can play with them.

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This poem is called
"Ginza Samba,"

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which is the title of an actual
jazz tune played, among others,

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by the late Stan Getz.

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Most of the things in
this poem are true.

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"Ginza Samba."

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"A monosyllabic European
called Sax invents a horn--

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walla whirledy wah.

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A kind of twisted, brazen
clarinet, but with its column

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of vibrating.

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Air shaped, not in a cylinder,
but in a cone, widening ever

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outward and bawaah
spouting infinitely

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upward through an upturned,
swollen, golden bell rimmed

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like a gloxinia flowering in
Sax's Belgian imagination.

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And in the unfathomable
matrix of mothers and fathers

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as a genius graven, humming
into the cells of the body.

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Or saved in the resonating
grail of memory,

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changed and exchanged as in
the trading of brasses, pearls

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and ivory, calicos and slaves.

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Slave laborers and slave girls--

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two cousins in a
royal family of Niger,

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known as the "birds" or "hawks."

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In Christendom,
one cousin's child

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becomes a "favorite Negro,"
ennobled by decree of the Czar,

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and founds a great family,
a line of generals, dandies

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and courtiers including
the poet Pushkin,

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killed in a duel concerning
his wife's honor.

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While the other cousin sails
in the belly of a slave

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ship to the Port of
Baltimore, where she is

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raped and dies in childbirth.

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But the infant will
marry a Seminole.

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And in the next chorus
of time, their child

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fathers a great Hawk, or
Bird, with many followers--

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among them, this
great-grandchild

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of the Jewish manager
of a Pushkin estate,

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blowing his American breath
out into the wiggly tomb

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uncurling its triplets
and sixteenths--

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the Ginza Samba of
breath and brass,

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the reed vibrating as a valve.

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The aether, the unimaginable
wires and circuits

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of an ingenious box here
in my room in this house

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built 100 years ago
while I was elsewhere.

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It is like falling in love.

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The atavistic imperative
of some one voice or face.

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The skill, the copper
filament, the golden bellful

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of notes twirling through their
invisible element from Rio

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to Tokyo and back
again, gathering

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speed in the variations as
they tunnel the twin haunted

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labyrinths of stirrup and anvil,
echoing here in the hearkening

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instrument of my skull."

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Thank you.

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[APPLAUSE]

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