Benjamin Boone & Philip Levine - The Poetry of Jazz (2018)

Without knowing or planning it, saxophonist/composer Benjamin Boone has spent his life preparing for a collaboration with Philip Levine. Long fascinated by the inherent musicality of the spoken word, Boone crossed paths with the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet as fellow professors at California State University, Fresno, and they ended up working closely together in the three years before Levine's death in 2015. Boone and Levine's "The Poetry of Jazz" captures a genre-expanding partnership unlike anything else in the jazz canon. Produced by piano great Donald Brown, the 14-track project features the compositions of Boone, the poetry of Levine, and a stellar band with special guest appearances by Tom Harrell, Greg Osby, Branford Marsalis and Chris Potter.


Benjamin Boone knows how to get inside the poem, Phil Levine's inscrutable and imploding loops of poetics, his observations of the seen and unseen. Boone knows where the thing called poetry lives, an ocelot among the waters, a sky-shaped Rain God that flares down upon us. He does this with a myriad of instruments, with human breath chiseling and burning through brass and string, reeds and skin and hands and resin. He is one of the very few that can lure Phil's poetry-magic and call it out and show it to the world...Beyond words up there with the muses. U.S. POET LAUREATE JUAN FELIPE HERRERA.