In Review
Edited by liz gonzález
 The
Language of Saxophones: Selected Poems
By Kamau Daáood
City Lights Publishers, 2005
Kamau Daáood,
performance poet and community arts activist, is the Artistic Director
of L.A.’s World Stage Performance Gallery. His work can be heard on his
award-winning CD Leimert Park.
Reviewed by ariel robello
When Adolphe Sax designed the Saxophone,
his hope was to create an instrument that had the flexibility of string
instruments, the power of brass instruments, and the tonal variety of
woodwinds. He was successful, but it wouldn’t be until the instrument,
shunned by orchestras, found its way into the grateful hands of jazz
musicians that the true potential of the instrument would be reached.
Enter Kamau Daáood, a native Angelino raised in an urban wellspring of
raw and bitter notes, of hard knocks and paralyzed beauty trapped in the
concrete facades of modern living. It is not easy to be a leader in
this place, even less so to be an arts activist. But easy is a synonym
for lazy and there is nothing lazy about Jazz, about art, or about this
particular “word musician,” as Daáood became known while he performed
with the Pan African People’s Arkestra.
Like the saxophone, the poems in
Daáood’s The Language of Saxophones heave and bite, dance and
flit, sway and slide as the notes of the sax would in the hands of
Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker. Much like James Baldwin achieves in the jazz
tale Sonny’s Blues, Daáood does not write about jazz, his
poems are jazz, born as he pulls his words from inside the drum,
from the pads of the dancers feet, from between the reeds, from under
the keys, from the pull of the strings, from inside the trumpet players
cheeks. The rhythms of his lines blow with the same deluge of
determined hot air, frustration, sensual spit, erratic pestilence and
desperate hope that is evoked by the crescendos of a jazz song.
silken gut songs
bubbling from the diaphragm
communities of consciousness
world music
soothsayer scatting landscapes
wailing hidden places
circles bust
listening hard for origins lullabies
celestial solos
sailing galactic wailing
smoke-a-rooney
bebop fingerpop from the top
anti mental slavery choir
avant-garde be on guard
to extinguish the self
into the golden cinders of the sun
in an air of smiles
hit this heart with a sledgehammer
it will not be moved
—from “Liberator of the Spirit”
Daáood practices the form referred to as
“freed verse”—lines that rattle like tin cups on jail bars, that unnerve
like sirens at dawn, language that has caught the Holy Ghost and is left
screaming in the ordered rows of pews. There are no capital letters,
colons, and periods to guide readers, as they are not needed. As a true
orator, Daáood’s freed verse assures its readers a liberating experience
guided by a voice so permeating that even in print it echoes. At times
his lines take strides as long as landing strips: “my invisible turban
is an angelic saxophone solo.” And at times they fire as short and
abrupt as a DJ's scratch: “bust the rat’s eardrum.”
In the poem “Army of Healers” the
speaker tells of a boy who finds salvation in the hot winds blowing
through the saxophone:
arthur learned
to finger the saxophone
by picking cotton with bloody fingers at the age
of five
he moistens his reeds with dreams he collected
as he sang spirituals by his grandmother’s knees
when he plays his soul spills out from the bell
of his horn
sometimes he vomits flowers sometimes barbwire
it depends on what his heart had to stomach
the night before
Daáood has dedicated his life and craft
to draft members for this “army” with the hope that the creative process
he lives and breathes can help heal the wounds of the community he
loves. Many poets are seen as fatalist with poems that are bound by
what life has taken from them, but Daáood’s words embrace the world as
it is and the people who are trying to navigate its obstacles.
And they do enlist every night of the
week at the small storefront Mecca in Leimert Park known to all as The
World Stage. Since 1989 when Daáood and legendary drummer Billy Higgins
founded “The Stage,” people from all walks of life, representing
generations of healers and generations of wounds, with poem or Djembe in
hand have come to testify, to surrender their burdens and their
blessings unto the mic, to get lost in the music, to be revived.
“Leimert Park” captures the life and sounds in and outside of “The
Stage”:
the sidewalk is
hard mud cloth
massaging the souls of my feet
i do West African dance steps
reflecting the sun off my Stacey Adams shoes
i stand on the
o.g. corner
tell old school stories with a bebop tongue
to the hip hop future
i see new rainbows in their eyes
as we stand in puddles of melted chains
Angelino or not, Jazz aficionado or hip
hop, politically left or politically correct, we should all be grateful
to Kamau Daáood for his unwavering faith in humanity, for his commitment
to his craft and for his quiet moonsong that serves as both balm and
catnip for the wounded army of healers working their way through this
world as cabbies and waiters. Daáood wrote this book for the people,
not for the critics, down to its pocket size; it is humble and it is
landmark, and we, we are so blessed.
ariel robello
is the author of My Sweet Unconditional (Tia Chucha Press). She
is a former PEN West Emerging Voices Fellow and the founder of Full Moon
Phases—a multi-ethnic, multi-generational women’s poetry workshop.
Currently, she is working on her MFA at Antioch University.
In Review
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