Thirteen Kinds of Desire: A Collaboration

Around my tenth year of living in Australia, I began to ask the Universe, very sincerely, what I was supposed to do with all the experience I had gained in my by then twenty-year-long musical odyssey around the world. I wanted my music to lead me in a new direction within myself. Was I supposed to begin to write my own songs now—lyrics and music? I knew hundreds of wonderful jazz tunes. What would I write? Words—I started thinking about the nature of words. I ruminated for months as I went about my daily life, trusting that somehow answers would come to point the way, as they faithfully had so far in my journey when I asked questions from this genuine place within.

One night, I found myself backstage at the Kiama Jazz Festival, just south of Sydney, waiting for the opening guest artist to begin. We hadn't met, and I was to follow him in the program for the evening. His name was Yusef Komunyakaa, and I had never heard of him. All I remember was someone saying that he was a famous poet from the States who was here to open the festival.

As I stood there listening to him read while a jazz pianist improvised, I was instantly struck by the power of his spoken word—by the nature of the spoken word. I had been singing jazz for most of my adult life and hadn't thought about words in this deeper way. To be honest, I hadn't thought about the meaning of what I do as an artist in a long time. It had become obscured by the struggle to achieve. Where was my journey taking me? To what higher purpose, if any, and what was I learning about myself and the world? I could feel each of his words landing in my body. I could see and feel the images that he was tossing out land in me and create new spaces inside, which triggered more images. My imagination was fired. I remember thinking about how powerful poetry is and asking, where had it been all my life? I hadn't read it since college, where I always felt incapable of understanding. I had long since dropped it from my life. Now I was actually desiring it, feeling a need for it. I was grateful for being so moved by Yusef's words.

I don't remember what poem he recited, only that I went on to sing my first song after he finished, and I spontaneously paused, and, with a strange feeling of both comfort and confidence, said, "I just want to take a moment to thank you for the words you brought here tonight, because you really make me ask myself in a different way what I'm saying when I sing." At that moment, I could feel my energy find its way down a few layers to a deeper, more grounded place inside.

As I sang the next song, I had a profound experience of seeing in a fresh, new way the various expressions on people's faces as they listened to the music my band and I were making together. I was reconnecting to my original, pure desire to sing. I saw how music moves people, the way it moved me, made me feel deeply, made me feel whole, which is why I wanted to become a singer in the first place. All these realizations happened within moments while I was singing. Certainly this was an epiphany! I had asked the questions, and here were the beginnings of movement toward answers.

At the end of the concert, I asked Yusef for his telephone number so that I could contact him about meeting for coffee to discuss what . . . well, everything: What matters, what doesn't, what is art, where does the creative impulse come from, what nurtures it, what stops it, what makes us whole, what makes us real, what makes us unreal? How do we become exiled from ourselves? What tools do we need to make meaning for ourselves and to make...