Call It Music
Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song
in my own breath. I'm alone here
in Brooklyn Heights, late morning, the sky
above the St. George Hotel clear, clear
for New York, that is. The radio playing
"Bird Flight," Parker in his California
tragic voice fifty years ago, his faltering
"Lover Man" just before he crashed into chaos.
I would guess that outside the recording studio
in Burbank the sun was high above the jacarandas,
it was late March, the worst of yesterday's rain
had come and gone, the sky washed blue. Bird
could have seen for miles if he'd looked, but what
he saw was so foreign he clenched his eyes,
shook his head, and barked like a dog--just once--
and then Howard McGhee took his arm and assured him
he'd be OK. I know this because Howard told me
years later that he thought Bird could
lie down in the hotel room they shared, sleep
for an hour or more, and waken as himself.
The perfect sunlight angles into my little room
above Willow Street. I listen to my breath
come and go and try to catch its curious taste,
part milk, part iron, part blood, as it passes
from me into the world. This is not me,
this is automatic, this entering and exiting,
my body's essential occupation without which
I am a thing. The whole process has a name,
a word I don't know, an elegant word not
in English or Yiddish or Spanish, a word
that means nothing to me. Howard truly believed
what he said that day when he steered
Parker into a cab and drove the silent miles
beside him while the bright world
unfurled around them: filling stations, stands
of fruits and vegetables, a kiosk selling trinkets
from Mexico and the Philippines. It was all
so actual and Western, it was a new creation
coming into being, like the music of Charlie Parker
someone later called "glad," though that day
I would have said silent, "the silent music
of Charlie Parker." Howard said nothing.
He paid the driver and helped Bird up two flights
to their room, got his boots off, and went out
to let him sleep as the afternoon entered
the history of darkness. I'm not judging
Howard, he did better than I could have
now or then. Then I was 19, working
on the loading docks at Railway Express
coming day by day into the damaged body
of a man while I sang into the filthy air
the Yiddish drinking songs my Zadie taught me
before his breath failed. Now Howard is gone,
eleven long years gone, the sweet voice silenced.
"The subtle bridge between Eldridge and Navarro,"
they later wrote, all that rising passion
a footnote to others. I remember in '85
walking the halls of Cass Tech, the high school
where he taught after his performing days,
when suddenly he took my left hand in his
two hands to tell me it all worked out
for the best. Maybe he'd gotten religion,
maybe he knew how little time was left,
maybe that day he was just worn down
by my questions about Parker. To him Bird
was truly Charlie Parker, a man, a silent note
going out forever on the breath of genius
which now I hear soaring above my own breath
as this bright morning fades into afternoon.
Music, I'll call it music. It's what we need
as the sun staggers behind the low gray clouds
blowing relentlessly in from that nameless ocean,
the calm and endless one I've still to cross.
Literary Analysis
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Summary
Philip Levine places himself in a quiet room in Brooklyn Heights and lets an ordinary bodily act, breathing, open into memory, music, and mortality. The poem begins with the near-rhythm of breath and the sound of Charlie Parker playing on the radio, then moves outward into a remembered scene involving Parker, Howard McGhee, and the vulnerable aftermath of performance. Levine's mind keeps returning to the difference between sound and silence, genius and damage, the public life of art and the private fragility of the body.
As the poem progresses, the present tense of listening becomes inseparable from the past: the speaker recalls working on the docks, singing inherited Yiddish songs, and later meeting Howard years after Parker's collapse. These memories are not arranged as a simple tribute; they are filtered through the speaker's own aging body and his awareness that breath itself is temporary. The final movement turns reflective and almost surrendering, as the speaker accepts music as a name for what cannot be fully named, a form of endurance that helps people face the approach of darkness and the unknown ahead.
Theme
- Art as survival - Music becomes more than performance; it is a way to keep living through pain, time, and uncertainty. The poem treats Parker's playing and the speaker's own breathing as parallel acts of endurance.
- Breath and embodiment - The poem repeatedly links breath, voice, and life itself. Levine suggests that to breathe is already to participate in a kind of music, while also reminding the reader how fragile that process is.
- Memory and witness - The speaker builds the poem from remembered voices, places, and stories told by others. The act of remembering preserves Parker and Howard, even as the details show how partial and mediated that preservation is.
- Genius and damage - Parker is presented as brilliant but physically and emotionally undone, which creates a tension between artistic greatness and human collapse. The poem respects the achievement without romanticizing the suffering.
- Silence beneath music - Although the poem celebrates sound, it keeps returning to quiet, silence, and the limits of language. Levine implies that music carries an element of the unsayable, something that exists even when no note is being played.
- Acceptance of mortality - The closing image of the sea and the fading day frames the poem's meditation on aging and death. Music becomes a companion to the speaker as he faces what lies beyond his own crossing.
Literary Devices
- Free verse - The poem's open form matches its drifting movement between present observation, memory, and reflection. The lack of fixed meter lets Levine sound conversational while still building emotional momentum.
- Imagery - Sensory details such as sunlight, breath, rain-washed sky, and the taste of air give the poem physical presence. These images ground its abstract meditations in lived experience.
- Juxtaposition - Levine places Parker's artistic intensity beside damaged bodies, hotel rooms, loading docks, and ordinary city streets. The contrast deepens the poem's sense that beauty exists alongside exhaustion and vulnerability.
- Metaphor - Breath is treated as a kind of music, and music is treated as a form of life entering and leaving the body. This metaphor allows the poem to connect art with the most basic human functions.
- Allusion - References to Charlie Parker, Howard McGhee, and related jazz history give the poem a rich cultural frame. These allusions turn a personal meditation into a wider conversation about American music.
- Repetition - Words and phrases about breath, silence, and music recur throughout the poem. The repetition helps mimic musical riffing while reinforcing the poem's central concerns.
- Paradox - The poem repeatedly joins opposites, such as silent music, the living breath, and a body that is both automatic and essential. These tensions capture Levine's sense that art often names what ordinary language cannot.
Symbolism
- Breath - Breath stands for life, mortality, and the hidden music of being alive. It is both biological necessity and a metaphor for artistic expression.
- Charlie Parker's music - Parker's playing symbolizes genius that cannot be separated from pain and instability. It also becomes a model for art that outlives the artist's damaged body.
- The sky - The clear sky and later gray clouds reflect changes in feeling and perspective. It can suggest openness, clarity, and then the approach of obscurity or death.
- Hotel room - The hotel room functions as a temporary shelter for Parker's exhausted body and as a symbol of the transient life of performance.
- The sea - The unnamed ocean at the end suggests the unknown future, death, or the final passage every life must make. It gives the poem's meditation on music a vast, uncertain horizon.
- Railway Express loading docks - The docks symbolize labor, hardship, and the speaker's own physical life outside the world of art. They help connect musical creation with working-class experience.
Tone
Levine's tone is reverent, searching, and quietly self-questioning. He honors Charlie Parker without turning him into a myth, and he honors Howard McGhee as a human witness rather than a heroic figure. The mood, however, is more unsettled: the poem feels tender and luminous at first, then increasingly haunted by silence, bodily vulnerability, and the sense that beauty is always moving toward disappearance.
Historical Context
The poem draws on the world of mid-century jazz, especially the culture surrounding Charlie Parker and the musicians who knew him. Levine writes from a later perspective, looking back on an era in which bebop transformed American music while many of its artists lived under severe physical, emotional, and social strain. That larger jazz history matters here because the poem treats improvisation, collapse, and endurance as inseparable.
Levine is also writing from a strongly urban and working-class American context. His attention to docks, city neighborhoods, immigrant languages, and everyday labor reflects a broader postwar literary interest in the lives of workers and in the textures of city experience. The poem's mix of jazz history and personal memory places it within a tradition that sees American art as emerging from both struggle and improvisation.