PAN M 360 at FIJM 2024 | Aja Monet, committed jazz, committed poetry, a breath of fresh air

No other Montreal media has as many human resources on hand for expert coverage of the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal. Many of us are scouring the outdoor site and concert halls : Jacob Langlois-Pelletier, Frédéric Cardin, Stephan Boissonneault, Michel Labrecque, Varun Swarup, Vitta Morales and Alain Brunet offer their album reviews, concert reports and a few interviews. Happy reading and listening!

Live jazz supporting poetry was commonplace at the turn of the 60s. Beat generation poets were accompanied by jazzmen, as were African-American writers during the civil rights struggle and the more radical phases of Black American rebellion in many USA cities in the 60s and 70s. We also remember the Last Poets, whose syncopated declamations were (among other things) at the origin of rap as we know it today.

The marriage between poetry and jazz still exists, but its protagonists are a rarity today. And that’s exactly why Aja Monet, from Los Angeles, arrived at Studio TD on a Friday evening and blew in a breath of fresh air. Conscious poetry, creative and committed writing, both pamphleteering and sensitive, both private and political. In black American style, a contemporary jazz quartet accompanies this prolific thirty-something, who has published numerous novels and poetry collections and recorded the fine 2023 album When The Poems Do What They Do, the main subject of this concert / spoken words at FIJM on June 28.

From the point of view of literary form, the words are direct, the meaning is direct, and a few formal elements transform these pamphlets and reflections into art. But above all, it’s the timbre of the voice and the magnetism of this highly intelligent and beautiful woman. Her activism and social conscience run the gamut, from European colonialism to the detriment of America’s indigenous populations, to today’s African-American condition, via the ongoing tragedy in the Gaza Strip, pushing her to denounce everything from the homelessness crisis in Montreal. These are just some of the injustices she seeks to expose beneath the stones of our humanity at the dawn of one of the darkest periods in its recent history.

There’s no pretence here of evaluating Aja Monet’s literary work, just savouring this event where jazz and poetry are once again in symbiosis. A class act!