SOURCE: “Jazz in the Caribbean Air,” in World Literature Today, Vol. 68, No. 4, Autumn, 1994, pp. 715-718.

In the following essay, Weinstein explores the use of jazz rhythms and allusions in the poetry of Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite.

If one could assemble in imagination an ultimate jazz band to honor the literary achievement of Kamau Brathwaite, one could not do better than to choose the four musicians his poetry heralds: Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and Duke Ellington. This jazz quartet particularly noteworthy in Brathwaite's poetic world has as much to do with the heroism Brathwaite finds in their lives as with the rich intellectual and spiritual rewards he has discovered in their music over the decades. Without hyperbole, one could look upon Rollins, Coltrane, Ayler, and Ellington as primary sources of poetic inspiration, “muses,” or, even more strikingly, archetypal poetic figures. While it is belaboring the obvious to...