Paul Austerlitz and Michael S. Harper

Double Take: Jazz-Poetry Conversations

You are listening to two excerpts from the recently released CD Double Take:  Jazz-Poetry Conversations, an innovative blend of words and music from Yaddo composer (and bass clarinetist) Paul Austerlitz and Yaddo poet Michael S. Harper.

The two artists have developed an original style of highlighting the musicality of Mr. Harper’s poetry and Mr. Austerlitz’s improvisatory compositions, which comment on the spoken word. The CD is a “Double Take” in the sense that it presents two live performances of the same material whose variegated cadences illustrate the collaborative nature of jazz/poetry conversation. Both men teach at Brown University, where the live performances for Double Take:  Jazz-Poetry Conversations  (Innova) were recorded.

Mr. Austerlitz, who recently completed his first Yaddo residency, composes for the bass clarinet, blending Caribbean influences with free forms of jazz. He teaches jazz and world music at Brown. Mr. Harper is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and has been honored with the Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America, the Black Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and the Robert Hayden Poetry Award, among others. He has been a guest artist at Yaddo several times, beginning in 1975, and is a Director of The Corporation of Yaddo. He is a professor of English at Brown.