Video filmed and edited by Jayson Chesler
CollabX hosted its first event, An Evening of Jazz and Poetry, Saturday at the Pythian lodge in Tempe. More than 30 people gathered to watch the live, improvised collaboration between poets and a jazz band.
The event, split into two sets of about 45 minutes each, featured poets reading their material while the band jammed.
Although the event was hosted in Tempe, most of the organizers and some of the performers are based in downtown Phoenix or the ASU Downtown Phoenix campus, and the event was originally intended for a downtown venue.
Elizabeth McNeil, Jack Evans, Michael Bartelt, Ryan Van Velzer, Leah Marche and three other members of Marche’s group BlackPoet Ventures performed their poetry. The band consisted of Keith Kelly (saxophone), Elliot Sneider (piano), Ruth Wenger (cello), Joel Oroz (drums), Ben Scolaro (electric keyboard) and Ben Hedquist (bass).
CollabX is the name of an ongoing collaboration between Michael Pfister, a writer and downtown ASU professor at the School of Letters and Sciences, and Wenger, a cellist, teacher and recent graduate of the ASU Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.
The poets and musicians only met an hour before the show and had minimal rehearsal time. The event brought out spontaneity in both sets of artists, Pfister said.
“(CollabX) came together around the idea of artists coming into contact with each other, the idea of collaboration, the idea of different disciplines in contact and how that influences the creative process,” Pfister said. “We were noticing different shows, disparate shows, but not a lot of connectivity between different artists in the Phoenix area.”
The overarching goal of CollabX, which started about six months ago, is to connect artists from a variety of disciplines. Saturday’s event fused poetry and jazz, but a previous event for the Downtown ASU Philosophy and Film Series featured an improvised live score of the silent film “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” with Wenger and Sneider. For future events, CollabX is seeking to incorporate dance, design and other artistic fields, Wenger said.
“(Pfister) has his foot professionally in English and humanities, myself in music, but he’s also a musician and I’m also a writer. We started noticing all these overlaps and how much we both learn from all these other disciplines,” Wenger said. “We were talking about reviving the idea of an artistic salon.”
Rosemarie Dombrowski, another professor for the downtown English department and organizer of Phoenix Poetry Series and First Friday Poetry, selected the poets for the evening.
“I knew exactly who I wanted because I know all my ASU professors who are poets, I know all of the community poets, I know all of my student poets,” Dombrowski said. “I thought, ‘who has the perfect voice and the confidence to pull this off?'”
The first set featured McNeil and Evans, two established “page poets” whose poems may be thought of as primarily intended for a written rather than spoken form, and Bartelt, an ASU undergraduate student. Before an intermission, Wenger sang a poem by Dombrowski with Sneider’s piano playing. The second set featured poets whose work generally fit into the rhythmic genre of slam poetry.
The musicians adapted their accompaniment to suit the tone of the writer, demonstrating versatility of their stylistic and emotional palettes. For instance, Wenger’s spectral cello accompaniment hung over Bartelt’s poem about his deceased grandfather, while the slam poetry of Van Velzer and the BackPoet Ventures members was underscored by funkier fusion grooves.
During his introduction, Pfister referred to the event as akin to a “first kiss” between the featured musicians and poets.
While that the metaphor served as a disclaimer that things could get awkward — in fact, the band initially sounded a little hesitant before quickly settling into a groove with the spoken word accompaniment — it also reminded the crowd that the show meant to serve as a fruitful starting place for more to come.
Pfister said he hopes that the success of this first event will allow CollabX to apply for funding grants that will provide more freedom to choose venues.
He said downtown venues were considered but were not possible due to scheduling or funding for the Saturday event, and ultimately the Pythian lodge was chosen because musicians at the event knew the owner. Grants will likely enable more choices for the project in the future.
“There are so many people that probably would not have been in the same room together had we not made it happen,” Wenger said. “That’s the mission of this CollabX entity, to bring people together from the community from ASU, local academia, community artists and different disciplines.”
Editor’s Note: Poet and performer Michael Bartelt is a former Downtown Devil contributing reporter. He did not contribute to the reporting or editing of this story.
Contact the reporter at bkutzler@asu.edu
