Jazz and Literature - S02E03

A look at the shared frontiers of jazz and literature from the many ways jazz shaped the world of poetry and vice versa, and hear how jazz critics have shaped our understanding of the music for the last hundred years. We’ll talk with poet Sascha Feinstein and literature historian Michael Borshuk about how everyone from the Beat writers of the 1950s to the civil-rights minded poets of the 1960s found their muses in the world of jazz, take a look at the life and work of the “jazz poet” Langston Hughes, and chat with our resident jazz historian Lewis Porter about how jazz critics have influenced the public’s perception of jazz for better and worse. 

 

Guest Speaker correction: Sascha Feinstein is not Co-Director of Creative Writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He taught at Vermont College of Fine Arts for 7 years, and has been Director of Creative Writing at Lycoming College since 1995.

 

Episode Transcript

 

Host:  Jeff Haas

Guests: Sascha Feinstein, Michael Borshuk, Paul McCann, Lewis Porter

 

Music

• Duke Ellington “Weary Blues”
• Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen “Charlie Parker”
• Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald / Billy Strayhorn “Something to Live For”
• John Coltrane “All or Nothing at All”
• Jack Kerouac “The Last Hotel & Some of Dharma” 
• Langston Hughes with Charles Mingus and the Horace Parlan Quintet “Good Morning / Harlem”
• Langston Hughes with Leonard Feather's All-Star Sextet “The Weary Blues”
• Don Byron and Sadiq “I Cannot Commit”
• Langston Hughes with Charles Mingus and the Horace Parlan Quintet “Same in Blues / Comment on Curb”
• Charlie Parker “Billie’s Bounce”

 

Original Air Date: May 26, 2012

 

Radio broadcast produced by Lou Blouin and Jeff Haas

Radio broadcast audio engineering by Jack Conners and Brock Mormon

Podcast audio remastering by Sam Boase-Miller

Transcripts by Erik Saras

 

Theme Song: Jeff Haas Trio & Friends “Giving In”

 

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The New Jazz Archive radio broadcasts originally sponsored by Chateau Chantal. The New Jazz Archive receives no revenue from podcast reissues of radio broadcasts.