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Featured Review > Jonathan Eig > Ken Nordine
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(page two)
Nordine refers to his home as a "big old yesterday house," and the description is apt. It is three
stories tall, 94 years old and very brown. It squats in a block of bland apartments in a working-class
section of Edgewater. The front porch reveals a slate of mailboxes and buzzers with all the names
removed save two: Ken Nordine and Beryl Vaughan, husband and wife of 50 years. When they
were younger, they rented off some of the big old yesterday house to bring in extra money. But Nordine
has done well for himself over the years and now the house, all 17 rooms of it, is theirs alone.
He began his radio career in the 1940s, and in the 1950s he began reciting his playful poetry over jazz grooves. At
the same time, he paid the rent doing commercial voice-overs. The Nordine voice, which would not sound
at all out of place speaking to Moses from a burning bush, has been used for so many television and radio
commercials that no one has been able to keep track. Blue jeans, beer, deodorant, table wax, automobiles,
gasoline, paint, antacids, exterminators and banks. The list goes on. If America has made it or
done it, at one time or another, Nordine has helped sell it. At the same time, he has maintained a
kind of alter ego. Like the buttoned-up banker who puts on tight leather pants at night, Nordine
has thrived after hours as a jazz hipster. For decades, jazz aficionados have collected his hard-to-find
albums and tuned to his weekly radio show, which is recorded in Chicago at WBEZ and beamed around the world
by satellite.
He has invented a genre called word jazz, and he is the undisputed poet laureate of the form. To some ears,
word jazz is the point at which musical and poetic improvisation meet and begin to dance. To others, it
might better be described as the sound of Ken Nordine speaking in tongues to himself. In either case,
it makes for an obscure exercise in creative wordplay. He once described it this way: "It's a way of
saying yes when you mean yes, a way of saying no when you mean no, and a way of saying yes when you mean no
and no when you mean yes. It's also a way of belonging to something larger than yourself without
leaving yourself out. It's also just a name for something, same way love is just a name for
something, and also hate. And it's a letting yourself go, a kind of free association; the only
associations that swing are the free ones. Then, too, it's a dead seriousness combined with an
alive comicness. Oxymoron. More important, word jazz is a freedom within limitations."
A sample, in which Nordine speaks and his own voice, electronically altered, answers, might sound like this:
Ever thought of writing a book?
Oh sure
Well, I've been thinking about it, too.
Lot of times
About what it would be about. That would be a good name for a book.
What?
About what it's about, by whatsit.
Who?
But if I knew what it was going to be about...
Would you do it?
I mean, before I were going to write it...
I bet you wouldn't
I wouldn't want to write it.
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