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A live broadcast set the ball rolling, courtesy of the Scaledown club, and their eponymous show on Resonance 104.4 FM, broadcast to London and webcast worldwide for the broadbandits amongst us. All the music was improvised, and half the poetry Oulipian. The trombone poetry set recorded at the club back in October may also be broadcast on this Friday afternoon show one day: see Scaledown for details.
At Joan Coffey's Coffee Culture at the Green Note café/bar in Camden on a blue sky Saturday afternoon, trombone poetry threaded New Orleans jazz through a sequence of poems and soundwalks. Joan sang a couple of favourites and showed a very likeable short film by Andrea Dorfman. Also combining music and spoken word, Andrew Clarke sang a fine set of songs including that hymn to infidelity, "A Shot in the Mouth", and returned to the stage with a handful of gothic short stories.
For an event entitled Word Incest & Cut-Ups, Malgorzata Kitowski invited James Byrne and me to join her in simultaneous readings by all of us of a series of poems by each of us. The mêlée took place in a former gun shop reborn as the Riflemaker Gallery, in Soho, featuring, under the banner of Indica, artworks such as Yoko Ono's apple-on-a-pedestal plus convulsions of kinetic art.
Some sparks were struck, but more thoughtful preparation could have taken things much further, and richer relationships between the poems and the improvised trombone-playing would also have been created. Bright spontaneity was also undermined by the dull blunder of giving someone the wrong order of pieces. The sudden dialogue between the trombone and a resounding metal sculpture, though, was a happy bonus.
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