ISBN13: 978-0-9796509-1-8; $18.95

by Philip S. Bryant

with music by Carolyn Wilkins

In his stunning new book of poems and prose, Stompin’ at The Grand Terrace: A Jazz Memoir in Verse, award-winning Minnesota writer Philip Bryant revisits his boyhood home on Chicago’s South Side to capture the sights and sounds of post-war America as seen and heard through the eyes and ears of two old friends whose lives—and loves—spin joyously around jazz.

Meet Bryant’s father, James, and his longtime accomplice Preston: hard-working blue-collar steelworkers who spend their Saturday afternoons listening to—and arguing about—the world of music blown high and wide by a cavalcade of America’s jazz upstarts and stars. In this tribute to family and art as told by Bryant, whose taut, colorful poems lyrically trace his own initiation into this soulful place, Stompin’ at The Grand Terrace honors the abiding affection James and Preston have for their pastime and each other, despite their differences in background, outlook, and taste.

Digging deep into the grooves of their monumental record collections, Bryant chronicles the rise and evolution of jazz from its roots in gospel and blues through big band and bebop to the outermost limits of avant-garde gone wild. At the same time, he conjures in stark yet sublime prose the lives of James, Preston, and their neighbors along the hard edges of the South Side in the 1950s and ’60s, when African Americans tasted and endured the bitter brew of segregation, discrimination, and despair amid civil upheaval. Through the magic of his poems, Bryant reveals how music forges friendships, communities, and dreams, and how jazz—America’s great original art form—holds the power of possibility to transcend the widest of racial, social, and cultural gaps. Like the music it so wonderfully celebrates, Stompin’ at The Grand Terrace dances, whirls, arcs, and soars across its pages to lift the reader to places where, as John Coltrane played for James and Preston and countless other listeners over the ages, there is no greater love.

Stompin’ includes a bonus CD featuring more than a dozen original compositions (inspired by Bryant’s poems) by renowned jazz pianist Carolyn Wilkins, professor of ensembles at Berklee College of Music in Boston. As longtime Chicago friends themselves, Phil and Carolyn perform A Stompin’ Suite: he reads, she plays—a cross-country collaboration over time and space.

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A Conversation With Phil Bryant

Minnesota author Philip Bryant and Blueroad Press editor John Gaterud recently talked about Phil’s new book, Stompin’ at The Grand Terrace: A Jazz Memoir in Verse, which is just off the press and now available.

JG: What inspired the poems of Stompin’?

PB: The poems in Part 1, “Stompin’ at the Grand Terrace,” were a direct extension of the poem “Stella By Starlight” in my 1998 book, Sermon on a Perfect Spring Day (New Rivers Press). It appears near the end of the book, and as I recall was one of the last poems I’d written for that project. It’s the first poem where Preston and my father appear. At the time, I thought it was a one-shot deal, and didn’t think much more about it—until later, when I was on sabbatical [at Gustavus Adolphus College]. I remember sitting upstairs in our campus library in the quietest, most secluded corner I could find, trying to figure out what I was going to actually write during this leave, when suddenly these poems started coming, as if I were channeling them from somewhere. I finished a couple—“The Shape of Jazz to Come,” I think, and a few others—when I realized I wasn’t quite done with Preston and my father. That was about sixteen years ago, if you can believe it.

JG: Where did your father, James, and his friend Preston meet?

PB: Preston (the literal Preston) owned a Chicago record store called Blues and The Abstract Truth, a few blocks from where we lived. My friends and I used to hang out there after school, listening to the sounds he’d have playing all the time. He played a lot of jazz, but lots of rock, too. When paying customers would come in, Preston would switch to straight R&B because that’s what they were interested in and, more importantly, buy—because he was running a business! (smile) But I remember my father going in one day after work and checking out Preston’s extensive stock of jazz records. He bought a whole armload that day, and they really hit it off with each other, right away, and became fast friends after that.

JG: You grew up on the South Side in the 1950s and ’60s. What are some of your memories of your boyhood there, including school, music, and neighborhood life?

PB: It’s a swirl of things, now that I’m older. In my earliest childhood, things were pretty stable, almost sedate. People in the neighborhood where I lived were, for the most part, working people who worked very hard—people who came home and worked on their houses and yards that they worked long and hard to pay for. They went to church every Sunday—mandatory in those days, it seemed—and raised their kids to educate themselves enough so they wouldn’t have to follow their parents into the factories and steel plants where they went every day in order to make a living. Later, toward the late ’60s, that old order started breaking down fast. There were riots and civil unrest, the same as what was going on in the rest of the country at the time. But there was also plenty of music, from blues to jazz to gospel. We lived only a few blocks away from the famous South Side jazz club The Apartment. Once, I remember my father woke me up one night around 2:30. I was home from college, and he said I absolutely had to catch the last set of the night by the great tenor sax player Sonny Stitt, who he said was in “rare form.” It was a once-in-a lifetime-experience, my dad argued as he literally dragged me from bed. So we went, and he was right—it was. But it’s still like a dream to me, and I can’t totally say now that it wasn’t.

JG: Stompin’ is about many things, but the history of jazz—and its place in American cultural life—is among prominent themes. What draws you to jazz? And who are some of your favorite performers?

PB: It’s the music I grew up with. I loved it, for sure, even though I considered it to be “my father’s music,” and in some ways still do. That’s as opposed to what I consider to be my music, which is Jimi Hendrix. So maybe I’m just designating it according to a particular time or period in history, and not so much to temperament or sensibility. When I listen to the music, it helps me to decipher somewhat my multi-layered and complex background. I like all of the jazz artists mentioned in the book. They’re all great and legendary, as far as I’m concerned.

JG: In the book, James and Preston often argue about “the new thing”—what might be called avant-garde. James is open to change and evolution, but Preston, ever the “traditionalist,” resists. Can you comment on how the poems explore some of these differences and approaches?

PB: I got this structure of progressive vs. traditional from Langston Hughes and what he did with his brilliant Jesse B. Simple column. Preston’s character in the poems represents that early part of my childhood. This is the period before the upheavals of the late 1960s. Preston was a firm believer in the folk traditions of his culture. He understood the great achievements made by musicians during the Golden Era of jazz. He also believed that what they accomplished in creating this great art form was pretty much as close as human beings will get to perfection. Thus he was less inclined to accept or believe that there could possibly be any later music approaching such an elevated state of the sublime. My father, on the other hand, was much more willing to listen to what musicians were creating or playing in the present. He was a true progressive who appreciated what John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman were trying to do in order to further the music. As you can read in some of the poems, Preston was less convinced of the “advancements” made by those musicians than my dad was.

JG: Part 2 of the book is about your Aunt Janey. Who is/was she, and how did the Janey poems come about?

PB: As with Preston and my dad, Janey also emerged from the first book, Sermon on a Perfect Spring Day. And like them, I consider her a force of nature. She’s a font from which to draw, like the music and the culture. She embodies certain essentials about the culture I come from, which I hope are expressed through her in the poems where she appears.

JG: What poets and writers have influenced you?

PB: God, there are so many! Where do I start? I’ll mention just a handful with the understanding that there are many, many more. I think the first real poetry I heard early on was Shakespeare. My mother would read the plays aloud to my sister and me. In my misspent youth, it was William Blake and the English Romantics. Then there were the early modernists—T. S. Elliot, Pound, Hart Crane, and, most importantly when I began to mature somewhat as a writer, William Carlos Williams. Out of the bunch I mentioned, probably Blake and Williams were the most important to me in the beginning. But this is just for starters. I must also mention Jean Toomer, whose book Cane had a deep and profound effect on me, as you can see in Stompin’, with its mix of prose and poetry.

JG: Another thread weaving through the book touches on race relations in America and, in particular, in Chicago. What are some of the intersections between and among race, music, history, culture, and modern life that you wanted to explore?

PB: Yes, it’s there. I didn’t really want to be explicit about the subject or theme of race. I wanted it to be woven into the texture and fabric of the work itself—not because I wanted it there for any reason of my own, but because it belongs there of its own accord, like the buildings, streets, sights, and sounds of the South Side. Make of it what you will. I trust the reader will think more about this still-bedeviling issue and core feature of American life and history.

JG: Other themes in Stompin’ include the power of family and community and, in some wonderfully sweet pieces, the lure of love. Any thoughts?

PB: I guess all of these poems come from those places. Which makes me a regionalist writer, right?! (smile) A regionalist who no longer lives in the region! Ha! But those people and places and history stay with you, I believe—as long as you live. Even if you move far north to live among the Swedish Lutherans, as I chose to do, those folks from the South Side come right along with you.

JG: Your longtime childhood friend, jazz pianist Carolyn Wilkins, collaborated with you on producing the accompanying CD for Stompin’. What do you remember about your Chicago days together, and how did this new project unfold?

PB: It’s crazy, but when we were twelve or thirteen years old and I was getting into writing and she was training to become the great musician she is, we vowed to each other that we’d do a poetry/music collaboration some day—and lo and behold, after all these many years, we have. Outside of my immediate family, Carolyn was one of the first people I shared my poetry with. I remember we’d sit up all afternoon in my living room playing my dad’s jazz records. I think I was the first one to tell her that Coltrane had passed away the summer he died. I think she was away at some summer camp and didn’t know about it.

JG: The final section of the book also features a series of poems “closer to home,” which is Southern Minnesota, where you’ve taught English for many years at Gustavus. How has this “a sense of place” influenced your work?

PB: I graduated from Gustavus, so have connections not only as a teacher but as a student as well. I consider St. Peter to be the northern-most suburb of Chicago, since I (a transplanted Southsider) live here. My next book (the “Minnesota Book”) deals exclusively with St. Peter, Minnesota, and this place where I’ve lived and called home for more than twenty years now.

JG: Miles Davis makes several appearances in your book. And, of course, so does Lester Young—Prez. In your estimation, where do they stand in the pantheon of jazz greats?

PB: Miles is one of the most important figures in jazz of the last sixty years. He plays a major defining role in three important periods: the Bebop Era of the mid- to late 1940s; the Post-Bop Era, from 1950 to 1961; and the Avant-Garde Era of the mid- to late ’60s. I think Miles almost single-handedly created what’s now called fusion or jazz-rock with his late masterpiece, In a Silent Way. And, of course, Lester Young—what can you say? No Lester, no anything, just about.

JG: What would have James and Preston thought of Barack Obama’s election as president?

PB: They would have loved it, of course! But then I imagine they would always secretly acknowledge only one real President in their lives—and that would be Lester Young, Prez himself! Who else?

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Read an interview with Phil’s collaborator Carolyn Wilkins here.