No Eyes: Lester Young

I kind of trashed Meltzer's "Reading Jazz," so let me make it up here with a big thumbs up for a really fun collection. The poems in No Eyes are accessible and lyrical with a great feel for the music--they spread down the page like tasty sax tootles in a classic Young solo. I especially like how Meltzer balances the beauty of Lester's playing against the tragedy of his life. Snippets of song lyrics, conversation and Young's private slang weave through the poems to give a clever snapshot of the man behind the sax. And Meltzer's love for the music is clear from the downbeat. Big eyes for this one.

David Meltzer's long meditative poem on jazz giant Lester "Prez" Young is a moving (both swinging and poignant) tribute to this unique tenor sax stylist. Based on the last year of Young's life, which he spent mostly in a hotel room in New York City, and on a photograph of the great jazzman printed in the New York Times that shows him sitting on his bed cradling his horn, Meltzer's poem reproduces Prez's jivy speech patterns and diction as a way of exploring the jazz master's music, his attitudes toward his audience, his imitators, his detractors, and his experience with racism in the military that has been blamed for his near mental breakdown and his increasingly reclusive nature. Meltzer also incorporates popular song titles and phrases into his poetic lines in order to delve into the jazzman's psyche, utilizing especially the song "All of Me" as a way of suggesting, for example, that when the police found his lifeless body in his hotel room they confiscated his few possessions but did not take "all" of him because his music lives on. Beautifully designed and printed, with photos of Young and musical motifs at the beginning of Meltzer's beat, bop-like meditations, this is a striking edition and the long poem is fully worthy of Black Sparrow's fine production. Meltzer's poem is one of the most convincing literary treatments of jazz ever conceived and created.