The Poetry of Jazz

The lightning rod for Alabaster DePlume’s luminous follow up to the widely-acclaimed 2020 release To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1 was personal. “Someone was going through a thing,” says the Mancunian poet-performer. “I said, ‘go forward in the courage of your love’. And then I thought 'yeah, that's what I need to hear as well’.”

There's the title cut: or rather, the George Shearing instrumental to which Indin has set her own lyrics, and whose title "And then I wrote" she (re)makes her own, in tribute to the female poets she has mobilised for her project. Indin's feisty words against Shearing's cool vibe create a productive tension, as the female practitioner of a male- dominated craft takes over the "master's tools", not so much to dismantle his house as to rebuild it, driven both by her need for liberation "Speak your mind, pronounce it" and by her desire for a revivification of a revered tradition "I first heard this song / I had to hum along, / N' then I wrote these lines / Substantial words that rhyme." Rather than being cowed by her great predecessors, or crushed by the continuing injustices of her age ("Bewildered as I am / In these modern times"), Indin resolves to make her mark, on the musical world and in her life as a woman and mother. Because, as she writes, "Who gives in speechless? / Careless? Wordless?" Well, not Sonja Indin, that's for sure.