09 Dec 2011
by arlenecorwin
in 2011, circling round baths, coffee book
My Drug of Choice
My whimsy,
No one paying me – I guarantee -
My drug of choice is coffee.
A little bit embarrassed, still
I must admit
That getting up and out of bed,
Productive, calm, ideas in head,
With energy the captivating motivation,
It’s magician caffeine,
Slick with tricks
Transfixing and converting dullness
In the intellect
To masterpiece,
Accomplishment, t
The scent of genius
In the air
- all there -
Charmed caffeine powers
Potential for some hours,
Then like all things that exist,
Transient, evanescent, transitory,
Drawn to Time by time
Evaporates leaving just – me.
Drug Of Choice 10.23.2011
Coffee Book; Circling Round Baths;
Arlene Corwin
11 May 2011
by arlenecorwin
in 2011, cat book, coffee book
Catnap Time
Cup of coffee. Mind alert.
Have turt-
le doved
My way through lunch
With Kent. And now,
An hour later
In a chair, I bow
To catnap time.
(In fact, the cat is napping
Atop Birdie’s cage*;
Incomprehensible, this marriage).
Outside, there is a bit of thunder,
Bit of rain,
A bit of covering up of sun.
Inside again,
Kent snoring on the sofa
(a bit – just like the distant thunder).
Windless, soundless
In and out the house,
Except for gentle scratchings
From this penciled place
On piece of paper,
Plus a tone inside my ear.
Post pause:
Sun’s shed its dark disguise,
Cat, bird and flies
Return
To life outside and in.
*Birdie is our Australian parakeet elegans .
Cat Nap Time 5.11.2011
Coffee Book; Cat Book;
Arlene Corwin
27 Dec 2010
by arlenecorwin
in coffee book, God book
Just a thought during this Christmas season 2010
God Created Coffee Too
Why is it I think favored thoughts
With coffee as my cup of tea?
Meditate and contemplate
The many sides of You; for
Usually,
This brain’s poor,
Deficient,
Ruled by sloth,
Confused and unintuitive,
Unmotivated, insufficient,
Wanting, cloudy, low IQ’d.
All when I’ve not consumed
A cup to wake with,
Take a break with.
Must I live dependent on caffeine
In order to commune
With You?
Inane, I ought not to complain,
For You created coffee too.
© God Created Coffee Too 12.23.2010
Coffee Book; God Book;
Arlene Corwin
07 Dec 2010
by arlenecorwin
in 2010, a sense of the ridiculous, coffee book
In A Caffeinated Mania
In a caffeinated mania
I know what it is to be bipolar.
Words, ideas, take hold
And one is stuck at the computer
Or the nearest piece of paper.
It’s quite fun
And pity those on lithium
Who have this feeling all the time:
Rhythm, idea, words and rhyme.
Sounds like a witch’s chant.
I’m Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and
I’m grand,
A giant,
Genius…
(to rhyme with Dos…)
I had a friend
Who had this syndrome.
Now he’s dead.
He’s home,
I hope.
Thank goodness this condition
Tapers,
Wanes,
Dissolves
As coffee
Leaves and one is sane
Again
And dull.
I believe
It’s leaving.
s-uh-l
ow –ly.
© In A Caffeinated Mania 12.7.2010
A Sense of the Ridiculous; Coffee Book;
Arlene Corwin
07 Aug 2010
by arlenecorwin
in 2010, a sense of the ridiculous, coffee book
I Don’t Polish Everything
I do not polish everything.
Not furniture, not poetry.
Re-doing and renewing:
That’s not living,
The disparity
May lead to mediocrity.
Ok by me. May be that
That’s what’s meant by me-
diocrity.
For then,
When
I am eager,
Coffee influenced or not,
I polish till I’m saturated.
Table, forehead, verse may glisten.
Even-ing the energy, the will and talent.
One-draft-Amadeus was the deity
To do it.
I am not. Sometimes
I polish everything
And sometimes just say, “Screw it!”
© I Don’t Polish Everything 7.8.2010 A Sense Of The Ridiculous; Coffee Book; Arlene Corwin
15 Dec 2009
by arlenecorwin
in 1949, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1969, 1984, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, a sense of the ridiculous, arlene corwin's biography, autobiography, biography, birth death & in between, birthday book, cat book, circling round baths, circling round computers, circling round energy, circling round eros, circling round nature, circling round reality, circling round time, circling round vanities, circling round woman, circling round wrinkles, circling round yoga, coffee book, defiant doggerel, definitely didactic, doggerel, God book, I Is Always You is We, I Was Thinking..., lessons to be learned, life, love relationships, love relationships; circling round eros, lyric, mother book, nature of & in reality, numbers, on the way to the post, our times our culture, pure nakedness, recipes, revelations big & small, small stories book, special people special occasions, swedish book, the processes creative thinking meditative, to the child mystic, Uncategorized, vaguely about music, war book
Arlene Corwin’s Poetry
Just another WordPress.com weblog
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Arlene Corwin’s Open-Ended Biography
(10.3.2007 updated 10.24.2007 updated 1.3.2008; updated December 15, 2009, October 2010 )
Arlene Corwin (born Arlene Faith Nover) is an American jazz singer and pianist, poet, teacher and practitioner of Yoga. Born November 8, 1934 in the Williamsburg Maternity Hospital, Brooklyn, New York. She has two children. Jonathan Eric Corwin (born July 24. 1956 and) Jennifer Nover Council (born February 2, 1964). Mother Margy Lillian (born Brown). Father Albert S. Nover. Both were hairdressers, owning a beauty salon together. Everyone was musical on both sides of the family. Mother sang, could play some piano. Father was a gifted sculptor and wood carver, played a little harmonica and mandolin. The family is Jewish.
Early Life
Started studying piano age 8. Studied voice at the famous 1650 Broadway with ‘coach’ Matty Levine. Did a little recording at aged 10 in Nola Studios. (The record has since disappeared) At 12 she started studying harp with Meyer Rosen (Julliard and NBC Orchestra) and the occasional piano lesson with an NBC pianist who taught her how to read chord changes, seeing at once that she was not interested in learning classical piano.
As a child she had already sung at weddings, bar mitzvahs and for the USO, raising bonds for the war effort. At 13, having a boyfriend who played the saxophone and who listened to Symphony Sid, jazz disc jockey whose late night show originated from Birdland, she awakened to jazz, listening to the late night show “under my blanket”. “A turning point”, she says. (Well before “Lullaby of Birdland” was put to words Arlene had written a lyric of her own – a lyric she still sings today) At 14,she was playing for a dancing school once a week. Then she got an accidental job (“slipping in on a banana peel when the singer got sick”) in a Brooklyn nightclub singing with a group. “Mom and dad chaperoned, of course”.1950s
She began to sing regularly when again, out of the blue, an agent rang offering a job for a hundred dollars a week to play at the Mayflower Hotel in Manhattan. It was a restaurant owned by Bob Olin, a former light heavyweight world champion. “I was so naïve I played the whole evening without ever taking a break. Who knew about breaks? Why they kept me I’ve no idea.” But they did and the steady salary of $100.00 a week (which she gave directly to her mother, any other choice never occurring to her) and the experience of having to make a varied program led to her singing to the piano, and eventually to playing to the singing. At this time she was still in high school as attending the prestigious High School of Music & Art as a harpist.She graduated from Music & Art getting a scholarship to Hofstra College as a music major.
Then in 1952, while still at Hofstra College (now university), she was playing on the weekends in a Hempstead, Long Island nightclub-restaurant when Slim Gaillard, who’d come to see Jack Teagarden (also working there) began to take notice of her. He started showing up regularly. There he met Arlene’s mother Margy, and the two eventually opened a jazz nightclub, the first to cater to blacks and whites. It was called The Turf and it, like Birdland had its own radio show, for which Arlene wrote the theme song “The Slim Gaillard Show”. Now she was standing as well as sitting, getting a chance to sit in and sing as often as she chose. The die was cast. It was jazz, cool jazz.
Early Influences
In 1954, on the day she ought to have been attending her college graduation, she married Bob Corwin, a 21-year-old jazz pianist with the Don Elliot Quartet. Because Bob toured, Arlene began her new stage of education: listening to Don’s group while they played on the same bill as the jazz greats of the 50’s. There was Helen Merrill at George Wein’s Storyville in Boston, Terry Gibbs and Illinois Jacquet in Detroit, Bill Evans, Cy Coleman, Bernard Peiffer, Tal Farlowe,Johnny Smith John Mehagan and Billy Taylor (who had also performed at the Turf) at the sophisticated Composer owned by jazz lover and connoiseur Willie Short in Manhattan. ” It was also a chance to see and listen to other singers of the day. New York was marvelous in those days. I saw Peggy Lee at Basin Street, became friends with Blossom Dearie at Trudy’s in the village, Oscar Peterson, Marian McPartland at the Hickory House, Sheila Jordan, Morgana King. It was THE university for me. I was introduced to and mentored by Tony Fruscella, the tragic, unsung genius of the trumpet, ‘who I took on my gigs, but to whom I was actually the apprentice’ – and through Tony to Morgana King and Beverly Getz, the talented [and equally tragic] wife of Stan Getz. I feel blessed to have experienced jazz at that time. The guys would gossip about who played ‘behind’ or ‘ahead’ of the beat, bass lines, good changes, bad changes. No Music & Art or Hofstra did that. I learned almost the whole of what is now called The American Songbook. And I, I was sounding like Sarah Vaughn with a little voice.”
Hanging Around Manhattan; Not This, Not That…
Living in New York, and looking for a niche she spent time, as other musicians did, at the Musicians Union Local 802 or Charlie’s Tavern where jobs could show up. In this way, there were weeks and weekends away with big bands: Tommy Dorsey’s Orchestra under the leadership of Warren Covington, Claude Thornhill and Larry Sonn.
“When you hang around New York all kinds of opportunities show up”. And so, she got a leading role in a B film called “Jukebox Racket’, wrote the score for another B film called, at the time “She Should Have Stayed In Bed”, later to be called ‘1,000 Shapes Of A Female: see IDMB (the company, called Exploit Films was owned by Errol Flynn “tall, big in every way, veins on his face, but exuding old world charm” He was quite, quite overwhelming.”
Then there was a bit part in John Cassavetes “Shadows”, followed by the lead in what has become a cult ‘beat’ musical called “The Nervous Set” by Fran and Jay Landesman where she introduced the now-standards “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most and “Ballad Of The Sad Young Men”, both subsequently recorded by Ella Fitzgerald, Shirley Bassey and numberless major artists. She studied acting with Joshua Shelley. “It was a time to find out who and what I was. “I was definitely not an actress. I was too introverted and none of those clothes fit” she says.
More Influences and more Not This, Not That…
In 1959 she met Johnny Burke (Burke & Van Heusen) who took her under his wing, taking her to Hollywood to demonstrate his show “Donnybrook” for Rosalind Russell and husband, producer Frederick Brisson “It was a glitzy time. I stayed at Bob Hope’s house in Palm Springs, met Frank Sinatra and his then fiancee Juliet Prowse, Jerry Lewis, Marlene Deitrich, had my own suite in Las Vegas , traveled first class, but was so introverted I always kept to myself, never saying much, definitely not participating in any of these scenes. Those clothes didn’t fit either.”
All the while she returned to the intimacy of New York supper clubs. They were the bottom line, singing and playing.
It was during the supper club period, she met Al Weissman who became her manager. She was signed to the Joe Glazer Agency and began to tour with her own trio. “Wherever I went they’d say, “You know, there’s just been a girl here who sounds like you. Her name was Barbra something. I suppose we had Brooklyn Jewishness in common. ” (She too was signed with Glazer.)
Although published by Frank Publishing (owned by composer Frank Loesser) years later she asked for the songs back because “nothing happened.” “It was a period of promise, a period I was not equipped to fulfill”.
1960s-1970s
In 1962 it was back to Hollywood with Al Weissman and high hopes. “I had some jobs, but never in my genre.” Back to New York. A little jaunt of songwriting with singer Dick Haymes. A short marriage of four months to Richard Robin Palmer.
Greece, Lebanon, Greece, Oxford – Yoga & Jazz
In 1966, by way of Paris, Greece (where she and husband Jim Council were neighbors with Leonard Cohen and Marianne) and Lebanon, “where I actually managed to do some television, singing jazz”, she settled in Oxford, England for the next 18 years, teaching yoga,(“lectured and demonstrated in what must have been a hundred Women’s Insitutes, posed for one of the very first health magazines called Health & Fitness, wrote articles on nutrition, had a weekly radio spot on a little radio show for BBB Oxford actually doing Yoga on radio while describing each pose with a microphone up my nose, did a tape on meditation – it was a lot of Yoga”) and singing and playing, being voted Best Jazz Singer in the Midlands 1972, appearing at Ronnie Scott’s three times. She did 3 television shows; a late night BBC jazz show called “In The Cool Of The Evening”, radio for BBC overseas, was invited over to Amsterdam to do Dutch radio, sang at universities around England, (“one night opposite Pink Floyd, “who were just starting out, I suppose”), the American air bases.
She appeared several times at The Stables in Wavendon (run by John Dankworth – now Sir John Dankworth – and Cleo Laine -now Dame Cleo Laine – while at the same time giving weekly yoga lessons to a group there, (which included Dame Cleo – “a wonderful
yogin”). The Wavendon All-Music Plan, later known simply as WAP “was the most stimulating and original enterprise I’ve ever encountered, pairing all kinds of musical genre. I even played on the same bill as Vladimir Ashkenazy.”
Starting in 1969 and all during the 70’s fate gave a push to the yoga side of things and Arlene was teaching yoga classes in doctor’s offices for hyper-tense, cardiac and overweight men. teaching regularly at conferences for IBM. She gave demonstrations, lectured all over for the Women’s Institute, posed and wrote for Health and Fitness Magazine (summer issue 1982) a book called The New Manual Of Yoga by Karen Ross (1973) wrote articles on nutrition, made a cassette called This Is Meditation. It was a full double life with Yoga taking half the time and singing the other half.
1980s to now.
In 1983 she once again ran into Slim Gaillard – this time in London. He asked her to appear on a television show he was producing that was to star himself, Kai Winding and Wayne Shorter. It was the last appearance she ever made in England.In 1984, finding Sweden fertile ground for singer/pianists, and meeting and falling in love with Kent Anderson, she moved to Sweden where she lives until today, performing, and writing regularly for “Live With Good Intentions” an online magazine.
Still growing, still changing
The latest news – 2009 and 25 years later, aged 75: a cd of her own songs for Imogen Records produced by George Reece, a concert of Johnny Mercer to commemorate his 100th birthday, poetry grown to 2000 poems (see Arlene Corwin Poetry).
2009 finds her favorite project on Google called Arlene Corwin’s Poetry, a project that started in 1949 or about 2,000 poems ago.
2010 landmark: First published book of poetry, “Circling Round Time” comes out in September “To The Child Mystic” the second due to come out in December.
Tags:arlene corwin’s background, biography, life
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23 Oct 2009
by arlenecorwin
in 1995, circling round nature, circling round woman, coffee book, our times our culture
All At The Same Time
I like to start the day with coffee:
Half black power, half au lait,
Turn on the Beeb, begin a poem.
Taking down a favorite tome-
A little read – I clean the bedroom,
Roam downstairs and get involved.
The menu solved, I wipe the floor
Then jump-rump to piano where
I sit, playing a tune or four.
Go back and start a bread. Then yoga
In a toga or a sweat suit,
Standing on one foot I eat a fruit
Then fetch the radio and go outside
To clip a hedge
And while in motion find I dredge
A title, line, a word or two
From deep within the conscious. Whew!
I saunter back because I’m haunted
By the drive to write it up,
So then, undaunted, drink another cup
(I know it’s bad) of caffeined brew.
(It’s such a pleasant thing to do).
Then turning art toward starting lunch,
Poetic hunch aside, I stretch -
A bit more yoga. Oh, the post:
Walk up the road –four hundred meters.
Smell the air. What could be sweeter?
Well, that’s taken care of most.
It’s flame October, mushrooms wanting to be picked.
I’ve time to rove o’er hill and ditch, bog and moss.
I’ve no success.
Through trudge and brook and mushroom book
I know no longer where to look
And bear my bucket home again, no worse for wear,
Free from care, lungs filled with air.
Resuming chores, my song, my rhyme,
My coffee, yoga – ah, it’s time
To greet my husband, feed the cat,
Giving all my warmth to that.
Feeding husband, cat and me – triple-sided chat for three -
I fall from grace and watch TV
Awhile, then go to bed and read -
Perchance to sleep, to dream – or maybe
Stand ten minutes on my head,
Tell God I want to do His will,
And then at twelve, lie quite, quite still.
©All At The Same Time 95.10.31
Circling Round Nature; Circling Round Woman; Our Times, Our Culture; Coffee Book;
Arlene Corwin
08 Jan 2009
by arlenecorwin
in 1994, coffee book, definitely didactic
Tags: 1994, coffee book, definitely didactic
Coffee (A Conflict Of Values)
Catering to a certain need
For stimulation, even relaxation
And the psychic high,
The coffee bean in cool, dark tin,
Fragrance and the oil in
The box or jar or bag’s supply
Of pleasure ought to make the drinker
Think a little about why
The bitter sweet is such a ‘stinker’
In whose absence droops
The mood, the energy, the good;
Drink whose undemanding look
In innocent or gorgeous cup
Creates the nervous, wrecked and ‘hooked’ -
Converting down to up.
Dear, oh dear, I fear
That life with coffee’s here forever;
Symbol of that quiet urge
Insistent – to reach high as sky
Feel the charm of stimulation,
Pleasant conversation’s purge.
To say this has a feeble ring.
Stimulation from a thing?
Surely pleasure comes from other means,
Less addictive than caffeine –
Out of reach of smell, taste, touch
Of java’s clutch (was Java Dutch?)
Of conversation’s time-filled waste;
Something needing not a brew
And not the company of two.
But then, energy from what?
Surely not a coffee pot!
Dear, oh dear, the will is weak
When pleasure lies within the cheek
And one has never learned the art
Of keeping silence in the heart.
Nasty habit! Coffee evil!
Wreaking havoc like the weevil
On plantations of the body.
Devil’s guest! One ought to use you as a test.
You steal upon the cells by stealth,
You speed up heart, adrenals, pulse,
God knows what else?
Claim vitamins, create unhealth
And still the peril lies elsewhere:
Down where habits have their lair;
Where vice meets virtue, mean, excess;
Where the lamest and the sagest
Battle for their piece of peace.
Posing as a social duty,
Threatening in its bitter beauty,
Dear, oh dear, I fear that life
With coffee’s here to stay,
My own cup a mere hour away.
From Macbeth, the coffee oath:
Stir the sugar, stir the milk,
Make the coffee smooth as silk,
Help the migraine, the depression –
Be benign in my transgression.
Tranquilize away confusion,
Make gregarious the nation.
Cof-free, cof- fiend? enemy, friend?
Or just coffee
And what you make it to be?
©Coffee (A Conflict Of Values) 94.4.21
Definitely Didactic ; Coffee Book;
Arlene Corwin
08 Jan 2009
by arlenecorwin
in 1993, coffee book, nature of & in reality
Where’s My Free Will Got To?
Just a chemical being,
Down one second, up the next?
A cup of coffee all it takes
To take me from the world of snakes
To full production. Energy
That lies somewhere -
Suddenly awake and there.
I hate it!
I, a thing manipulated.
Am I just a world-bound being?
Is there something I’m not seeing?
Some first law that binds it all,
Some gluing law that says we’re soul
That must abide by natural law
Of bio-this and bio-that,
Bound up in drives like some tomcat;
Slowed down by glands that make you fat
And cells that die and lie and claw?
Where’s my free will got to?
©Where’s My Free Will Got To? 93.6.2
Nature Of & In Reality; Coffee Book;
Arlene Corwin
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