Free Verse Ode
This poem can be characterized as an ode. Why? Well, it's a poem of praise. It's a poem in which the speaker pays homage to the jazz musicians he loves, and to the power of their music. (Can we write an ode to Beyoncé? We love her.)
In terms of meter, it's written in free verse. How do we know that? Well, let's just take a look at the first stanza:
This is not bad –
ambling along 44th Street
with Sonny Rollins for company,
his music flowing through the soft calipers
of these earphones (1-5)
See how these lines vary in length? The first couple of lines are short, the fourth line is pretty long, with seven words, and the last line is only three words long. There isn't a set number of syllables in each line. What's more, there's no rhyme there. That's another sign that the poem is written in free verse style.
Given that this is a poem about jazz, it's pretty appropriate that it's written in free verse. Jazz, after all, is an improvisational music. Jazz musicians break "conventional" musical rules. Free verse is a type of verse that also breaks "conventional" poetic rules, by doing away with a structured meter. So the poem's form mirrors the music that it's talking about.
We can also see here that the stanzas in this poem aren't self-contained: the thoughts and sentences spill from one stanza to the next, as in:
and to the esteemed Arthur Taylor
who is somehow managing to navigate
this crowd with his cumbersome drums. (19-21)
This technique is called enjambment. So why might Collins have written the poem in this way? One explanation might be that the stanzas are mimicking the way that music is played. Musical instruments interact with one another, after all. The saxophonist doesn't stop playing when the pianist is playing, or when the bass player is playing. In jazz (and in all music), sounds overlap. In Collins' poem, the way that the stanzas overlap and spill into one another can be read as reflection of this.
So, the form of the poem neatly reflects the music that it praises. Still, it's not all open and flowing. The poem reflects order in other ways. It's made up of ten stanzas, and each stanza is five lines long. So even though the writer takes liberties with his free verse style, by varying the length of lines and doing away with rhyme, he still gives "order" to the poem by dividing it into ten parts of equal length. Sure, this is an appreciation of the openness of jazz, but it's also a controlled poem. The form within which this openness is appreciated is also important here.