爵士诗灵魂夜 A Soulful Night of Jazz Poetry

一张精纯的爵士乐，也是文学的立体展演！

台湾第一张爵士诗专辑。由爵士音乐家谢明谚与诗人鸿鸿联手制作，邀请八位年龄、背景不同的诗人──分别来自台湾、香港、澳门的郑烱明、陈家带、鸿鸿、廖伟棠、曹疏影、袁绍珊、崔香兰及林理惠，以截然相异的声音及语言、腔调，读出自己的诗行，乐手则以即兴的声响回应。谢明谚率领衔的杰出乐手，包括钢琴曾增译、贝斯池田欣弥、鼓组林伟中，以及客串的长号邓亦峻，呈现了一个既平行又交织的状态：音乐让诗的意象更加有穿透力，诗也让音乐更能带听者进入情节。加上林理惠深富磁性的戏剧性嗓音，或变化声线，吟唱经典曲目，或以灵动的声音穿梭。就像所有爵士乐的演奏一样，在电光石火间完成，一期一会，无可复制。

专辑的一面是诗与爵士乐传统的对话，包括献给盖希文、比莉・哈乐黛、查特・贝克、约翰・佐恩的诗，鸿鸿也以〈台北蓝调〉为台湾历史最悠久的爵士酒吧留下印记。另一面则是对台湾历史与当代生存的探索：林理惠的〈请问芳名〉将妮娜・西蒙的黑人女权歌曲〈四女性〉填上新词，纪念四位白色恐怖的受难女性；郑烱明〈倾听〉则是为美丽岛事件所写的召唤。

文化评论者包德乐（Dean Anthony Brink）教授评道：「这张专辑反映出爵士乐的主题与节奏，同时也体现了歌手、诗人和演奏者的精采互动……可说完全捕捉到了现场戏剧表演的兴奋张力。」

Jazz is relatively unknown in Taiwan, which lends a freshness to these fusions of poetry and acoustic instrumental accompaniment, which each opens to the other. Jazz signifies a wide variety of styles, with its very roots bound up in the pentatonic transgressions of the blues, Gospel’s telltale call and response, and a muted channeling of the energy in ragtime. Its forms of expression range from jazz standards with a big band of lounge sound, to stride piano and scatting and even electronic experimentation. The original renditions and variations of jazz classics and recent edgy work are each accompanied by a poetry read in one of multiple Chinese dialects—Taiwanese, Cantonese and Mandarin—and some English. What I like most about this particular collaboration of poets and musicians is that the voices of the singer and the poetry create a parallel movement that sometimes overlaps and often engages in dialogic interaction—notable intense with the saxophone on “Listening,” by Cheng Chiung-ming. Mars Lin’s “Should You Ask My Name” is a powerful reinterpretation of Nina Simone’s bitter pathbreaking black civil rights song “Four Women,” which outlined various harmful stereotypes of African American women, suggesting an empathetic personae-embodiment-and-deconstruction of the suffering of black women in being pegged in these stereotypes that perpetuate unkind racializing attitudes that objectify divisions among us. The four women in Lin’s poem are victims of Taiwan’s White Terror, the climatic final one being the famous case of Ting Yao-tiao (丁窈窕 1927-1956), who was killed by firing squad merely due a personal vendetta and false accusations of being a communist. Reflexively folding into jazz themes and rhythms, Chen Chia-tai’s “Rhapsody on Gershwin” touches on motifs in jazz while embodying some of the interplay of singer, poet, and players. Hung Hung’s “John Zorn, Taipei Impromptu, 1995” is one of the more dramatic, minimalist and experimental on the album, even humorous at times in its impeccably edited syncopation of instruments punctuated by verses. It even captures the excitement and intensity of his live theatrical performances.

——Dean Anthony Brink, Professor, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University
Author of Poetics and Justice in America, Japan, and Taiwan: Configuring Change and Entitlement (2021).