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With gifts like “Le Jazz Hot,” “Beatin’ the Dog,’ and “Love in Outer Space” it’s no wonder why T. R. Hummer chose to sample the song titles of Jimmie Lunceford, Adrian Rollini, Big Maybelle, and Sun Ra for his new book, The Infinity Sessions. At the core of the collection are four suites dedicated to each of these jazz and blues artists, but for T. R. Hummer, it’s not so much what’s lifted as what’s left in return. To borrow again from the phrasing of Eliot, Hummer effectively creates something “unique, utterly different from which it was torn?’ As Hummer writes in “Blues in the Night,” “music needs no subject, but one always turns up”; and in The Infinity Sessions Hummer transforms these songs into small narratives that expose both desperation and devotion. The poems possess a wholeness on the page such that even a reader whose musical talent begins and ends with a barber comb and a bit of waxed paper can enter this collection and feel entirely at ease. This is in part due to those subjects that turn up, the careful renderings of the people who populate his landscape, but it also has a large part to do with Hummer’s impeccable ear and effortless humor. Surely a reader who only knows Big Maybelle and Sun Ra inasmuch as she knows their reincarnations in Lavay Smith and Amon Tobin can appreciate a line like, “On a good day, he would have pistol-whipped his mother.”
–Beth Bachmann, The Southern Review
In The Infinity Sessions, T. R. Hummer achieves a radical act of translation, creating poems that project the narrative of twentieth-century America implicit in the syncopated rhythms of jazz and blues. Hummer boldly stands up as a poet and rides with some of the obscure greats with whom he feels a deep kinship—Jimmie Lunceford, Adrian Rollini, Big Maybelle Smith, and Sun Ra—in a dazzling poetic cycle as melodic, surprising, and improvisational as the finest of jazz music.
Showing readers that the musician’s character is tested and formed in the merciless crucible of improvisation, Hummer forces forth his own unique character as a poet, testing himself to the limit within the mystery, sadness, and beauty of jazz. His vaultingly ambitious collection is a work of grace and nuance, its conveyance of music in words incisively original in achieving this “impossible” translation.
In the darkness, without a sound,
The relays close; the tape slides by.
What will it be this time? Shuffle for the lovers foundDead in an alley? Ballad for the boy
Who slipped over the edge? Nobody wants to call
The song. But this is fate. No mercyIn this business, the musicians know. They all
Lived and died for it, common names forgotten.
But note by note, take by take, their lyricalStumbling fattens the vault of heaven.
Omniscience has a lot to answer for. The seraphic reels spin,
Blues etched wave by wave on the shell of one electron.And then the great remastering: variations in the key of pain.
—The Infinity Sessions jacket notes