Here’s a new live video from an improvised piano recording I made back in March. As an experiment, I wanted to record live and totally improvised piano while someone read poetry. Needless to say, we ended up recording sixteen tracks of music. Some of it came out better than expected and a few tracks were not bad I suppose. The poetry reader for that day was an actress named Brooklyn. She patiently read the poems from a teleprompter while I fumbled around on the piano. Neither one of us knew what the other was about to do, as I didn’t supply her with the poetry beforehand.
In a way, you could say that these recordings were spontaneous and totally live, and alive. It was fun playing in an improvised fashion. We recorded these tracks in about forty minutes or so. I feel like if we had spent more time, the recordings and performances would have been exceptional perhaps.
Either way, what you have here is something raw and unadulterated. The recordings were good enough to include in the podcast of The Poe Underground Podcast. I can only dream of what the recordings would have been like if we had more time. All in all, I would like to repeat this framework of live music and poetry going forward.
August 22, 2025 – D.K. Mckenzie
Seaside is a poem by Rupert Brooke.
You can listen to the full episode of the podcast episode of where Seaside first appeared.
The Poe Underground Podcast – Dreaming in Blue – Episode 38