Phil Bryant usually writes in a quiet room, but his poetry swings. In fact, his new book, "Stompin’ at the Grand Terrace," might be the biggest thing a Minnesotan has done for jazz since the Bad Plus recorded a Nirvana tune. With that move, the local avant-jazz trio opened a window on jazz music for a new generation of listeners. Bryant could do the same thing through poetry.

“[Jazz] will come back in some form or other, it always does and I believe it always will. It’s too great a music for it to never be 're-discovered' and then reinvented again by a whole new generation of people. It's America's true gift to the whole world,” says Bryant, who also notes that our new poetry-loving, jazz-fan president has already renewed America’s relationship with these somewhat history-bound art forms.

“Stompin’ at the Grand Terrace” (Blueroad Press), is a verse memoir that captures Bryant’s upbringing on Chicago’s South Side in the 1950s and '60s. A CD featuring jazz pianist Carolyn Wilkins playing backdrop is tucked inside.

The poet and Gustavus Adolphus English professor does spin plenty of music, mostly jazz (although he went through a Jimi Hendrix and Doors phase as a youth), when he isn’t writing. His relationship with those sounds echo across this collection -- particularly in the first section of the book, which follows the friendship between Bryant’s father, James, and Preston, the owner of a record shop. The two friends met on weekends, a stack of music between them, and talked about life by talking about music. Bryant captures these conversations, some ripe with "real-life language" (as the warning label on the CD calls it), others full of wonder and reverence for the artists at hand.

"I try to illustrate the 'ethnic' aspect of jazz through this select and rather devout audience of two. There still was a sizable audience for jazz in the Black South Side of Chicago then. It shrunk as time went on and as musical tastes and cultural shifts in the community as a whole started taking place,” says Bryant. “They were unique, I think, for their total devotion and advocation for the music, and for how it so deeply affected and informed their perspective on the world and their own lives. But during their time, there were a lot of serious jazz venues where you could still hear the music in all its power and glory.”

Bryant recalls his father waking him to see Sonny Stitt play an early morning set, and Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Coleman Hawkins, and Ornette Coleman feel as real and present in his life as his Aunt Janey, a formidable and supremely quotable figure who merits her own section of poems.

Bryant recalls his mother reading Shakespeare to him and his sister early in their childhood. "That was the first poetry I ever heard," he says. "She also liked Tennyson and would do a sort of spoken-word performance-poetry recitation of 'The Charge of the Light Brigade,' which was thrilling for my sister and me."

It made an impression. As a teenager, he began writing his own poems — mainly as a way to get girls. "Wrong — but by the time I figured that out, I was hooked. Both my parents were extremely literate, so I grew up with thousands of books in the house. It was quite extraordinary for a household like mine to have such a sense for the importance of books, ideas, and reading," he says. "When I said I was thinking about becoming a poet, they were both very happy, like I'd just announced to them that I wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer. That was pretty amazing on their part, and I was pretty lucky, given my proclivities, to have parents like them who understood what I wanted to do with my life."

Bryant will read at 7 p.m., Friday, May 8, at Mankato Barnes & Noble, River Hills Mall; at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, May 19, Common Good Books, St. Paul; and at 6 p.m., Saturday, May 23, at Magers & Quinn, Minneapolis.