Perico
Aztec Parrot was in town this weekend. His nombre de pila is Darren de Leon. Back in the day (1997 more or less) his poetry crew (Los Delicados) and mine (The Taco Shop Poets) were the Beatles and Rolling Stones of the Chicano poetry scene. There were no performance groups like ours so the field was wide open to perform at places like San Francisco's Galeria de la Raza, L.A.'s Self Help Graphics and the Nuyorican Poets Café in NYC's Lower East Side. Back to Darren. Meeting him around 1990 left me perplexed. He seemed a total oddball to my San Diego-Tijuana upbringing. He was a Chicano from San Bernardino (Eisenhower H.S. '83), who knew his jazz inside out, could narrate the rise and fall of The Doors, listing their Venice haunts and who at about 25 years old or so then, had left his years of competitive golf behind before enrolling at U.C. Riverside.
We sat down on Sunday afternoon on the gravel driveway at Avenue 50 Studio in Highland Park to chat and maybe offer a guide to my perplexities. He was in town for the L.A. release of Joel B. Tan's book Type O Negative.
It turns out Darren's a second generation jazz lover. His father was a Marine stationed in North Carolina in the 1950s, when he fell in love with the music's syncopation and energy, but he couldn't pass the cardboard test. To get into a mainstream jazz clubs around the base, i.e. ones that served white patrons, the doorman wouldn't let anyone in whose skin was darker than cardboard. Darren's old man was a dark-skinned Mexican American. Turns out he probably ended up listening to better music because he ended up spending a lot of time in the African American jazz clubs.
To this day, as a tribute to his old man, whenever Darren drives south from San Francisco, his home for 14 years, he puts on Coltrane's A Love Supreme when he enters the Pacheco Pass. Miles Davis's music made its way through the belly of Darren's mom and into the womb. His father snuck him and some of his siblings into the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach in the late 1960s to hear jazz. How? The father greased the palms of the Mexicans in the kitchen. In elementary school he already knew ballooned cheeks on a trumpet could only mean Dizzy.
Darren never studied music but the jazz beats drip from his poetry. Here's a sample:
The hills of Temecula, Laden with a cross, Watered by tears. His deed burned and the ashes blown into his face Spit and fleas from a horse, mounted by a Stetson, a shotgun, a hanging rope strapped to his saddle. The minister Smiled from the foothill. "There's rail work in San Bernardino, Mess-i-can" - From "Four Notes in Chicano Jazz"
Darren's worked with high school age students for years. And he's worried about the future of Chicano poetry. Alurista, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Jose Montoya and Raul Salinas are the pillars of work born around the time of the civil rights movement. They're getting older, some are dying and there's little connection between the older and younger generation. That's one of the reasons he still drives the spine of California reading for anyone willing to listen.
Photo by Adolfo Guzman-Lopez
