According to their website, The National Jazz Museum in Harlem’s mission is “to preserve, promote, and present jazz by inspiring knowledge, appreciation and celebration of jazz locally, nationally, and internationally.” When we came yesterday to visit, they had a running exhibition of Bebo Valdez.
Bebo Valdez, a Cuban pianist, composer, bandleader, and arranger, was born in Cuba in 1918. He left Cuba in 1960 and eventually settled in Sweden. There he played Cuban music and Latin jazz.
His career boosted in 1994 and released CDs, films, and more. One of the more interesting things he created that caught my attention was the movie Chico y Rita. This movie is about a young piano player, Chico, and a beautiful singer, Rita. They fall in love, and perform together.It’s animated, as well, giving an interesting perspective and vision to an adult audience. What’s interesting about this story, however, is that Chico resembles Bebo himself in many ways.
Spoiler Alert:
In the movie Chico is a piano player from Cuba, like Bebo. He also leaves the music scene for decades, like Bebo, and then has a career revival once again and becomes a success.
The film might not be about Bebo’s whole life, but it definitely has some similar life events. Although it doesn’t depict his life exactly as it was, “….it evokes the era that produced him and led jazz musicians like Dizzy Gillespie to work with Cubans, giving birth to a new kind of jazz.” (MPR News)
While there were several poems from Saeed Jones book, Prelude to Bruise, that caught my attention, the poem, Daedalus, After Icarus, was probably the first. Some of that might have to do with the fact that I felt like I understood the meaning behind this poem almost instantly, while for some other poems in the collection, comprehension did not appear until after a couple of extra reads. The poem is quite short, being only two stanzas long, and reference the Greek myth of Daedalus, the great but cursed inventor, and his son, Icarus. The original myth is one that warns of hubris, as Daedalus constructs wax wings for his son and himself to escape Crete. However, Icarus’ hubris gets the better of him as he flies too close to the sun and crashes due to the wax on his wings melting. Saeed Jone’s poem seems to reference Daedalus finally reaching land after his long journey and looking back into the sea, where his son is now lost in. In the scene, there are children, many of whom seem envious of the wings, but one boy in particular mentions how they don’t wants wings. Instead they wants to be fish. The poem almost seems to mock Daedalus, whose only real hope in the past of saving is son was if he invented something that allowed him to be fish. The poem itself seems to be quite dark, with no real interaction between Daedalus with the other characters, with Daedalus more focused on looking out at sea than listening to the requests of children. It was an interesting poem to include in the collection, seemingly because the piece seems to be somewhat out of place. Perhaps the only connection between the poem and the rest of the collection is that the poem references Greek mythology and the collection as a all is supposed to be inspired by Greek epics like the Iliad or the Odyssey. All in all, I enjoyed the poem.
I’m also going to include two of my poems here. The first one was the poem I wrote during the poetry workshop, while the second poem is a found poem that is based on “Previous Condition” by James Baldwin.
Is A Dark Morning
Her shot glass is blue bubbles is tongue is dripping lipstick
is tingling hair on an unwanted mustache
is a red, sweaty face is ripped sheets and no company
is an empty room is heels all over the place
is a painful swollen nose ring is a dark morning
Back In New York
I had been dreaming
woke up in the morning, trembling
Back in New York and hating it
Heavy ceilinged, perfectly square
the color of chipped dry blood
was so hideous
Everyone had gone to bed
Everyone was asleep
Banging on the door
I sat up and lit a cigarette
Don’t let them scare you to death
“Took his crap”
Nothing but a bum
Same rents for same old shacks
Dirty as sin
Had not been painted
We had a stormy relationship
But we stuck
Took a couple of beatings
Worse things have happened
Robbery or murder in my neighborhood
Acted like I didn’t know a thing
Back in New York and hating it
Beaten as a person
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