PoetryMusic: Jazz Duo & Poetry Performance

 PoetryMusic 

“Where Words and Music Meet”with

Colleen O’Brien – voice / cello

Chris Lee – vibes / percussion

PoetryMusic is a world-class chamber jazz duo dedicated to performing poetry that has been set to music and the poetry is sung.

This multi-media performance includes an accompanying slide presentation with each poem projected on the screen along with photographic images so that the audience can follow the written word with the poem being sung. Following the program, we open the floor up to questions, comments and discussion.

A sample performance may include –

•    Several original compositions set to Japanese and Chinese poems by Li Po, Toshiyuki and others. Four short poems of Emily Dickinson and Rumi’s ‘Where Everything’s Music’

•   Two wonderful settings of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 (My Mistress’ Eyes) and Sonnet 60 (Like As The Waves) by Mark Miller and Sonnet 43 (When Most My Eyes Do Wink ) by Rufus Wainright.

•    American poet Robert Creeley has had many of his poems set to music by jazz bassist Steve Swallow. We perform two of these: Echo and She was Young.

•    The amazing young English composer/arranger Jacob Collier’s setting of “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost.

•    Zen/ Beat poet Gary Snyder provides the inspiration for a voice and percussion improvisation on his poem Wave. Also a beautiful paean to America from Jack Kerouac’s last paragraph of On The Road set to music by composer Peter Sommer.

•   Composer/ Pianist Fred Hersch’s beautiful setting from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass – ‘The Sleepers’.

Other poets include e.e. cummings, Archibald Macleish, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Pablo Neruda, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Bly and Paula Sergi.

Light refreshments will be served. For more information – please contact Melissa at the Ukiah Library: 467-6434 or carrm@co.mendocino.ca.us