Aaron Copland at his Piano
(Rock Hill, 1978)
BY King Wehrle
Library of Congress

One of the more telling connections between basketball and music is heard and seen during the opening montage of Spike Lee’s film He Got Game. With images of basketball spanning the landscape of the United States, from fields of golden wheat in the Midwest to the urban playgrounds of New York City to courts along the Pacific Ocean, the accompanying music is Aaron Copland’s “John Henry.” The composition itself takes the story of John Henry, the mythic figure of American folklore, a man born a slave yet who acquires transcendent appeal in his labor against the steam engine. At the heart of this folktale is the belief in the pastoral America before the machine (industrialism) enters the garden, America is a utopian commonwealth. Copland’s composition carries with it a nostalgia for an America that no longer is, and as the composition unfolds, the music contrasts with the images presented on screen — quick and improvisational moves — alley-oops, slam dunks, shake-and-bake maneuvers, and sleight-of-hand tricks and theatrics.

This conflict between the “formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games,” as the great Fitzgerald^[7] wrote, the cadence of which we see in the jump-cut juxtapositions of basketball, and the nostalgic, fluid sounds of Copland’s score, offers us a broad range of views on American society. The nation that offered the world its Declaration of Independence, full of rhetorical flourishes and high-sounding phrases of liberty and equality, has also produced writers famed for novels exploring crime and vice — a nation’s ideals and ideas in conflict with itself. America, too, like any nation, also has past and present in conflict. While Barzun claimed that to know America is to know baseball, that vision of the nation, of the preindustrial utopia, is well in the rear view mirror of the current machine, one of clocks and quick decisions, a world where we must improvise with those around us to create something of meaning that, no matter how we draw it up, is subject to revision, or as the poet Carl Sandburg put it, “Building, breaking, rebuilding.”

In the early 1990s, when jazz, in all its varied frequencies, was becoming transformed into the music of the conservatories, brought to us by Movado, a black man with dreadlocks and driving voice performed a poem that captured the cadence of basketball as I heard it. The poem chronicled, with Homeric heroism, the infinite conquests of Earvin Johnson, rightly nicknamed “Magic” — the legendary point guard for those dynastic Los Angeles Lakers of the 1980s — a man of endless creativity, a muse for any poet with the ear to transform motion into sound.

Missouri-born poet Quincy Troupe, it should come as no surprise then, has written poems on basketball as well as autobiographies on recording giants, including jazz legend Miles Davis. Troupe’s performance that day over two decades ago in the colonial village of northern New Jersey captured the jazz cadence of basketball, where set plays open up into improvisational moments that display creative genius. He writes in “A Poem for Magic,”

These few lines capture part of the magic of Magic Johnson because it unfolds in time and space, suggesting the fluid openness of basketball. It is a poetry driven by verbs, by movement, by constellations of images in an unbroken narrative sequence without a full stop to be found. Troupe’s achievement is both formless and full of grace, and the true challenge lies in the oral performance of the poem itself, making it a vibrant piece never read, heard, or performed the same way twice — similar to any basketball game, no matter how it’s drawn up on a coach’s clipboard.