I would make the assignment even more arduous with my next decision: the poem had to be accompanied by music. Fred Fine loved music. He spoke frequently about singing in a Yiddish Choir as a child, and was a devotee of performances in Chicago. His encyclopedic memory encompassed not only literature and history, but music as well. For the potential of infusing music in the poem I turned to Mitar Mitch Covic, a long-time collaborator of mine and a remarkable bassist, whom I like to compare to Czech bass player Miroslav Vitous. Mitar also happened to be an artist, teacher, and activist whose life had been touched by Fred. I asked if he would brainstorm and experiment with me to see if we might collaborate on a tribute. We know each other well enough that either of us could bail out if we thought the effort was falling flat.
When we met in Mitar’s spacious living room, in front of the deepest and most diverse jazz collection I know, with his ever-present selection of a superb wine within reach, I had only one word for my poem. “Gravitas” was a word Fred used often. I am certain that it was from his lips that I first heard the word. I agonized over how I could capture a life as large, long, significant, and complex as Fred’s in a three-minute poem. Knowing his love of classical music I turned to composers for an external spark.
Thinking of the phoenix rising, as a metaphor for his emerging from the underground, I recalled Igor Stravinsky’s “The Firebird” based on the Russian folk tale. I would treat Fred’s life as a symphonic story and try to condense the trajectory of his life into three movements as in Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements. At our first creative meeting I shared the title of my unwritten poem with Mitar, along with the Stravinsky-inspired structure in which I would flash defining periods in Fred’s life, starting with the Great Depression. Spontaneously Mitar started playing a jazzed up, Mingus-like version of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” It made me laugh out loud, while proclaiming, “that’s it!”
At the end of that first session I still had only a title, but based on my abstract description of what I saw as “defining periods” in Fred’s life, I went home with Mitar’s musical foundation for all three movements on a cassette tape. Now all I had to do was find a cassette player. We met weekly and I had the audacity to critique the evolving musical score, especially the second movement depicting Fred’s own emergence from the ashes, this despite the fact that it would take nearly five-and-a-half more weeks before I had enough confidence in my own words for the poem to progress much beyond the title.
I was in a drought exacerbated by a deadline. This was also a new creative scenario for the two of us. In previous collaborations Mitar had always responded to my already written words, which were inextricably attached to a spoken rhythm that emerged organically out of my poetic process. When I recite those poems it is as if I have written sheet music dictating the reading of the poem. Outside of their solos the musicians simply have to keep up. This time the two of us started in the same space and time -– with no poem and no music. I either truly listened for the first time or listened in a new way. I definitely responded to the music differently as opposed to relying on the musician to follow my meanderings. For me it was a liberating conceptual breakthrough in my work with music and this was reflected in the poem as well as the performance.
Here is the poem, which came out of me with only about a week-and-a-half to spare before the memorial:
- “Gravitas”
