8:00pm - 11:30pm
The Hideout
1354 West Wabansia
ROCKPILE Poetry and Jazz Fest with special guests The Spider Trio, Bob Malone, Art Lange, Dan Godston, Larry Sawyer, Francesco Levato and Ed Roberson at The Hideout
ROCKPILE Poetry and Jazz Festival, a collaborative journey of poetry and music, featuring David Meltzer, poet, musician and essayist, Michael Rothenberg, poet , song writer and editor of Big Bridge Press, along with local artists and musicians will perform on Friday, November 19th at the Hideout in Chicago. The performance at the Hideout will be the sixth stop in an eight city tour.
ROCKPILE, in a spontaneous fusion, joins poetry and music, and is intended to educate and preserve, as well as to create a history of collaboration between musicians and writers. It will help to reinforce the tradition of the troubadour, on and off the road, for all generations.
The tour will continue to New Orleans, Washington DC, New York, Chicago and St. Louis. Interviews and conversations with the local musicians will take place before the performances and become a part of the “on the road ROCKPILE journal” as it grows from city to city and evolves with each performance.
The ROCKPILE journey will be documented online (http://www.bigbridge.org/rockpile/) daily with performance clips, excerpts from the journal, interviews, video and audio files. The tour will conclude in San Francisco, where poets, songwriters and musicians of the Bay Area and beyond will gather in the troubadour tradition to share, through poetry and music, the story of the ROCKPILE journey as a final grand performance.
ROCKPILE, made possible by grants from the Creative Work Fund (www.creativeworkfund.org), the James Irvine Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and is sponsored by the Committee on Poetry, Inc.
The Poets
David Meltzer was raised in Brooklyn during WWII and performed on radio and early TV on the “Horn and Hardart Children’s Hour”. Exiled to L.A at 16, he enrolled in an ongoing academy with artists Wallace Berman and George Herms. He migrated to San Francisco in 1957 and became and important figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and appeared in Donald Allen’s “The New American Poetry” a seminal work of that era. “Beat Thing” a book length, poetic journal, published by La Alameda Press in 2004, won the Josephine Miles PEN Award in 2005. His books, Reading Jazz, Writing Jazz and No Eyes, Lester Young all reflect his deep connection and dedication to music throughout his career. His complete publication history is at http:/meltzerville.com/. As a musician, and poet his recordings include: Serpent Power, Vanguard Records, 1968, reissued on CD in 1996 Poet Song, Vanguard Records, 1969. Green Morning, Capitol Records, 1970.Serpent Power/Poet Song, Italy, 2000, and most recently, David Meltzer: Poetry with Jazz 1958 was issued by Sierra Records. David Meltzer currently co-edits, Shuffle Boil, a magazine devoted to music.
Michael Rothenberg is a poet, songwriter, and editor and publisher of Big Bridge magazine online at www. bigbridge.org. His poetry books include The Paris Journals (Fish Drum Press), Monk Daddy (Blue Press), Unhurried Vision (La Alameda/University of New Mexico Press) and most recently CHOOSE, Selected Poems (Big Bridge Press). He is also editor for the Penguin Poet series, which includes selected works of Phillip Whalen, Joanne Kyger, David Meltzer and Ed Dorn. He has recently completed the Collected Poems of Phillip Whalen for Wesleyan University Press. His songs have appeared in Hollywood Pictures' Shadowhunter and Black Day, Blue Night, and TriStar Pictures' Outside Ozona. Other songs have been recorded on CDs including: The Darkest Part of The Night by Bob Malone, Difficult Woman by Renee Geyer, Global Blues Deficit by Cody Palance, The Woodys by The Woodys, and Schell Game by Johnny Lee Schell. Complete publication history can be found at http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/Rothenberg m/
The Musicians
Dan McNaughton formed Spider Trio in 1997 in New Orleans, in order to perform his jazz compositions which express his love for a wide range of music, from funk to modern classical. The second SPIDER TRIO cd, Presences, was released in 2007. The band is now based in Chicago, and the most current lineup of an ever-changing combo consists of Dan McNaughton, the group leader, composer and basssit, Bryan Pardo on reeds, and Tim Keenan on drums.
Los Angeles based Bob Malone (piano) plays over 100 shows a year all over the world, and he has opened for and/or played with Rickie Lee Jones, The Neville Brothers, Rev. Al Green, Boz Scaggs, Vonda Shepard, Arlo Guthrie, and many others. He has recorded eight records including: The Darkest Part of the Night (1996), Bob Malone (1998), Malone Alone (2003), and Born Too Late (2006). His music has been featured on Car Talk, and TV shows Dr. Phil, The Rachel Ray Show, Jag, and All My Children. His latest CD, is “Ain’t What You Know” (2008). Bob is a three-time recipient of the ASCAP Plus Award for independent musicians.
Featured guest poets include:
Art Lange’s work has been published in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and the Village Voice, New American Writing and the Partisan Review, and he has written program notes for over 200 jazz and classical recordings. He is the author of five books of poetry, including Needles at Midnight (Z Press) and The Monk Poems (Frontward Books). Lange was editor of Down Beat magazine from 1984-88 and currently he teaches at Columbia College, Chicago.
Dan Godston teaches poetry and other art forms to young people and adults in the Chicago area. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Chase Park, Versal, 580 Split, Kyoto Journal, California Quarterly, after hours, Edgz, Kyunghyang Shinmun, and other publications, while his articles have appeared in Teaching Artist Journal, among other publications. Godston also co-curates the interdisciplinary arts series, Chicago Calling.
Larry Sawyer curates the Myopic Books Poetry Series in Wicker Park, Chicago. His chapbook Tyrannosaurus Ant (mother's milk press) was recently included in the Yale Collection of American Literature. Larry also edits milkmag.org (since 1998). His publications include the Chicago Tribune, Jacket, The Prague Literary Review, the Exquisite Corpse, and elsewhere.
Poet, translator, and new media artist Francesco Levato is the executive director of The Poetry Center of Chicago and the author of Marginal State (Fractal Edge Press, 2006) and is a contributor to Witness: Anthology of Poetry (Serengeti Press, 2004). His poetry-based video artwork has been exhibited in galleries and featured at film festivals in Berlin, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere.
Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Ed Roberson is the author of City Eclogue (2006), Atmosphere Conditions (1999), and Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In (1995), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Roberson’s honors include the Lila Wallace Writers’ Award and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Award. His work has been included in Best American Poetry. Roberson lives in Chicago, where he has taught at the University of Chicago, Columbia College and Northwestern University.
Rockpile Blog:
http://www.bigbridge.org/rockpile/?cat=3
