Rest in Power, Ken Nordine

The New York Times marks the passing of Ken Nordine, a spoken word poet known for "creating a form of storytelling that he called 'word jazz,'" writes the Times's Richard Sandomir. Nordine's poems and stories were featured on the WBBM program Word Jazz (which is now aired on Sundays at midnight on WBEZ), on commercials, and on records like, Word Jazz (1957) and Colors (1966). These projects "led to collaborations with Fred Astaire, Tom Waits, Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead and other artists," Sandomir explains. Nordine "died on Feb. 16 in Chicago. He was 98. His son Ken Jr. confirmed the death." Picking up from there: 

Mr. Nordine became wealthy doing voice-overs for television and radio commercials. But he found his passion in using his dramatic baritone to riff surreally on colors, time, spiders, bullfighting, outer space and dozens of other subjects. His free-form poems could be cerebral or humorous, absurd or enigmatic, and were heard on the radio and captured on records, one of which earned a Grammy nomination.

“Ken Nordine can pontificate on any small object and make it resonate with the profundity of consciousness and the euphony of a beautiful piece of music,” the critic Neil Strauss wrote in The New York Times in 1996, previewing a performance by Mr. Nordine at the Knitting Factory in Manhattan.

Mr. Nordine spent time in Chicago nightclubs in the 1950s reciting poems by writers like T. S. Eliot and Omar Khayyam, accompanied by jazz musicians. But when he realized that many of the same people kept returning to the clubs, he began to ad-lib new verses.

He felt that jazz was ideal for his stream-of-consciousness poetry.

“I like jazz for the principle of what jazz is: a flight of musical fantasy within structure,” he said in an interview for the book “Incredibly Strange Music, Volume II” (1994). “I’m trying to do the same thing verbally: take off on a theme so you become tangential and transcendent at the same time.”

His first album, “Word Jazz” (1957), included a romantic hipster poem, “My Baby,” which attracted the attention of Bud Yorkin, the producer of the 1959 television special “Another Evening With Fred Astaire.” A finger-snapping Mr. Astaire danced sensuously with Barrie Chase on a nightclub set while Mr. Nordine recited his words offstage and a combo played jazz:

I couldn’t help myself, it was love for sure.

I picked my baby up, danced over to the stage

And I told the leader: “Leader, this is my baby”

He just said, “Crazy!”

My baby gave him a special look like she does

He could see my baby had eyes to swing.

Speaking to the audience, Mr. Astaire declared that Mr. Nordine had “invented a new kind of contemporary beat.”

Read more at the New York Times.