Jazzing with Bigfoot
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JAZZING WITH BIGFOOT
by Marty Achatz and STREAKING IN TONGUES
Jazzing with Bigfoot is the completion of a trilogy featuring poetry by two-time U.P. Poet Laureate Marty Achatz and music by experimental father/son band STREAKING IN TONGUES.
"Marty Achatz's wildly original (and originally wild) Jazzing with Bigfoot reminds us that making mythology is one of our highest forms of play, one of our deepest delights. Blending ancient traditions of the epic and lyric, and the improvisational spirits of modern Jazz and the Beats, these enchanting poem-songs track their hairy hero's adventures through culture from Christianity to Cubism, poetry to rural parenthood, and across habitats from Michigan's Upper Peninsula to traditional Japan to the night sky's constellations. What we see when we catch up is, wondrously, ourselves."
-Jonathan Johnson, author of May is an Island and The Desk on the Sea
"Jazzing with Bigfoot is funny, audacious, sad, wildly inventive, and smart. It reimagines the concept album, fusing poetry and jazz into a genre-bending exploration of a beloved, elusive creature. Marty Achatz has created a project wholly his own in the intersection of humor and elegy -- a delightfully inventive place where we might imagine Mark Twain's Eve's Diary meeting an Ira Glass narrative with guest appearances from Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and Charlie Parker. In this beautifully quirky project, music is not just prelude or fade out: It is woven throughout, and it is companion to poetry. Put your headphones on, slip in, and float here."
-Cindy Hunter Morgan, author of Harborless and Far Company
"Even before Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald, and Joe Pass, Jazzing with Bigfoot was always meant to be. A U.P. gumbo of verbal freeform, mixing George Shiras with Pythagoras, Monet's fuzzy creatures with Robert Frost, Marty Achatz's poems, backed by the quirky, off-kilter jazz excursions of the father-son duo STREAKING IN TONGUES, leads you into the woods, where it's dark, thrilling, and funny as your favorite Saturday morning cartoon. Every phrase holds a Cracker Jack box surprise, every line leads you deeper into a literary thicket that reeks of matted fur, the blood of John the Baptist, and Mother's meatloaf, while Marty Achatz conducts his dauntless search for the spirit of the venerable Bigfoot."
-John Smolens, author of A Cold, Hard Prayer