Jazz and Poetry & other reasons

“Weaving his own experiences into general historical trends, Briggs’s talk becomes more poem than lecture as he explains why the beat movement continues to haunt the American mind.” – Lynn Darroch, The Editor’s Corner

Jazz and Poetry & Other Reasons is a series of performances created by Robert Briggs and produced by Stuart Fessant and Keith Scales. The objective of Jazz and Poetry & Other Reasons is the renewable combination of words and music that reveals why jazz is to music what poetry is to knowing.

Ever since the 1930s, the combination of jazz and poetry has offered inspiration and insight into feelings that freed the body and mind from mundane concerns. But since World War II, readings have been relegated to bars and bookstores where they are too often disrupted by alcoholic clamor or innocent book browsers.

Featured in theaters however, Jazz and Poetry & Other Reasons, will not only solve such problems but by scripting each read will produce a richer exchange between the musician and the reader that will heighten feelings and insights.

Robert Briggs was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1929 and attended Auburn and Columbia Universities and served in the Army during the Korean War. He was a bookseller in Greenwich Village and North Beach where he was involved in the jazz and poetry scene in the 1950s.

In 1972 he founded Robert Briggs Associates (RBA), a loose-knit group of West Coast consultants to writers and small publishers. The association was involved in the publication of a variety of nonfiction: Rolling Thunder by Doug Boyd and Mind as Healer, Mind as Slayer, Kenneth R. Pelletier’s classic book on stress, as well as works by Joseph Campbell, Stanislav Grof, Colin Wilson, and Theodore Roszak. By 1995 RBA became involved in multimedia projects.

A member of the Zen Community of Oregon, Robert Briggs is author of The American Emergency, 1989, and Ruined Time: The 1950s and the Beat, 2006.