Jungle Nights and Soda Fountain Rags: Poem for Duke Ellington and the Duke Ellington Orchestra

by Brian Gilmore

Format: Paperback, 108pp.
ISBN: 0967504309
Publisher: Karibu Books
Pub. Date: June 2000

Reviewed by Kalamu ya Salaam

Brian Gilmore is a cut above. His 30-part poem on Duke Ellington is deep and deft. Each section can stand alone, but taken as a whole the piece is a magnificent, swinging suite not unlike some of Ellington’s major compositions.

Gilmore has done his homework and is thorough in using specific details of the lives and lifestyles of Duke and his band members. If you know the sound and history of Duke music, your appreciation for Gilmore’s work will be increased three or four-fold.

Rather than solely evoke the music itself, Gilmore gives us nuanced and knowledgeable portraits of these musicians as human beings with desires, contradictions and marvelous musical talents. The book opens with an elegant portrait of young Ellington:

the boy who painted 
signs was blessed 
from birth, 
played baseball 
piano 
and hung out all over the city 
where he was born, 
ward place Washington, D.C. 
rent party regular 
down with the 
blues 
buddy Bolden 
Bunk Johnson 
intrigued with this 
newfangled 
New Orleans 
Negro music 
called

“jasssss…”

The book’s ending is equally poignant, for now the spotlight is turned on Duke’s son Mercer, who carried the band on after Duke was gone. Hear both the familial tenderness and the inevitable comparative tension of father and son who are also musicians and successive leaders of the same band:

comes the son 
to clean the house
move the chairs 
sweep the floors 
put the books back 
where they 
belong

get the house ready 
for the world 
though 
the head of the house will not be 
home

and the poem continues with this magnificent image of macho and sentimentality mixed into an inseparable duende:

like an extra in 
a film 
the son was 
there

to love the man 
but not the father or 
the father and not the 
man

like we love the man 
and never knew the father 
and we let the 
father become what 
he had to become

and the man what he had 
to become

stepped 
to the side 
like a bullfighter 
with a red cape

took the father’s paint 
into his hands

smeared it all over the earth 
gave it to everyone who 
wanted to know how it felt 
to be blessed

The language of this long poem is simple, but the sentiments are bittersweet river deep, ocean wide, as right as rain and terrible as a thunderstorm. Gilmore is grappling with issues at a larger level than the majority of contemporary poetry attempts. Most of us go for the personal moments, the introspection of the self, and here comes Gilmore telling us about Ellington and Hodges, Paul Gonsalves and Juan Tizol, Bubber Miley and Billy Strayhorn; telling us about the meaning of music that unerringly was the essence of us.

Some would look for more alliteration and other poetic devices to dress up the words, but by the use of understatement and simplicity Gilmore more accurately conveys the grand complexity of Duke’s mighty music. What Gilmore does is show the immensity of his subject by employing tiny, precise gestures that attract our attention more thoroughly than if he were waving huge colorful flags. I think Gilmore’s technique is cinematic rather than dramatic, meaning like a good movie actor using just soft voice and facial gesture he reveals a world that on stage might require grand movements and tumultuous talk. This minimalist approach was a successful gambit that could have easily backfired had not Gilmore packed the spare stanzas with so much history, with so much meaning, and so much reflection of the rigorous beauty of Duke’s music.

On the deficit side of the street, I do not like either the layout or the typeface that was chosen; neither has the elegance of the music nor the subtlety of the poetry. The typeface is hard to read, and it is very, very difficult to distinguish commas from periods, which may not seem like a major problem, but in poetry as tightly crafted as this is, every word, every punctuation, every line break contributes both to the overall meaning as well as to the beauty of the poem’s content and topography. Layout wise, the book would have been better served by isolating the sections instead of running them one after the other without breaks. The cover in purple, green and white with a black & white photo of Duke is gaudy rather than grand. I doubt Duke would have found this combination of typeface, layout and cover attractive.

But regardless of the gaucheness of the package, the redemption is in the message. Let me close this review with one of my favorite sections, part 6.

Dreamy Blues:

a young girl 
is somewhere waiting on 
the boy she loves; she 
has seen him everyday for the last 
five years but today he will not come.

an old man 
is down by a river 
standing at the spot 
where he saw his only son drown.

a woman who never knew her 
mother but knew her 
mother did not lover her 
is somewhere walking the 
streets.

i travel to all these places, 
long to capture that 
which seems to be our shadow 
swells with absurdity 
recalls jobs we can’t have, 
hotels we can’t enter 
restaurants which 
show us doors instead of menus.

ours is a deep dyed emotion; 
marching bands 
ragtimers banjo pickers 
barrelhouse ballers 
dangerous dance halls 
segregated neighborhoods 
too proud to weep 
what they live.

we are that drama. 
we are this unusual arrangement 
that speaks 
for the millions 
that is why 
this song is full of 
our dreams.

heard in 
late hours 
on our radios 
phonographs we love ourselves more 
sleep well at night 
rise from our beds 
to work hard 
and fancy future 
triumphs where 
we are wide awake 
in the middle 
of nightmare

this sound 
will carry us forward 
and speak to the world 
in a language that does 
not lie

just a ditty i wrote down 
one day 
before the show 
while my 
mother prepared supper

and somewhere 
we were living 
this mood…

Gilmore, I love this work, madly.

Related Information

Brian Gilmore web page
http://www.briangilmore.com/

Karibu Books
Prince George’s Plaza
3500 East/West Highway
Hyattsville, MD 20782, USA.  

Tel: 301 559 1140    
Fax: 301 559 5316    
website: www.karibubooks.com

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