Yusef Komunyakaa's "Testimony" and the Humanity of Charlie Parker

If Charlie Parker could read the thousands of poems written in his honor, would he be delighted enough by the sheer volume to overlook the weakness of the verse itself? Perhaps. He was known, after all, for his generous praise, and certainly one cannot fault the inspiration for these poems, Parker being one of the most important artists of the twentieth (or any) century. As most people know, he spearheaded the modern jazz movement in the forties, actively changing the language of music in terms of harmonic structure, musical cadence, melodic lines, and velocity. (Parker's well-known involvement with narcotics made him all the more popular; he represented the ultimate in hipster mystique: frantic genius, coupled with romanticized overindulgence.) When he died in 1955 at the age of thirty-four, poets across the country tried to express the depth of their loss, gratitude, and awe. Scrawled napkins in coffeehouses, academic journal publications, spray-painted slogans on cement walls—tributes to Bird inundated the American landscape. But how many of these poems from the fifties to the present deserve a lengthy discussion? Sadly, very few.

I do not mean to dismiss some exceptional pieces by writers such as Bob Kaufman, Ted Joans, Owen Dodson, Larry Neal, Jack Spicer, Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Michael Harper, and, more recently, Christopher Gilbert, Joy Harjo, Lynda Hull, Paul Zimmer, Betsy Sholl, Dionisio D. Martínez, and others. This is a sincere qualification; over the last fifty years, a number of fine writers have produced excellent Bird poems. Still, the vast majority of Parker homages rely on clichés, most obviously "Bird lives!" but also "Blow, Bird, blow!" as well as a host of dreadful ornithological metaphors. Humbled by Parker's mythic legacy, poets tended to praise him with embarrassingly hagiographic detail, equating him to Christ, Buddha, and other gods and saints. In verse, he was always Bird, but rarely Charles.

Which is why we should be all the more grateful for Yusef Komunyakaa's "Testimony," a fourteen-page libretto that explores the life and legacy of Charlie Parker. The longest jazz-related poem of Komunyakaa's career, "Testimony" achieves what so many other poems do not: it celebrates Parker's humanity, and, in doing so, it does not shy from the complexity of his music or personality. The poem encounters Parker at various stages of the alto saxophonist's life and presents a variety of voices that broaden our perspectives on the man and his music. Komunyakaa testifies to genius but never at the expense of human truths, nor does he allow biography to eclipse his own artistry: stanza by stanza, section after section, he fuses language and music with astonishing success.

Komunyakaa wrote "Testimony" on commission for ABC radio in Australia. The poem first appeared in Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature, accompanied by an interview that focused on the work.¹ Later, "Testimony" became a centerpiece for his collection Thieves of Paradise.² A few years later, in January 2002, two dozen musicians and singers performed the libretto at Sydney's Opera House. Wildly enthusiastic reviews described the performance as a visual and aural extravaganza, and reading the poem on the page cannot quite compete with a multitiered stage and gigantic screens with bright slide shows of Charlie Parker, nor does the reader experience the immediacy of hearing an alto saxophone. Yet on the page, we experience a more intimate relationship—at least in terms of the narrative—between Charlie Parker and Komunyakaa's complex exploration of history and sound. "I think with Bird's alto," Komunyakaa said in the Brilliant Corners interview,

there's a great lyricism, almost a tonal narrative. I'm also interested in the fact that he had such an intricate relationship with the blues—and a blues is not always a dirge. [Grins]. There's wonderment. There's laughter. There's a wholeness to his vision that I admire, and a bravery as well.

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With or without musical accompaniment, however, this libretto testifies to the breadth of Parker's legacy more than any other individual poem.

The first section...