"We get our chance to vote yea or nay this Friday, when Pinksy and Hobgood bring PoemJazz to the Regattabar. And here's the good news: on disc, at least, PoemJazz works. A great deal of that success lies with the fact that the pieces herein — all by Pinsky but for Ben Jonson's "His Excuse for Loving" — work as music.
The notion of poetry with jazz suggests horn players and pianists vamping along impressionistically, reacting to lyric content, digging those crazy stanzas! But Hobgood — though he did mostly improvise on the spot in two studio sessions — plays forms. Key and chord changes hug Pinsky's verse closely. Exits and entrances, "solos" for voice or instrument, have a compositional logic. Pinksy, meanwhile, uses repetition as an effective song-like device. What's more, the two have a knack for resolving "choruses" in sync." Read more ThePhoenix.com: