Hot Heat Jazz, by Maria Straw-Cinar

Hot Heat Jazz, by Lito de Silva (Portugal). Contemporary.

Hot Heat Jazz

Call and response notes float over killing fields,
spiritual stories – nuggets of blackgold
boldy hollered across snowy cotton fields,
sound of music hanging in air laying bare
                        a hard day’s nightache

Rising from rags in time into the mix, European clicks
Irish jigs, German waltzes, French quadrilles
New Orleans schmaltz and sass
                            all that jazz
Ragtime!
Flappers chop their hair
Americans throw caution…
swing to new rhythm,
synchronicity glides,
shades of  blue

Gillespie-life fizzy
notes spinning ol’
black magic Dizzy,
and  the dancehall born,
till wartorn cries screech
down time’s elevator shafts,
a man with no notion of rhyme –
rises up speaking guttural,
drowning out music
and the dance halls close,
all the good players
shipped off to die –
them white folk found no one
to make dance hall songs fly,

but the beboppers gathered
listening  to intricate sounds
strain as the moustachioed man
manically barked hate
spewed pain –
notes in the gutter,
yet music tinkles in stars.

Bebop to freedom,
Monk obeys scatting,
free chatting,
scatterbrain natting
Thelonius speeds up the music,
too fast for dance.
From fingers to brain –
Blitzing warpain
Blues fuses with jazz.

Out of smoke-choked bars notes rise, drift across plains
once again, sweat drops drip onto white cotton-
picking fields, melodies drift back, drift  forth; so gentle,
so sweet, clever and  fulsome and deep.
Oh, those hot steamy nights –
                        nights that jazz was born.

Maria Straw-Cinar

Maria Straw-Cinar is a poet, writer and teacher. Her recent projects include a T.V Drama, Wild Women of Paris, about the female artists and writers living in Paris in the 20s. She hopes to continue to develop strong roles for women in her future writing for theatre, film and television. Her debut novel Girl, was short-listed for the Cinnamon Press Novel award in 2010 and is available to purchase online. In 2016  year she published a poetry collection Flamenco with Lulu Press, and her play, Vinegar Alley was long-listed for the Papatango Writing Prize and went on to have a staged reading in London (BAME/The Great Pretenders). She has a poetry website, Poetry and Other Pleasures mstrawcinar.wordpress.com. 

Over the past year she has been involved in a mentoring project with the editor of Cinnamon Press, inspired by the work of artist Lito de Silva to create an ekphrastic poetry collection, A-feto