by Steve Koenig

On the sales table at Vision Festival 2003, where musicians has their discs and poets had their books, I saw a new magazine, Shuffle Boil. Thumbing, through, I thought, “Drats! This is sort of what I wanted to do with Jump Arts Journal.” Shuffle Boil is a magazine, three issues and one year old, featuring writing about music and poetry about music and poetry by musicians. It’s standard magazine size, the first issue fifty pages, the third up to seventy-four.

Editors David Meltzer and Steve Dickison, of Berkeley, CA, made their way to New York’s Bowery Poetry Club to celebrate their magazine and their own poetry with music by bassist Reuben Raddings and drummer Drew Gardner.

In performance, Dickinson’s poetry was introspective, and the musicians were in a heated interplay with each other- with one problem. The musicians were playing their own thing, as if the poet was not there. As it went on, I found myself listening more to the music than the text, which I would have appreciated on the page of spoken alone. This was not bad if you like to listen to incongruent layers, as I do, but it wasn’t a collaboration.

The second part featured poet Meltzer’s more outgoing and humorous work, and this time, Meltzer seemed to lead the musicians with his words and phrasing, forcing much more interaction. When he read a piece for the late bassist Peter Kowald, Radding had his strings sigh. There was a great poem sending up both California life and Eastern philosophy, “like fortune/ when the hibachi/ rusty with bird shit/ dung of crane.” His piece about the Runyoneque characters “Nasty and Moxy” had everyone in stitches. Multi-instrumentalist Sabir Mateen joined the poets for the second set, but I had a prior commitment.

The three issues of the magazine are an interesting verbal and sometime visual collage of texts and graphics. The pieces range from standard jazz-praise-poems which do lots of name dropping, some fine, some just for those who think it’s hip to feel not blue but kind of, to quotes from Captain Beefheart and fascinating musicology such as a copy and translation of a French article about a concert by the Lebanese singer Fairuz.

At twelve dollars for an annual three issues, this is a fun and often deep read that's well worth the time browsing and enjoying pieces such as Larry Ochs’ (from ROVA saxophone quartet) recommendations of Xenakis on disc and, the kind of thing that will make you keep the mag as well, a reproduction of a Steve Lacy song to Yehudi Menuhin. I’m looking forward to issue #4.