To read Bukowski has always been, to a great extent, to hear Bukowski. Such was the conflation of art and man in his poems and prose that, whether their narrator was called Charles Bukowski or Hank Chinaski, you felt like you were on the receiving end of a highly personal confession. Sure, it was a heavily mythologized and ultimately unreliable autobiography, but that only served to heighten the sense of direct communication between the man and his readers. Age, experience, and the joys and anguishes of the flesh were the mainstays of Bukowski’s oeuvre. These, and hard-bitten, hard-won philosophy, truth refracted through the bottom of a bottle, moments of rare beauty when the clouds parted to reveal a burning clarity.

Bukowski’s voice became an even more familiar sound for those who had the fortune (or misfortune, depending on the poet’s mood) to witness his notoriously rowdy readings. A safer, more selective experience could be had by sampling the numerous official and unofficial recordings of such events that circulated amongst his many fans. Hearing him read confirmed the presence of a voice that could be easily imagined when reading his books: a laconic, husky drawl that alternated between slurred confusion and razor-sharp brilliance. For a self-confessed dirty old man, Bukowski sure had a way with a clean, new poetic line. At his most concisely eloquent he could have you in 10 words or less. And when he had you, he had you for good.

Bukowski has already provided inspiration for a range of popular music artists, from direct references such as Rheinhardt Rowlands’s album Charles Bukowski to indirect associations, such as Tom Waits’ beat-referencing, booze-soaked early albums (and no, Bukowski didn’t want to be thought of as a beat writer, but few popular music artists have combined lowdown bo-homily and tender perversion as well as Waits). Tom Russell brought homage and vocal style together brilliantly on his 2005 album Hotwalker, a poetic recreation of the glory days of Bukowski, Kerouac, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Dave Van Ronk, and other fellow travelers.

Jazz composer and arranger Nicholas Urie adds to this tradition by putting a number of Bukowski poems to music, repeating the mixture of big-band dynamics, free-jazz experimentalism, speech, and song used on his inspired 2009 project Excerpts From an Online Dating Service. For that work, texts from actual online sites were set to music and sung by Christine Correa, resulting in a hybrid language that mixed deadpan banality with unexpected lyricism. The sometimes bathetic mixture of the sublime and the absurd is something that links Extracts to My Garden, with the notable difference that, this time, Urie and co. are dealing with work written deliberately as poetry. Correa provides the vocals for most of the pieces, thus providing both a link to Urie’s previous work and a neat solution to the problem of giving voice to a poet whose own voice is so familiar. What’s more, the use of a female voice to articulate the words of a defiantly male writer brings a critical, gender-aware fidelity to the project.

At the same time, the various jazz instruments (all played by men) also provide variations on the poet’s voice. Frank Carlberg’s Rhodes and Kenny Pexton’s tenor sax flesh out “Round and Round”, the swinging track that circulates around the repeated lines “You have my soul / and I have your money”. “My Garden” finds John Carlson’s trumpet giving way to Alan Ferber’s trombone in a long, muted midsection that gives mournful resonance to the lines “pain is flowers / blooming all the time”. The horns take a more dissonant turn on “For Crying Out Loud”, offering a rich array of textures to this hymn to weeping and giving a sense of the “droning malaise and chronic unrest” that Urie identifies with Bukowski and Los Angeles in his liner notes.

All in all, this is an album that stays true to the spirit of Bukowski while offering a new way of hearing his words. Like the gloomy laureate whose work is re-sounded here, Nichloas Urie is not afraid to walk on the dark side. Equally like his subject, he is able to find fragments of beauty in the gloom. Pain may be a flower but it can grow away from the dirt in its search for the clearer air.

Nicholas Urie made an impressive footprint with the release of his Excerpts From and Online Dating Service (Red Piano Records, 2009). The composer/arranger modus operandi changes little on My Garden, where he takes is texts from the poetry of West Coast writer Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), and weaves them into provocative and often violent tapestries of contemporary big band sounds.

Bukowski was a gutter poet laureate, who at the height of his popularity, labored in a Post Office job. He wrote in “dirty realism,” the impolite language and cadence his Los Angeles home, straight from the streets and skids. Urie already proved himself creative in finding a “book” for his music and the composer’s adoption of Bukowski is in perfect keeping with that.

Urie is a master of revealing sonic tactility, the feel of sound. He does this with equal ability, whether in the rhythm section, where he marches with the quiet militancy of a feather army (“For Crying Out Loud”), or in the chaotic frenzy of squeaking trumpets or sputtering low brass (“Finality”). “The Lioness” proceeds like a Wiemar Berlin opium dream, as does “Lean,” a baritone saxophone solo gushing from the gaping wound of the arrangement. Urie structures his arrangements around the given atmosphere of a poem, atmospheres as depraved and venal as the online texts he used for Excerpts From and Online Dating Service.

This is not pretty music, nor is it particularly easy to listen to. But this makes it no less genius. This is music of high intelligence that expects as much as it provides, and what it provides is a listening experience like little else in our barren sonic desert.

Click to read – Nicholas Urie in Jazziz.

Friends of mine have sometimes complained about jazz’s lyrical landscape. For those steeped in standards, the idiom can feel like a wash of “My Foolish Hearts” and “Body and Souls.” No wonder that most of my cliché-averse colleagues at school preferred instrumental jazz, with its angularity and friendliness to experimentation.

Of course, there’s nothing cliché about the way Theo Bleckmann or Kurt Elling interpret the old repertoire, but there seems to be room for new kinds of lyrics in jazz. Charging into this gap have been John Hollenbeck, who set William Blake in Joys and Desires (Intuition, 2006), and more recently, Nicholas Urie. Urie’s first release, Excerpts from an Online Dating Service (Red Piano, 2009), set personal ads from across North America. His most recent release, My Garden (Red Piano, 2011) sets selected poems by Charles Bukowski, the late Los Angeles-based poet whose brash, postmodern verses have become favorites of many young artists at the beginning of the 21st Century.

Urie’s Bukowski selections are brief. The longest, “Winter: 44th Year,” includes only 29 short lines; the shortest, “Round and Round,” only nine words. The feat, then, is how Urie stretches such concise material to fit his through-composed, extended compositions. Repetition is key to his approach. “Round and Round” takes its cue from the text’s title, cycling “You have my soul / and I have your money” in an asymmetrical 9/8 time signature before Frank Carlberg develops the mechanistic theme on the Rhodes, adding bebop language to the mix as he goes. Horn backgrounds enter, first punctuating, then tying knots around Carlberg’s solo, eventually strangling it in a contrapuntal crescendo before releasing their grip to Kenny Pexton’s tenor saxophone solo.

Urie has an acute sense of drama, allowing his pieces to blossom thematically over long periods of time, whether through themes, solos, or background figures. “Round and Round” ends at peak density, with saxophone improvisation, vocal improvisation, brass stabs, and the vocal theme all happening simultaneously. So skilled is Urie’s writing that none of this density compromises clarity; never does his ensemble, for all its chaotic rollicking, sound muddy.
Those who see jazz music as a strictly modal enterprise should check out the title track, “My Garden,” with its wandering chromaticism. After an opening trumpet solo, Urie weaves the poem’s first stanza upon itself, blurring beginning and end. Christine Correa’s voice delivers the poem in melancholy drips, oozing “pain is a flower / pain is flowers / blooming all the time.” Solos by John Carlson on trumpet and Alan Ferber on trombone, though, show what a sweet pain this can be.

My Garden is a thematically compact, vivid recording that rewards concentrated listening. Urie’s ensemble evokes everything from coy humor in “Lean” to fiendish courage in “Lioness.” The music’s scope is at least as large as that of the poetry, and the combined effect of the two make this one of my favorite recordings in any genre of the last two years.