It’s been an honor to continue receiving the support from Jerry Jazz Musician, who have published another of my poems (previous poems here, here and here). This one will be included in my forthcoming collection The Blackened Blues (more on that here, and link for pre-orders here).
This poem, entitled “Booker Little’s Deliverance,” concerns one of my all-time artistic heroes, of whom I’ve written about in the past.
In an extended meditation on the devastatingly premature loss of three geniuses (Little, Eric Dolphy, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, entitled “Victory and Sorrow: Bright Moments from Three Masters”), I write:
For many years—all through college and after graduate school—John Keats signified, for me, the ultimate artistic loss of all time. In terms of talent and potential versus time granted to practice and refine his skills (dead from tuberculosis, aged 25), Keats has even the most unbearable cases beat: his good friend and fellow genius Percy Bysshe Shelley (aged 29), their mutual friend Lord Byron (36). Even the great Franz Schubert (31) who, considering his abilities, may have amassed a body of work to be mentioned in the same breath as his fellow Austrian Mozart (himself only 35). Yet, like Mozart, Schubert was so stunningly prolific the collected output somewhat mitigates the loss.
Once I began seriously listening to jazz music, I came to recognize that this art form is littered with premature deaths. We know all about our famous rock stars, many of whom flamed out early in life due to self-destructive habits and hobbies. The typical, if irresponsible (and racist) assumption is that most jazz players were junkies and therefore each casualty must have died with a needle in their arm. In actuality, the number of luminous young men whose deaths were not self-inflicted is unsettling.
At the top of my list is Booker Little. Considered the heir apparent to the effulgent Clifford Brown (himself only 25 when he died, clean and sober, in a car crash), Little did not die so much as have his life defrauded, at age 23, from uremia—an especially brutal, and painful, type of kidney failure. Barely legal drinking age, Little had already led sessions that stand alongside the best post-bop recordings of the era (He neither drank nor took drugs, incidentally).
Little was able to complete two albums in the final year of his life; both considered masterpieces by aficionados, but largely obscure outside of jazz circles. This is ignominious on a number of levels. For one thing, the music contained in these releases captures the ethereal nature of life, the ecstasy of creation and the unique expressions our most gifted artists are capable of conveying. Beyond that, the albums are touchstones; perhaps the most poignant instances from any era of a human being defying death with dignity and joy, even as mortality circled his head like a demented buzzard.
What Keats was able to convey so succinctly, and enduringly, with words, Little achieves without needing a single syllable. His voice, of course, is his instrument, and his trumpet tells the story of his life: not for nothing was his final work entitled Victory and Sorrow. It’s impossible to listen to this music without hearing the history of illness, injustice and ultimately the transcendent human ability to, at least temporarily, overcome anything.
At once somber and serene, the compositions achieve an intense distillation of Beauty: the joy of inspiration leavened with the contemplation of transience. It is all in there, as devastating in its way as the symphonies of Mahler or the extended meditations of Tolstoy. Does the concentrated intensity of this sound derive from the soul of a man who sensed his time was, all of a sudden, just about up? It is almost intolerable to imagine that he was anticipating –and realizing– some of the experiences and emotions of the years he should have had, putting every thought, feeling, regret and ambition into his playing. Was he in fact dealing with significant pain while he composed and played this music? If so, we are getting into deaf Beethoven levels of drama and disbelief.
How did he manage? There is a tune on the album Out Front entitled “Strength and Sanity”, which could be a commentary on what any individual requires in order to survive—much less thrive—in a world where there is a distinct shortage of both. It certainly speaks to ingredients necessary for jazz musicians, incomparably talented men who were still, circa 1961, considered second-rate citizens, not to mention the additional stigma of being jazz musicians. But it is also a statement about what Little had to count on and cultivate just in order to get as far as he did, and deal with the hand he was dealt: performing, composing and playing against the dying of the light.
Perspective. That he was called on so young by the capricious machinery of Fate is enough to humble a hardened heart. That he succeeded in creating, and leaving behind, music that still inspires and consoles is a miracle; a miracle that, in the final analysis, equals or surpasses and possibly even overwhelms the illogical, unfair nature of his passing. That this blissful, restorative sound exists to help any confused, self-pitying individuals left behind, struggling to carry his baggage, makes a compelling case to consider the bigger picture.
Booker Little’s Deliverance
Your blood, poisoned by neither drink nor drugs,
but the ravening appetite of some fickle force
we can’t fathom; the way hearts attack us or else
our systems are assailed by cells made to invade.
At least fate had the courtesy to inquire if you had
any final words: your short life’s work summarized
on two albums that scorn mortality, even as death
circled your ailing body like a demented buzzard.
Strength and sanity, victory and sorrow—
calling softly: holding a lantern, showing
us some of what you were already seeing.
Was this expression—an elegiac storm still able
to inspire and console, capable of changing lives
half a century after it got stuck to magnetized tape;
just another day in the studio, that odd laboratory
of mournful miracles—worth all it took to make?
Those revelations transmitted from the impassive edge
of elsewhere, a place memory and deed are annihilated:
some insatiable absence of being where all sound ceases.
(Booker Little, a virtuosic composer and trumpet player, died tragically at 23 due to complications from uremia. Prolific during his abbreviated career, Little managed to lead two influential sessions in 1961, despite being in considerable and constant pain.)
