NPR Applauds Philip Levine & Benjamin Boone's Jazz Collaboration

Former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winner Philip Levine started to collaborate with saxophonist Benjamin Boone when he was 84 years old (just three years before his death from pancreatic cancer in 2015) on the album The Poetry of Jazz, which was released just last week. At NPR, Tom Vitale begins, "Poet Philip Levine discovered jazz on the radio when he was a teenager." From there: 

"Like any young person, I wanted to find an art form that the older people in my family would reject, naturally you know," he said to me in a 2004 interview. "I had found T.S. Eliot in poetry: 'God, what kind of garbage is this?' You know. And I heard jazz — rhythmic, driving, sometimes very lyric — and it was very exciting."

Levine would be awarded a Pulitzer Prize and two National Book Awards for his poetry, and he remained a jazz fan the rest of his life. In 2012, when he was the U.S. Poet Laureate and teaching at California State University, Fresno, Levine read his poetry accompanied by a band led by a fellow faculty member. That was saxophonist Benjamin Boone.

"And it was absolute magic," Boone says. "It was like he was a member of the band. It was like he knew exactly what to do. Like a jazz musician."

On and off over the next three years, Levine and Boone went into a studio to record. Three years after Levine's death, the sessions have finally been released as The Poetry Of Jazz.

The first track is a poem about adolescence called "Gin." Boone just composed a head, or opening melody, and let the band freely improvise the rest, as the poet read along with them in the studio.

"What I love about 'Gin' is that in those free areas, you'll hear the musicians commenting on the lines of Philip's poetry," Boone says. "But it's not a surface-level commentary. It gets the inner core of what he's trying to express about awkwardness, but compassion, and with humor."

Learn more at NPR.