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Featured Review > Jonathan Eig > Ken Nordine
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(page three)
And so it goes, without a station break or reality check, for a solid 30 minutes. Nordine is like an avant-garde
saxophonist without a saxophone. He is a conversation between Ornette Coleman, Sigmund Freud and T.S. Elliot.
Charlie Parker's rapid-firing synapses were an early inspiration. Nordine improvises confidently and according
to the rules of a unique universe not because he likes to hear himself talk but because he loves to juggle words and
think aloud. Whether anyone understands it is not so much a concern.
Yet there is ample evidence that Nordine is understood. Serious music lovers across the country
reserve a special place in their hearts and in their CD carousels for word jazz. In the late 1950s, his
records on the Dot label (the same label that recorded Pat Boone) were big hits. "He is a
fascinating individual," says Kenneth Mueller, manager of the radio department at the Museum of
Television & Radio in New York. "His style is unique. It sort of transcends the Beats
and the contemporary poetry that's out there. "He's still very relevant," Mueller says. "Jerry Garcia
was a big fan. Tom Waits has really been a big fan of his work. While he was a contemporary of the
Beats, I think he was way ahead of his time. He's really more relevant to the majority of poets reciting
in coffee houses today."
Nordine answers the door slowly. He is hobbling with a bad back, and the first thing you notice is
that he is wearing giant red slippers that look big enough and fluffy enough to have kept Neil Armstrong's
feet warm on the moon. They are decidedly not cool. But then again, it would not be difficult to
imagine some of the other surviving members of the Beat generation, say Allen Ginsberg or William S. Burroughs,
wearing worse. Nordine is 75. He is tall and strong, with giant hands, an ample belly and a full,
fleshy face. If his long white hair were not thinning, he might resemble George Washington. "You're hip
to cataract operations?" he asks me as he leads a tour of the house.
On an overcast day, with Lake Michigan frozen chunky white, the Nordine home is dark and mysterious. Furnishings
are random, at best. Several original paintings, sort of in the Paschke school, decorate the walls; some of
them are properly hung; some sit on the floor ("I would paint nudes, but only in X-ray," Nordine says). He's
got a print made by Muhammad Ali and an original painting of the Oswald shooting that he made the day after it
occurred. Upstairs, there's a portrait of Nordine drawn by Jerry Garcia, as well as a photo of the two men
together ("He was very shy," Nordine says of Garcia. "I think he was a sideman who lightning struck into
leadership"). His recording studio, like most else in the house, is dark. It is packed tight with computers,
stereo speakers, keyboards and a 26-inch Macintosh screen. He has a Grateful Dead mouse pad, and above his desk
is a toy parrot with a pillow round its neck. The pillow is stitched with the message "Genius at Work."
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