Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Abbey Lincoln Sings Oscar Brown Jr.'s LONG AS YOU'RE LIVING


These beautiful, vital, and necessary, lyrics by Oscar Brown Jr., were composed in collaboration with Abbey Lincoln, Tommy Turrentine and Julian Priester. Presented here, on New Day, is the original recording, which appears as the concluding track of side B on the masterpiece, Abbey Is Blue, under the leadership of Abbey Lincoln, for Orrin Keepnews Riverside record label.

As I fell asleep last night, Grace asked Justice, why New Day? When I arose, this morning, it was this song which carried me from dreaming into the now. Thank you, Grace. You always know the right questions to ask!


Date: ca. November 1959
Location: Reeves Sound Studios, New York City
Label: Riverside

Abbey Lincoln (ldr), Stanley Turrentine (ts), Tommy Turrentine (t), Julian Priester (tb), Cedar Walton (p), Bobby Boswell (b), Max Roach (d), Abbey Lincoln (v)

Monday, June 21, 2010

Celebrating Eric Dolphy, born June 20, 1928



Show description for Sunday 6/20/2010 @ 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Eric Dolphy , born this day, June 20, will be celebrated this afternoon on New Day Jazz.

New Day Jazz


Justin Desmangles

Jazz music for lovers and the lonely.

Genre

Jazz

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TrackArtistSongAlbumLabelComments

Charles MingusWhat Love?Charles Mingus Presents Charles MingusCandid

Charles MingusAll the Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freuds Wife Was Your MotherCharles Mingus Presents Charles MingusCandid
========================== Airbreak ==========================

Eric DolphyGazzelloniOut to LunchBlue Note

Eric DolphyHat & BeardOut to LunchBlue Note
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Mal WaldronWarm CantoThe QuestPrestige - New Jazz

Eric Dolphy17 WestOut TherePrestige - New Jazz

Eric Dolphy & Booker LittleBirds MotherFar CryPrestige - New Jazz
========================== Airbreak ==========================

Eric Dolphy & Booker LittleFire WaltzLive at the 5 SpotPrestige - New Jazz

Eric Dolphy & Booker LittleBee VampLive at the 5 SpotPrestige - New Jazz
========================== Airbreak ==========================

John ColtraneIndiaThe Other Village Vanguard TapesImpulse - Japan

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Poetry, Jazz & Freedom by Rene Menil


It is the existence in itself of jazz, of major importance to us, that has more than any critical thinking caused us to understand the stylistic character and content of a work in its historical context and even its limitations and to grant the value of spontaneity to these works only.

In its essence jazz is improvisation. If one created a theory of esthetics using jazz as a basis, it would mean creating it using as a means the invention of the marvelous as one went along. Because jazz itself is the result of a process using the very contradictions of being and its style consists of forming by means of music or any other means (note this also applies to poetry) - emotions and images in progression, as they occur in the minds eye. Any blockage, any laziness, any rigidification of life threatens the true development of this delicate crystallization.

No rhythm is set before the beginning.

No meaning is conceived before hand.

No rhythm, no meaning except a passion for being - a being dedicated to a desire that demands its realization - or its substitution in the sublimation of "song."

The musician doesn't know, cannot know, what his next note will be, nor will he know his next phrase, or the next possible adventure.

But he leaps like a rope-dancer on the tight rope of chance.

A work of beauty is a work of chance.

However, how many agree with Goethe when he says that the only works of lasting value are works of chance?

At this point our existence is drugged by the poison of eternity. Jazz is one of the best antidotes to that poison, creating in us the feeling of the moment, of transition.

For us, we do not hesitate to view the moment, whatever it is called, as the arena where all the problems that are common to humankind must be resolved from the world of music or any other. In the moment is found all the previous instants to a particular action in the process of becoming - since, in any thing that exists "that which has been superceded is at the same time also preserved, and in losing its immediate and apparent existence, is not destroyed." (Hegel)

The moment of being exists in the present, however, the present itself exists in a particular existence that is the outcome of its extension through duration in time.

Thus, for things that exist, there is no contradiction that cannot be reconciled between the past and the present except the one that exists in the minds of those who attempt to abstract its essence. Likewise in a society there is no contradiction between creations that are contemporary and those that are the past, between new works (not yet accepted) and the existing culture; the new creation although it may not be "valued" or regarded presently as valuable - combines all the resources of that particular social group that is being considered.

A poet is not contemporary because he is familiar with the past or has rejected it, but because he exists as a dialectical outcome of those stages of past existence. Thus at the same time, he is a living negation and a living preservation of all the old cultural forms. His contemporary aspect will be broader and of a greater value because of the fact that it is a totality formed of the past.

Cultural traditions that are reflected by the poet cannot serve as a model, there is no model for what has not yet come into existence. It will exist, however, as a pillar of the past and thus situates the poet in his time inflexibly; it makes him a poet who is modern in a time that is modern.

So much for the freedom of poetry: before us the future unformed.








Tropiques, no. 11 (1944); translated by Juliet Petremont

Taken from the anthology,
Black, Brown & Beige: Surrealist Writings From Africa and the Diaspora
edited by Franklin Rosemont & Robin D.G. Kelley
University of Texas, 2009

Monday, June 14, 2010

From the Dark Tower by Countee Cullen


We shall not always plant while others reap
The golden increment of bursting fruit,
Not always countenance, abject and mute,
That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap;
Not everlastingly while others sleep
Shall we beguile their limbs with mellow flute,
Not always bend to some more subtle brute;
We were not made to eternally weep.
The night whose sable breast relieves the stark,
White stars is no less lovely being dark,
And there are buds that cannot bloom at all
In light, but crumple, piteous, and fall;
So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds,
And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.
















.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain By Langston Hughes


The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

By Langston Hughes, The Nation, 23 June 1926


One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, "I want to be a poet--not a Negro poet," meaning, I believe, "I want to write like a white poet"; meaning subconsciously, "I would like to be a white poet"; meaning behind that, "I would like to be white." And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet. But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America--this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.

But let us look at the immediate background of this young poet. His family is of what I suppose one would call the Negro middle class: people who are by no means rich yet never uncomfortable nor hungry--smug, contented, respectable folk, members of the Baptist church. The father goes to work every morning. He is the chief steward at a large white club. The mother sometimes does fancy sewing or supervises parties for the rich families of the town. The children go to a mixed school. In the home they read white papers and magazines. And the mother often says, "Don't be like niggers" when the children are bad. A frequent phrase from the father is, "Look how well a white man does things." And so the word white comes to be unconsciously a symbol of all the virtues. It holds for the children beauty, morality, and money. The whisper of "I want to be white" runs silently through their minds. This young poet's home is, I believe, a fairly typical home of the colored middle class. One sees immediately how difficult it would be for an artist born in such a home to interest himself in interpreting the beauty of his own people. He is never taught to see that beauty. He is taught rather not to see it, or if he does, to be ashamed of it when it is not according to Caucasian patterns.

For racial culture the home of a self-styled "high-class" Negro has nothing better to offer. Instead there will be perhaps more aping of things white than in a less cultured or less wealthy home. The father is perhaps a doctor, lawyer, landowner, or politician. The mother may be a social worker, or a teacher, or she may do nothing and have a maid. Father is often dark but he has usually married the lightest woman he could find. The family attend a fashionable church where few really colored faces are to be found. And they themselves draw a color line. In the North they go to white theaters and white movies. And in the South they have at least two cars and a house "like white folks." Nordic manners, Nordic faces, Nordic hair, Nordic art (if any), and an Episcopal heaven. A very high mountain indeed for the would-be racial artist to climb in order to discover himself and his people.

But then there are the low-down folks, the so-called common element, and they are the majority--may the Lord be praised! The people who have their nip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round. They live on Seventh Street in Washington or State Street in Chicago and they do not particularly care whether they are like white folks or anybody else. Their joy runs, bang! into ecstasy. Their religion soars to a shout. Work maybe a little today, rest a little tomorrow. Play awhile. Sing awhile. O, let's dance! These common people are not afraid of spirituals, as for a long time their more intellectual brethren were, and jazz is their child. They furnish a wealth of colorful, distinctive material for any artist because they still hold their own individuality in the face of American standardization. And perhaps these common people will give to the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself. Whereas the better-class Negro would tell the artist what to do, the people at least let him alone when he does appear. And they are not ashamed of him--if they know he exists at all. And they accept what beauty is their own without question.

Certainly there is, for the American Negro artist who can escape the restrictions the more advanced among his own group would put upon him, a great field of unused material ready for his art. Without going outside his race, and even among the better classes with their "white" culture and conscious American manners, but still Negro enough to be different, there is sufficient material to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work. And when he chooses to touch on the relations between Negroes and whites in this country with their innumerable overtones and undertones, surely, and especially for literature and the drama, there is an inexhaustible supply of themes at hand. To these the Negro artist can give his racial individuality, his heritage of rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous humor that so often, as in the Blues, becomes ironic laughter mixed with tears. But let us look again at the mountain.

A prominent Negro clubwoman in Philadelphia paid eleven dollars to hear Raquel Meller sing Andalusian popular songs. But she told me a few weeks before she would not think of going to hear "that woman." Clara Smith, a great black artist, sing Negro folk songs. And many an upper-class Negro church, even now, would not dream of employing a spiritual in its services. The drab melodies in white folks' hymnbooks are much to be preferred. "We want to worship the Lord correctly and quietly. We don't believe in 'shouting.' Let's be dull like the Nordics," they say, in effect.

The road for the serious black artist, then, who would produce a racial art is most certainly rocky and the mountain is high. Until recently he received almost no encouragement for his work from either white or colored people. The fine novels of Chestnutt go out of print with neither race noticing their passing. The quaint charm and humor of Dunbar's dialect verse brought to him, in his day, largely the same kind of encouragement one would give a sideshow freak (A colored man writing poetry! How odd!) or a clown (How amusing!).

The present vogue in things Negro, although it may do as much harm as good for the budding colored artist, has at least done this: it has brought him forcibly to the attention of his own people among whom for so long, unless the other race had noticed him beforehand, he was a prophet with little honor. I understand that Charles Gilpin acted for years in Negro theaters without any special acclaim from his own, but when Broadway gave him eight curtain calls, Negroes, too, began to beat a tin pan in his honor. I know a young colored writer, a manual worker by day, who had been writing well for the colored magazines for some years, but it was not until he recently broke into the white publications and his first book was accepted by a prominent New York publisher that the "best" Negroes in his city took the trouble to discover that he lived there. Then almost immediately they decided to give a grand dinner for him. But the society ladies were careful to whisper to his mother that perhaps she'd better not come. They were not sure she would have an evening gown.

The Negro artist works against an undertow of sharp criticism and misunderstanding from his own group and unintentional bribes from the whites. "O, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are," say the Negroes. "Be stereotyped, don't go too far, don't shatter our illusions about you, don't amuse us too seriously. We will pay you," say the whites. Both would have told Jean Toomer not to write "Crane." The colored people did not praise it. The white people did not buy it. Most of the colored people who did read "Cane" hated it. They are afraid of it. Although the critics gave it good reviews the public remained indifferent. Yet (excepting the work of Du Bois) "Cane" contains the finest prose written by a Negro in America. And like the singing of Robeson, it is truly racial.

But in spite of the Nordicized Negro intelligentsia and the desires of some white editors we have an honest American Negro literature already with us. Now I await the rise of the Negro theater. Our folk music, having achieved world-wide fame, offers itself to the genius of the great individual American Negro composer who is to come. And within the next decade I expect to see the work of a growing school of colored artists who paint and model the beauty of dark faces and create with new technique the expressions of their own soul-world. And the Negro dancers who will dance like flame and the singers who will continue to carry our songs to all who listen--they will be with us in even greater numbers tomorrow.

Most of my own poems are racial in theme and treatment, derived from the life I know. In many of them I try to grasp and hold some of the meanings and rhythms of jazz. I am sincere as I know how to be in these poems and yet after every reading I answer questions like these from my own people: Do you think Negroes should always write about Negroes? I wish you wouldn't read some of your poems to white folks. How do you find any thing interesting in a place like a cabaret? Why do you write about black people? You aren't black. What makes you do so many jazz poems?

But jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul--the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile. Yet the Philadelphia clubwoman is ashamed to say that her race created it and she does not like me to write about it. The old subconscious "white is best" runs through her mind. Years of study under white teachers, a lifetime of white books, pictures, and papers, and white manners, morals, and Puritan standards made her dislike the spirituals. And now she turns up her nose at jazz and all its manifestations--likewise almost everything else distinctly racial. She doesn't care for the Winold Reiss portraits of Negroes because they are "too Negro." She does not want a true picture of herself from anybody. She wants the artist to flatter her, to make the white world believe that all Negroes are as smug and as near white in soul as she wants to be. But, to my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering "I want to be white," hidden in the aspirations of his people, to "Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro--and beautiful!"

So I am ashamed for the black poet who says, "I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet," as though his own racial world were not as interesting as any other world. I am ashamed, too, for the colored artist who runs from the painting of Negro faces to the painting of sunsets after the manner of the academicians because he fears the strange un-whiteness of his own features. An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid too what he might choose.

Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand. Let Paul Robeson singing Water Boy, and Rudolph Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle class to turn from their white, respectable, ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.