Re:   “Three to Get Ready”

     In mid-2005 my friend and long-time collaborator, Ed Colker, began talking about a print or a suite of prints he might do for Dave Brubeck’s 85th birthday which was coming up in December.  Colker and Brubeck have been friends since the early fifties, and they eventually worked out a piece that includes an early Brubeck score and a Colker drawing.  I began thinking about a Brubeck piece of my own, drawn by Ed’s interest toward the Brubeck Quartet of the fifties, listening to the early albums with an eventual poem in mind.  The record I returned to again and again was Time Out (1959), which includes, most famously, Brubeck’s “Blue Rondo a la Turk” and Paul Desmond’s “Take Five.”  The attraction was personal.  I bought Time Out in ’59.  It was an icon.  Its success, like the successes in the same period of Pollock and De Kooning, suggested that art—thoughtful, deliberate, experimental art—could capture a significant public space.  And along with Ellington’s “Falling Like A Raindrop,” Kenton’s, “Cuban Fire” and Monk’s “Round Midnight,” it shaped my sense of time and how rhythm could be stretched, conscripted, altered and changed.
   Of the pieces on that album, I settled on “Three to Get Ready.”  I had always liked it, and it had the advantage of not owning the same kind of place in my memory as “Rondo” or “Take Five.” Listening to either of those is invariably engaged with nostalgias of one kind or another, so personally referential that in their familiarity they are oddly inaccessible.   Also, in an interesting way, the press of the title had changed over time.  “Three to Get Ready” has an entirely different sense at 66 or 85 than it had at 19 or 38.  The title, of course, is—always has been—a musical witticism.  “Three to Get Ready” is in waltz time, 3/4 time, which moves after a few measures into 4/4 time, then back and forth.  Three to get ready…and four to go!   

     The poem is set in December—because of Brubeck’s birthday and because that’s when I began working on it, and also because in the old trope that compares age to the seasons, we are both now Decembrists, hence the poem’s “bare ruined choirs.”  I wanted to follow Ed Colker’s method of crossing the gap between art forms—not by illustration or immediate reference but by trying to make his drawing or lithograph responsive and companionable to the original.  In his work with my poems this has involved rhythm, density, openness, sometimes a catch from the poem’s imagery, sometimes an amplification or exaggeration of what an image might imply.  So, the poem wants to, following Brubeck’s time changes, shift from one kind of familiarity to another.  I also wanted to give space to the quartet’s lyricism that moves over the harder edges of the rhythmic changes.  Joe Doerr heard Paul Desmond’s saxophone in “a lilt passing like breath” in the second section, which suggests, very happily, that at least there I got something of a Colker-like companionability, which evokes and re-establishes the ulterior music of the piece