The Ben Allison Band with Robert Pinsky
8 p.m. June 27 in Morse Recital Hall, Yale. Part of the Music at Dusk series of the 2012 International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
I balked at writing about the Robert Pinsky/Ben Allison concert here; this is my theater blog, and my opinions of the music events at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas have been parceled out to some of my other outlets, such as ct.com and Daily Nutmeg.
But there was of course a special literary performance heft to this pairing of a popular poet and a precocious jazz musician, which made me hope I could find a way to cover it in a theater mode.
Then Pinsky whipped out a poem by someone of than himself. “I will read a poem to you as if it’s a poetry reading at a university,” he said. Then, he announced, he would read it again and the band would jam on it.
It was Ben Jonson’s immortal “His Excuse for Loving”:
Let it not your wonder move,
Less your laughter, that I love.
Though I now write fifty years,
I have had, and have, my peers.
Poets, though divine, are men;
Some have loved as old again.
And it is not always face,
Clothes, or fortune gives the grace,
Or the feature, or the youth;
But the language and the truth,
With the ardor and the passion,
Gives the lover weight and fashion
If you then would hear the story
First, prepare you to be sorry
That you never knew till now
Either whom to love or how;
But be glad as soon with me
When you hear that this is she
Of whose beauty it was sung,
She shall make the old man young,
Keep the middle age at stay,
And let nothing hide decay,
Till she be the reason why
All the world for love may die.
“Nobody wrote ear candy better than Jonson,” Pinsky opined, emphasizing the poem’s conversational quality. Which is, of course, a rather obvious thing to say about a playwright, not to mention one from an age where poetry and plays were always performed and rarely read. But many of the Pinsky fans filling the Morse Recital Hall auditorium beamed as if he’d imparted some extraordinary insight.
He ventured into Elizabethan territory again later in the concert with this joke: “Shakespeare was almost certainly homosexual. Or heterosexual or bisexual.”
Pinsky was caught in a moment, and can perhaps be excused. He was caught in many of them, clearly loving the limelight.He lives to make people appreciate poetry, and this was a splendid opportunity. Many poets would probably get flustered when they realized how much time they’d have to stand on stage doing nothing while the band played on. Not Pinsky—he’d done shows with the Ben Allison Band before, enjoyed “winging it” with little rehearsal, and was happy to tap his toes and grin. Allison’s not a particularly effusive frontman, conducting his mates with twitches and glances (a broad grin when he wants a good groove to continue, a fevered brow when he’s ready for a section to switch).
The instrumentation of Ben Allison’s band was himself on stand-up bass, his longtime guitarist collaborator Steve Cardenas, the band’s new drummer Rogerio Boccato and a guy who’s been doing a lot of shows with them lately, rock-savvy guitarist/banjoist Brandon Seabrook. It was Seabrook who stole the show, adding experimental, improvisational flourishes that the refined Pinsky, and even the cool Allison, were incapable of.
Robert Pinsky’s no Allen Ginsberg, nor does he want to be. But with his black shirt and swinging attitude and jazz compadres, he begged comparison. It was Brandon Seabrook, with his unlikely choice of banjo as a modern jazz axe, his raw strums and plucks and wild-eyed demeanor, that brought some real risk and fun to this otherwise precious mixture. He punked out the proceeding with power chords (on rhythm guitar, countering the smooth lines of Cardenas), bringing the punctuation to the Pinsky poetry.