TIN MEN AND THE TELEPHONE at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, July 2017 Poem by Hazel Smith

It’s easy to slip behind
while thinking you
are striding far ahead

so often a jazz performance
only swings with sub-Coltrane licks

but experimentalism is the whipping boy
of evolution

enter the latest post-postmodern act:
Tin Men and the Telephone

mobile remix
electro-fireworks
cosmic splashdowns
audience mash-ups

they carve sonic satire
from the tin ears
of politicians

to which pitches will they spin?
fast, slow or sleight of hand?

which world leader do you
crave to eliminate?

coloured circles
flutter quizzically on a
jazzy clockface

you phone in
so don’t tune out —

tin soldiers
conjure the regimented, militaristic
and as for the telephone —
a tetchy anachronism
dialling into the futuristic

natural selection as
the avant-garde of
audience enlistment

Tin Men & the Telephone is an Amsterdam based band that employs live electronics, projected visuals, and audience participation in improvised music.

Hazel Smith

Hazel is active in the areas of poetry, performance, new media and academia. Her work has appeared in numerous international literary magazines and in literary, musical and multimedia anthologies. She has published four volumes of poetry: Abstractly Represented: Poems and Performance Texts 1982-90, Butterfly Books, 1991; Keys Round her Tongue: short prose, poetry and performance texts, Soma, 2000; The Erotics of Geography: poetry, performance texts, new media works, Tinfish Press, 2008 (accompanied by a CD-Rom of new media and performance works with Roger Dean); and Word Migrants (Giramondo Publishing, 2016). Hazel is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University.