The creative cross-talk between poetry and jazz extends back decades, and yet it’s still a kind of wide-open frontier, awaiting standards.
Poet Kamau Daaood’s own claim to the fragile bridge between jazz and words dates back to the ’60s, when he served as a “word musician” in pianist Horace Tapscott’s influential Pan African People’s Arkestra, but Daaood’s fine new project, Liemert Park, on the MAMA Foundation label, is his official debut under his own name: it’s good news for the realm of spoken word, jazz division.
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