Reviewed by Tara Betts

Kamau Daaood borders on mysticism and scores his poems with breath within the first page of The Language of Saxophones. This collection spans more than 30 years of work by this writer who sharpened his skills in the Watts Writers Workshop with writers such as Quincy Troupe, Eric Priestly, the Watts Prophets and Jayne Cortez. 

The lexicon of horns becomes clear in this opening title poem that claims “prana moving through time signatures/bop blown through a wormhole/aimed at the earlobe of God/pondered DNA in saxophone solos/rising over the hills of lips/whirling wonder/articulating the language of bruises and bliss.” It is this balance of trauma and glory that creeps around the edges of Daaood’s poems, and jazz serves Daaood as an eager vehicle on the page and in his recordings that highlight his voice of resounding depth.

His performance chops resonate most clearly in the book’s earlier poems which run for several pages and circle back on repeating phrases to build tension, especially in poems like “Liberator of the Spirit” for John Coltrane and “The Last Song” for drummer Billy Higgins, and later in the book with “Papa, The Lean Griot” for pianist & mentor Horace Tapscott. One of the most touching poems is “Balm of Gilead” which describes the friendship between Billie Holliday and Lester Young and how those who held Holliday’s “cabaret card/spit no on the purest request” to sing at Young’s funeral, that shortly preceded her own. “Bird Droppings” begins with the distinct image of Charlie “Bird” Parker tossing chicken bones behind him on his way to the stage and brings readers to what he legacy he left-“a horn laid to rest heart broken/silence, dust in pawn shops/nailed to a cross with/rusty hypodermic needles.” 

The stamp of jazz imprints itself on Daaood as heavily as legendary Beat poet Bob Kaufman’s sense of surreal imagery. Whether Daaood mixes the spiritual practices of the orishas, Buddha. Muhammad, yogis and Christians in the poem “One” blessed with epigraphs from Duke Ellington and Bob Kaufman himself or Daaood ‘s “Djali I” and “Djali II” which are both dedicated to and about Kaufman, Daaood still lets Kaufman’s presence successfully pervade into other poems such as “Dance of the Nigganese Dancer” and “Healer’s Lament”.  

Although Daaood’s work is much more accessible than Kaufman and relates to his immediate surroundings with poems such as “Army of Healers” revealing the recuperative powers of creativity and poetry based in place (“Los Angeles” and “Leimert Park”), he flies into scenarios of the imaginary with ease. “Blakey’s Sticks” gleams as just one example with “I want to give Art Blakey’s drumsticks/to some child without a father/to use as chopsticks/to pick the stars from beards of giraffes/sitting on milk crates/in front of liquor stores.” Again, Daaood offers us a book of tributes with poems like this and “Sweating Paisley” for Jimi Hendrix, but he does not simply return to the typical celebrities that are forged into icons by popular culture. 

Daaood notices, as poets should, the people one might see on their own block or street. His lines seek to give everyone their own weight and connection to each other in a larger Black community.  In “Leimert Park” Daaood states himself clearly entrenched in the possibilities of juju and activism: “I want to stuff your dreams/with a bed of cleansing herbs/I want to wipe the bull’s eyes/off the backs/of your children.” All of the players, musicians or not, are valuable to the composition of Black life.

The selected poems in The Language of Saxophones continue from one to the next as if they were originally meant to be a seamless flow despite the wide span of three decades covered in this slim volume. Let the saxophones and so many other brass instruments keep blowing through the pen and mouth of Kamau Daaood.