Jazz and poetry go together as naturally as the coffee and cookies served last week at the Monroe Campus Jazz Café (a.k.a., the Community Room.) As part of NCC’s Art & Lecture Series, poet Lynn Levin and musicians Nancy and Spencer Reed performed for an appreciative audience of students, faculty and staff.
Lynn Levin (left) began the program with a reading of love poems, one of which rhapsodized comically on the finding of a lost sock. Proving that everything is grist for the poetic mill, Levin read poems she’d written about an all-white jigsaw puzzle she and her brother worked on as children, an odd character she’d met in a Fiction 101 class, and tapping tree sap for maple sugar.
Levin also read a ballad she’d written based on newspaper accounts of escaped prisoner Norman “Sleepless” Johnston. “I’ve been submitting this poem for publication since 1999,” Levin said. “Today, I’m reading it in celebration – I found out Monday that it got accepted.”
Levin is the author of two collections of poems, one of which, Imaginarium, was selected as a finalist in ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Awards. She was the Bucks County Poet Laureate for 1999. Levin teaches English at the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University.
Nancy and Spencer Reed (right) took the stage and performed the kind of easy vocal and instrumental harmonies that come only from 20-plus years of collaboration. Nancy’s velvety voice and scat-style phrasing were perfectly matched by Spencer’s jazz-riffing guitar accompaniment.
The duo performed Miles Davis’ “All Blues,” a piece by Thelonius Monk, and the jazz classics “On Green Dolphin Street” and “Take Five.”
The Reeds’ unique vocal and instrumental styling has been enjoyed by audiences around the world, including Japan and Mexico. Their combined discography includes 10 CDs, five of which feature Nancy and Spencer together. They frequently perform together at the Deer Head Inn in Delaware Water Gap and at area jazz festivals, in addition to solo performances and collaborations with other jazz musicians.
