February 2024
Bio Note: The music of this era has been on my mind more or less constantly for the last year or so, and it has now borne fruit, as my book, Jazz with a Beat, has just been published by SUNY Press. You can find it on Amazon or order it from your friendly indie bookstore.
She Said
She said jazz is how life should be flexible rhythm but you count it off beyond that improvisation melody left behind now it’s your call you know where the roots are you don’t know where it’s taking you she herself was Chet Baker Gerry Mulligan touching where you didn’t know you tingled or she was Thelonious Monk threading her way along narrow pathways with broad steps on either side are Arizona cactus long spined blooming endangered
Originally published in my book, Take Five: Poems in 5/4 Time, Fitzgerald Press. CT
New York, 1950s
A clutch of teenagers in a
school playground in the
Bronx, they had a
groove going, catchy
and hypnotic, and more
pulled in by the rhythm, and
some singing harmony, and then
there were maybe a hundred,
keeping that groove going.
It was the time.
All over Harlem,
up in the Bronx,
four or five teens on
street corners, in the stairwells
of tenements, for the echo,
paying lunch money for 78
RPM records, then 45s,
to hear the voices of Sonny
Til and the Orioles, Rudy
West and the Five Keys,
Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters.
And voices that could have been theirs
On WOV from Jocko,
Your Ace from Outer Space,
back on the scene in my
flying machine, saying Ooh
poppa doo, and how do you
do? And WWRL from Dr. Jive,
and that white guy, Alan Freed, who played
their music and white kids listened.
Under the streetlights,
girls would listen, and guys from other blocks
with their own sound, and they’d
have all the parts worked out, harmonies
and counterpoint, the language of school
come alive on the street. Years
later, they called it doo wop, but then
each group, each block, had its own syllables,
Hey, ktum-a, ktum-a, ktum-a, ktum-a,
Pa-pa, diddlit, Sh-boom, Ha-ba
boom-a-bada-bada-dada,
All you guys get to say the good parts, all I
get is He go a rang tang ding dong,
rankety shang, and if your lead was
good enough, and your bass was good enough,
and your harmonies clicked, maybe someone
like Richard Barrett of the Valentines
would hear you, and bring you
downtown, and you’d be over
Jocko, or at the Apollo, or Alan Freed’s
show at the Brooklyn
Paramount, but if you were good enough
you could sing your way across Harlem,
through any gang’s turf,
and one teenager in the Bronx
took that groove downtown, and
made a record,
“Runaround Sue,” and took it back up
to Belmont Avenue, and played it for
his friends, who said
“It was better in the schoolyard.”
The Real Shit
In the balcony
at the Apollo,
big Black mama
in the seat
beside me,
both there to hear
Frankie Lymon
Why do fools
fall
in love, then
Goody
goody for him,
pause, and the crowd
lifted him with
raucous cheers, Goody
goody for me, long
dramatic pause
and from that balcony,
next to me,
"Do it, Frankie!"
and he stopped,
looked up at her,
soft brown eyes,
cheeks still smooth,
"I'll do my best, baby."
Not long after
dead of an overdose
in his grandmother’s bathroom,
and for years
pushers in Harlem would sell it,
"This is the real shit, man,
the stuff that killed the Lymon kid."
©2024 Tad Richards
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