Last Call at the Tin Palace

By Paul Pines

Poetry. For most of the 1970s, Paul Pines owned and operated the Tin Palace, a jazz club that hosted figures like Kurt Vonnegut and Martin Scorsese, and gave expression to the most notable jazz innovators of that time. The club was honored by the Tribeca Center for the Performing Arts as a "lost jazz shrine," and featured in Perfect Sound Forever as a venue that "... paved the way for today's ... live music scene." The poems in this book rise from the improvisational impulse that produced not only Eddie Jefferson and Charlie Mingus, but painters Joan Mitchell and Larry Rivers, and many of the poets drawn to the corner of 2nd Street and Bowery. Like the music he championed, Pines takes on the personal and universal themes of love and loss, the ironies of shifting alliances and archetypal forces, destiny, and the gods who honor those they destroy, in Parker-like solos that leap into the moment to create an arc that moves with undiminished urgency.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0978555570
• ISBN13: 9780978555573
• Release Date: September 2009
• Publisher: Marsh Hawk Press
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.6" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

Well worth the read for poetry fans

Memoir through poetry is the goal of poet Paul Pines. "Last Call at the Tin Palace" is his reflections on The Tin Palace, a well known Jazz club that Pines operated for quite some time. The club once hosted the likes of Kurt Vonnegut, and Pines tells many stories through fine verse. "Last Call at the Tin Palace" is well worth the read for poetry fans, especially those with an interest in the 70s Jazz scene. "Meditation": There must be an end/to this palaver/before and after sex//this nodding/acquaintance of love and isolation//Madman Cocaine/stitch up my mind/with the tears/in things that never speak//make my heart/a place/where all my friends/with swollen feet are dancing/without shoes...