Poet's performance felt more deeply to quartet's music

Yusef Komunyakaa's voice is like a cello when he reads, deep and melodious and blended. The Pulitzer Prize winner and former IU faculty member returned to Bloomington Saturday night to filled seats at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater. To many of them, he was already a god.\nJoining him was the Susie Ibarra Quartet, a percussion-based jazz ensemble. \nKomunyakaa read first by himself, without the music. But his voice became a melody that seemed to evade the words themselves. As he read, he became more energetic and comfortable, perhaps because he was reading older pieces. He did remain relatively stiff through the whole performance. The experience of him reading by himself was lulling and calming, as if he were trying to create a melody in the absence of the music.\nWhen the Susie Ibarra Quartet joined him, they added that needed melody, though ironically the music itself was interpretive and did not really consist of a set melody. \nThe music culminated and complimented his words in a way that the melody of his voice came just short of. His voice resided in the calm, and the music broke that calm and made the words sing.\nAll of the artists performing on stage would be convincingly very talented to anyone with a remote appreciation for jazz or poetry. The combination of two drummers playing different percussion instruments, a pianist and a violinist made what seemed perfect compliments of each other.\nJazz often lends itself well to poetry, but the collaboration of the artists involved created a wonderful interplay between mediums and instruments.\nIt seemed obvious that Komunyakaa was feeling the performance with the Suzie Ibarra Quartet more deeply than when he was performing by himself. It showed in the way he performed. His voice became punchier, like strings being plucked rather than bowed. This made his poems easier to understand than when he was speaking them without music. The aura of the music created a moving backdrop for this more gutsy expression that culminated in a tension about to break -- and made it beautiful.\nThe highlight of the performance was appropriately the last piece, in which Komunyakaa was accompanied only by a Tibetan bowl that created a serene ringing sound, adding a surreal-like quality to his words. \n"If life is a dream," he said. "Good god, what a dream I've had."\nWhen he walked off the stage, it was like a dream.