All That Jazz?

This past weekend was the Iowa City Jazz Festival. Normally, I would love to be there. However, this weekend was hotter than a supernova so my wife and I were only able to come out to hear the Sunday night acts. Now, admittedly, I am not a full-on jazz aficionado, but I do love classic Big Band,  New Orleans, Dixieland, and Be-bop. My father's music was Ella, Basie, Satch, Torme, Sarah Vaughn, Miles, and definite is part of my life's soundtrack, However, for whatever reason, some jazz doesn't work for me. Jazz that is intentionally highly discordant and "sqwaunky" (squawky/funky) leaves me cold. Last night I discovered that free-form jazz that incorporates Carl Sandburg's poetry is also not my cup of tea.

Now, hear me out, jazz has a history of mixing with poetry to great effect. Gil Scott-Heron did it with "What is Hip" and the "Revolution Will Not Be Televised." Be-bop music and the Beat poets makes perfect sense to me. But Carl Sandburg? You be the judge. This from The Abracadabra Boys from 1970.

    The abracadabra boys—have they been in the stacks and cloisters? Have they picked up languages for throwing into chow mein poems?
Have they been to a sea of jargons and brought back jargons? Their salutations go: Who cometh? and, It ith I cometh.
They know postures from impostures, pistils from pustules, to hear them tell it. They foregather and make pitty pat with each other in Latin and in their private pig Latin, very ofay.
They give with passwords. “Who cometh?” “A kumquat cometh.” “And how cometh the kumquat?” “On an abbadabba, ancient and honorable sire, ever and ever on an abbadabba.”
Do they have fun? Sure—their fun is being what they are, like our fun is being what we are—only they are more sorry for us being what we are than we are for them being what they are.
Pointing at you, at us, at the rabble, they sigh and say, these abracadabra boys, “They lack jargons. They fail to distinguish between pustules and pistils. They knoweth not how the kumquat cometh.”

To me this is Gangster rap. This is old school hip-hop. But is it jazz?  Listening to Sandburg read it, you'd want to think he was a "hep cat," but he is making a satirical social commentary of  youth of his time.

I'm not rejecting Sandburg or the band that put his words to jazz music, but wonder if they do better existing apart or co-existing as a discordant coupling? The former is art for art sake, the latter is absolutely jazz.