Conversations with poet Nathaniel Mackey and musician Hafez Modirzadeh
 MUSIC AND LYRICS Musician Hafez Modirzadeh (left) and poet Nathaniel Mackey collaborate at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center. Nathaniel Mackey uses words as music and Hafez Modirzadeh sculpts sound into ideas. The two have collaborated on a poetry/jazz CD titled Strick and will be performing at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center on Thursday, Oct. 11. Mackey, whose latest book of poetry, “Splay Anthem,” won the National Book Award for 2006 and he’s currently completing the fourth volume in a series of novels called “From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate.” He is also a UC Santa Cruz professor and long-time radio host of KUSP’s Tanganyika Strut. Modirzadeh is a multi-instrumentalist, music theorist and teacher of improvisation with an Iranian cultural heritage. His CD’s include In Chromodal Discourse and Bemsha Alegria. GT spoke with the two recently about the synergistic relationship between jazz and poetry. NATHANIEL, YOU HAVE SAID THAT YOU ARE SURPRISED THAT YOU DIDN’T TAKE UP A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT AS A YOUNG PERSON. IT SEEMS THAT YOU APPROACHED WORDS MUSICALLY AS AN ALTERNATIVE. Nathaniel Mackey: I was always very attracted to music as a kid. I don’t know why I didn’t take up an instrument or why I wasn’t pointed in that direction. I was also very attracted to writing and language early on. I was writing fiction, stories and little poems. Some of the writers that I read talked about the connection of words to music. Louis Zukofsky, one of the modernist American poets, talked about poetry as a function whose lower limit is speech and upper limit is song. Other poets that affected me the most were the ones that had a close tie to music: Amiri Baraka and Robert Duncan, especially. YOU HAVE WRITTEN THAT MULTIPLE WORDS AND MEANINGS CAN BE HEARD AND UNDERSTOOD WITHIN EVERY WORD. STRICK IS THE TITLE OF YOUR POETRY CD. TELL ME ABOUT THAT WORD. NM: Most words have more than one meaning. To take a musical approach to the word is to regard the word as a musical chord. And different meanings are stacked up on another. A word like ‘strick’ refers to a kind of rope-like hemp substance but one can hear overtones and undertones of other words within that word. The word ‘strict’ can be heard in it and the words ‘struck’ or ‘strike.’ To bring those neighboring meanings and tones, so to speak, into play is to proceed with a musical sense of the word. HAFEZ, THIS SEEMS SIMILAR TO YOUR VIEW OF MUSIC AND HOW EACH FUNDAMENTAL TONE THERE REVERBERATES A SERIES OF OTHER TONES. Hafez Modirzadeh: The overtone series is the hinge that we all share across cultures, like light and rainbows. These are things that nobody owns and everybody shares. You could say that it is an acoustical property of nature that within each fundamental tone there are partials of other tones. Nathaniel’s work deals with bits of ancestral memory in the same way. Musically I’ve found that there is something like divine sequences across different cultural sound systems. And if you try not to complete the sequence, if you leave it open, then there is room for it to attach itself to other resonances from other systems. IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU APPRECIATE INCOMPLETENESS AND OPENNESS AS AN OPPORTUNITY WITH POTENTIAL. HM: Yeah. There’s something of the eternal if you leave the idea open. If you build concepts and then can sacrifice them, you can be in this disintegrative vastness. You are in the process of becoming. And in the process of becoming you find yourself becoming another, something other than just your self. A LOT OF THE VIOLENCE ON THIS PLANET IS ROOTED IN PEOPLE’S ATTACHMENT TO IDEAS. IT SEEMS TO ME THAT YOUR NOTION OF SACRIFICING CONCEPTS COMES FROM AN IMPULSE TOWARD COMPASSION. HM: When people try to close the idea and complete it, then they own it, name it and create an ideology to control others with. Then you’re talking about certain kinds of fundamentalism. This is what you see happen in politics. I’m sorry for the present state of things but ultimately there may be something optimistic on the other side. Also, we just can’t be sitting ducks. I think for the time being our business is to hold one another’s hands and take care of one another. Because when the rollercoaster is coming down, that’s what people do; they hold onto one another. That is an instinct that we should be working on right now. And it will take our minds off of hurting each other, too. NATHANIEL, I HAVE THE SENSE THAT THE SECTION IN “SPLAY ANTHEM” CALLED ‘NUB’ IS POINTING TO THE UNITED STATES IN PARTICULAR AS BEING A POINT OF ORIGIN OF DOMINATION CULTURE AND VIOLENCE TODAY. YOU HAVE DESCRIBED POETRY AS AN ALTERNATE GOVERNMENT. TELL ME HOW WRITING ADDRESSES THE VIOLENCE OF U.S. MILITARISM. NM: It is feeling the shock waves and reverberations of the violence. The word is a vessel that vibrates with all of those concatenations that are out there. In some ways it’s an automatic response in that it registers what’s out there. It speaks of it and speaks to it and speaks about it. Certainly ‘Nub’ points to the level of violence that we’ve seen escalate in recent years and the kind of pre-emptive stance that we’ve seen the U.S. government take in the world. There is talk now of a strike on Iran, even with the debacle in Iraq being exposed for what it is. It just seemed to me that the possibilities of being human, of being a nation that considers itself enlightened and something of a light-bearer for the world, had really been very radically betrayed and diminished. Hence ‘Nub’ has to do with that sense of something that’s so much less than what it promised to be. TELL ME YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE CONNECTION BETWEEN MUSIC AND SPIRIT. NM: Music has played a very central role in most of the sacred traditions all over the world and through the ages. There is a union of spirit and matter, of body and soul in what have been called the ‘danced religions’ of the world, especially in African religions where music and dance are central to the religious experience. That’s a large part of what I was exposed to in growing up as a child in an African-American Baptist Church where people would go into states of trance. It’s called ‘getting happy.’ BOTH OF YOU HAVE WRITTEN ABOUT RELIEVING THE BURDEN OF YOUR SELF FROM CREATIVITY. HOW DOES RELAXING THE SENSE OF SELF RELATE TO MUSIC AND WRITING AND TO RELIEVING SUFFERING? NM: There’s a long tradition in poetry of inspiration as really being inhabited by some other spirit. All of the arts have this in one form or another. It’s still alive, probably in its strongest forms, in various musical traditions because music is in so many ways so other to our normal discourse. But it’s there in poetry as well. I think it’s an opening up to some kind of sense of a species-wide experience, which includes vulnerabilities of various sorts. And it’s not that one necessarily gets away from suffering but that one inhabits suffering as something other than a personal, individual ordeal. That’s the beginning of compassion. It’s when one sees that one’s suffering is not just one’s own suffering, but that there’s something universal about what we go through. Hear Nathaniel Mackey and Hafez Modirzadeh at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 11. Tickets are $8/adv., $11/door. For more information, visit kuumbwajazz.org .
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