New Day

Ishmael Reed, Unreconstructed & Not Post-Black!

2012-02-12T21:20:00.001-08:00

Show description for Sunday 2/12/2012 @ 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

This afternoon, on the 5 o'clock hour, poet, playwright, essayist, and novelist, Ishmael Reed returns to New Day Jazz. His most recent novel, his first in over a decade, is Juice! A new book of essays, Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media, is the first collection of its kind by a leading African-American intellectual. Mr. Reed's online magazine, Konch, published it's latest issue this month.

http://www.ishmaelreedpub.com/

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	Artist	Song	Album	Label
	Miles Davis	Directions 1	Directions	Columbia
	Miles Davis	Side Car 2	Circle In The Round	Columbia
	Miles Davis	Water Babies	Water Babies	Columbia
	Joe Henderson	Escapade	Our Thing	Blue Note
	Joe Henderson	Caribbean Fire Dance	Mode For Joe	Blue Note
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Randy Weston	Samba Bassa	African Nite	Inner City
	Randy Weston	Niger Mambo	African Cookbook	Atlantic
	Gil Evans (Cecil Taylor)	Pots	Into The Hot	Impulse
	Cecil Talyor	Tales (8 Whisps)	Unit Structures	Blue Note
	Carmen McRae	I Left My Heart In San Francisco	Live At Sugarhill	Time
	Carmen McRae	I Didn't Know What Time It Was	Live At Sugarhill	Time
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Cassandra Wilson	I Didn't Know What Time It Was	Blue Skies	JMT
	Cassandra Wilson	Shall We Dance	Blue Skies	JMT
	Charles Mingus featuring Honey Gordon	Strollin'	Mingus Dynasty	Columbia
	Charles Mingus	Song With Orange	Mingus Dynasty	Columbia
	Gil Evans & Steve Lacy	Orange WasThe Color OF Her Dress, Then Blue Silk	Paris Blues	Owl
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Kenny Drew	If You Could See Me Now	Dark Beauty	Inner City
	Interview With Ishmael Reed By Justin Desmangles	Interview With Ishmael Reed By Justin Desmangles	Interview With Ishmael Reed By Justin Desmangles	Interview With Ishmael Reed By Justin Desmangles
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Kenny Drew	All Souls Here (excerpt)	Dark Beauty	Inner City

Will Alexander and the Ancient Future

2012-02-06T11:12:00.000-08:00

Show description for Sunday 2/5/2012 @ 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

This afternoon, on the 5 o'clock hour, poet, playwright, novelist, Will Alexander. We will be discussing his most recent works, Diary as Sin, Inside the Earthquake Palace: 4 Plays, and Mirach Speaks to His Grammatical Transparents.

“I am not of one persona, not of one mystery, but arrayed with intransigent neurons and timings. … I’ve splintered my own trajectory from a fissioning of threats which have issued from my great monomial leprosy. Which has created in me a raw ascensional vastitude, allowing me further millennia although the bodies about me will all have been destroyed. Because I speak out of blindness I am able to respond to spiritual extremity, which has transmuted dearth and soulless nightmare relations. Of course I am speaking from auto-causality, from an enriched alkaline insurrection, altricial, haunted, partaking cacophony from the cinders of nauseous aeronautics. Because I am Mexican and Seminole I breed schisms, I breed eloquent ransacking laws." -

Rosanna Galvez from Diary as Sin

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	Artist	Song	Album	Label
	Mary Lou Williams	They Can't Take That Away From Me	The First Lady of the Piano	Inner City
	Mary Lou Williams	Lady Bird	The First Lady of the Piano	Inner City
	Dizzy Gillespie	Dizzy Song (Lady Bird)	Jazz Time Paris, Vol. 2	Vogue
	Miles Davis & Gil Evans	Springsville	Miles Ahead	Columbia
	Gigi Gryce	Brown Skins	Gigi Gryce et Son Orchestre	Vogue
	Betty Carter	All I've Got	Out There	Peacock
	Betty Carter	Make It Last	Out There	Peacock
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Dizzy Gillespie	Afro-Paris	Horn Of Plenty	Blue Note
	Ahmad Jamal Trio	Billy Boy	Poinciana	Argo (Chess)
	Phineas Newborn, Jr.	What Is This Thing Called Love?	Phineas' Rainbow	RCA
	Charles Mingus	Mysterious Blues	Newport Rebels	Candid
	Billie Holiday	A Fine Romance	Music For Torching	Verve
	Billie Holiday	Cheek To Cheek	All Or Nothing at All	Verve
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Roy Eldridge	Crazy Driver	Little Jazz	Inner City
	Thelonious Monk	Sixteen	Genius Of Modern Music Vol. 2	Blue Note
	Gil Evans (Cecil Taylor)	Pots	Into The Hot	Impulse
	Andrew Hill	The Griots	Andrew!!!	Blue Note
	Andrew Hill	Alfred	Judgement	Blue Note
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Andrew Hill	Symmetry	Andrew!!!	Blue Note
	Milt Jackson	Out Of Nowhere	Wizard Of The Vibes	Disques Swing
	Zoot Sims	Slingin' Hash	First Recordings!	Prestige
	Buck Clayton	Passport To Paradise	Passport To Paradise	Inner City
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Sonny Rollins	Misterioso (excerpt)	Sonny Rollins Volume 2	Blue Note
	Interview With Will Alexander By Justin Desmangles	Interview With Will Alexander By Justin Desmangles	Interview With Will Alexander By Justin Desmangles	Interview With Will Alexander By Justin Desmangles
	Sonny Rollins	Misterioso (excerpt)	Sonny Rollins Volume 2	Blue Note

Quincy Troupe Errançities

2012-01-30T09:57:00.000-08:00

Show description for Sunday 1/29/2012 @ 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

This week, on the 5 o'clock hour, poet, essayist, editor, Quincy Troupe. We will be discussing his most recent collection, Errancities, as well as his new recording, SOUNDART a new tongue.

Many of the poems in Errançities had their origins in my visits to the beautiful French-speaking island of Guadeloupe. “Errance” is a French word meaning to “to wander,” or a “roving, wandering life,” also, “a risky, edgy, wandering life.” The title poem, “Errançities,” exemplifies all these concepts for me, as do other poems in the collection. I first discovered the word while reading the poems of Edouard Glissant, the late, distinguished poet, philosopher, novelist, and critical thinker from Martinique. I fell in love with the word and its meaning, and it seemed to apply to my life and the poems I was writing at the time—poems about different places I was visiting in the world.

But, and although I love the word “errance” and what it means, I felt it wasn’t exactly what I needed. So I coined the neologism errançities, an expression I felt more at home with, especially in the way the new word sounded, rolled off my tongue, and because it contains the word “cities” in it. In my mind I think of the word as a noun, because it identifies people, animals, places or things, even abstract concepts.

The rhythm and tone of errançities was also closer to another neologism of mine, Trancircularities, which was the title of my seventh book of poems, published by Coffee House in 2002. Also, in my mind, errançities means plural wanderings of many lives, rather than one life. Thus, Errançities is the title of this new book of poems: I hope you enjoy some of them.

—Quincy Troupe, January 19th, 2012, New York City

photo of Quincy Troupe by Chris Felver

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	Artist	Song	Album	Label
	Dizzy Gillespie & Charlie Parker	Shaw 'Nuff	Dizzy Gillespie All Star Quintet	Guild
	Bud Powell	Shaw 'Nuff	1960 Essen, Grugahalle	WDR
	Woody Herman	Four Brothers	Woody Herman & His Orchestra	Columbia
	Gerry Mulligan	As Catch Can	What Is There To Say?	Columbia
	Hank Mobley	Uh Huh	Workout	Blue Note
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Big Joe Turner	Shake, Rattle & Roll	The Boss Of The Blues	Columbia
	Lonnie Young	Jim & John	Southern Folk Heritage Series: Sounds Of The South	Atlantic
	Alec Askew	Emmaline, Take Your Time	The Land Where the Blues Began	Alan Lomax Collection
	Miles & Bob Pratcher	Buttermilk	I'm Gonna Live Till I Die Anyhow	Field Recordings of Alan Lomax
	Bo Diddley	Mumblin' Guitar	Have Guitar Will Travel	Chess
	Ray Charles	Movin' On	Hallelujah, I Love Her So!	Atlantic
	Howlin' Wolf	Going Down Slow	Howlin' Wolf	Chess
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Erroll Garner	Stairway To The Stars	Portrait	Documents (Japan)
	Erroll Garner	Stairway To The Stars	Portrait	Documents (Japan)
	Earl Hines	Piano Man	Earl Hines & His Orchestra	RCA
	Maynard Ferguson featuring Hank Jones	That Jones Boy	Birdland Dream Band	Fresh Sound (Spain)
	George Russell featuring Bill Evans	All About Rosie	The Birth Of The Third Stream	Columbia
	Charles Mingus	Gunslinging Bird	Mingus Dynasty	Columbia
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Lennie Tristano	Just Judy	Lennie Tristano 1946 - 1947	The Chronogical Classics
	Lennie Tristano	Spontaneous Combustion	Lennie Tristano 1946 - 1947	The Chronogical Classics
	Shorty Rogers featuring Hampton Hawes	Diablo's Dance	Shorty Rogers & His Giants	Documents (Japan)
	Lou Levy	Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead	Solo Scene	Fresh Sound (Spain)
	Hank Mobley	Roll Call	Roll Call	Blue Note
	Hank Mobley	Smokin'	Workout	Blue Note
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Quincy Troupe	A Man Walks In Slow Motion	A New Tongue	Soundart
	Interview With Quincy Troupe By Justin Desmangles	Interview With Quincy Troupe By Justin Desmangles	Interview With Quincy Troupe By Justin Desmangles	Interview With Quincy Troupe By Justin Desmangles
	Quincy Troupe	Poem For Magic	A New Tongue	Soundart

Matthew Shipp Interview on Elastic Aspects

2012-01-25T19:37:00.000-08:00

Show description for Sunday 1/22/2012 @ 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

This afternoon, on the 5 o'clock hour, pianist, composer, Matthew Shipp returns to New Day Jazz to discuss his most recent projects, including the forthcoming Elastic Aspects (Thirsty Ear). A preeminent figure in the development of the new music, Shipp stands among the giants of international art today. Also this afternoon, selections from the rare lp A Sign / I Was Not Alone (Out & Out Books, 1977), featuring the poetry of Adrienne Rich and the late Audre Lorde.

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	Artist	Song	Album	Label
	The Last Poets	Beyonder	Delights Of The Garden	Celluloid
	Jayne Cortez	I Have Been Searching	Taking The Blues Back Home	Harmolodic - Verve
	Matthew Shipp Trio	Alternative Aspects	Elastic Aspects	Thirsty Ear
	Matthew Shipp Trio	Aspects	Elastic Aspects	Thirsty Ear
	Matthew Shipp Trio	Psychic Counterpart	Elastic Aspects	Thirsty Ear
	Darius Jones & Matthew Shipp	Jonesy	Cosmic Lieder	AUM-Fidelity
	Hank Mobley	No Room For Squares	No Room For Squares	Blue Note
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Carmen McRae	As Time Goes By	Carmen McRae Alone	Amigo
	Carmen McRae	I Could Have Told You	Carmen McRae Alone	Amigo
	Carmen McRae	More Than You Know	Carmen McRae Alone	Amigo
	Audre Lorde	Meet	A Sign / I Was Not Alone	Out & Out Books
	Matthew Shipp Trio	Frame Focus	Elastic Aspects	Thirsty Ear
	Matthew Shipp Trio	Flow Chart	Elastic Aspects	Thirsty Ear
	Matthew Shipp Trio	Mute Voice	Elastic Aspects	Thirsty Ear
	Quincy Troupe	Finding The Lost Art Of Faith	A New Tongue	Soundart
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Adrienne Rich	The Mirror In Which Two Are Seen As One	A Sign / I Was Not Alone	Out & Out Books
	Etta James	W-O-M-A-N	R&B Dynamite	Flair
	Etta James	I'd Rather Go Blind	Chess Classics	Chess
	Matthew Shipp Trio	Explosive Aspects	Elastic Aspects	Thirsty Ear
	Matthew Shipp Trio	Raw Materials	Elastic Aspects	Thirsty Ear
	Audre Lorde	From The House Of Yemanje	A Sign / I Was Not Alone	Out & Out Books
	Cassandra Wilson	Blue Skies	Blue Skies	JMT
	Cassandra Wilson	Apricots On Their Wings	Days Aweigh	JMT
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Matthew Shipp Trio	Rain Forest	Elastic Aspects	Thirsty Ear
	Interview Matthew Shipp By Justin Desmangles	Interview Matthew Shipp By Justin Desmangles	Interview Matthew Shipp By Justin Desmangles	Interview Matthew Shipp By Justin Desmangles
	Darius Jones & Matthew Shipp	Black Lightning (excerpt)	Cosmic Lieder	AUM-Fidelity
	Matthew Shipp Trio	Stage 10	Elastic Aspects	Thirsty Ear
	Matthew Shipp Trio	Dimension	Elastic Aspects	Thirsty Ear
	Marlena Shaw	Liberation Song	Chess Classics	Chess

Head in the clouds he'd have said of himself, she'd have said elsewhere, his to be above and below, not know or say, hers to be alibi, elegy otherwise

2011-12-11T22:11:00.000-08:00

Song of the Andoumboulou: 50

by Nathaniel Mackey

-ring of the well-

Fray was the name where we came
to next. Might've been a place,
might not've been a place but
we were there, came to it
sooner
than we could se... Come to
so soon, it was a name we stuck
pins in hoping we'd stay. Stray
was all we ended up with. Spar
was another name we heard
it
went by... Rasp we also heard it
was
called... Came to it sooner
than we could see but soon enough
saw we were there. Some who'd
come before us called it Bray...

Sound's own principality it was, a
pocket of air flexed mouthlike,
meaning's mime and regret, a squib of
something said, so intent it
seemed. At our backs a blown
conch,
bamboo flute, trapic remnant,
Lone
Coast reconnoiter come up empty
but for that, a first, forgotten
warble trafficked in again even so,
the
mango seed's reminder sent to what
end we'd eventually see...

We had
Come thru there before we were
told. Others claiming to be us had
come thru... The ubiquitous two lay
bound in cloth come down from on
high,
hoping it so, twist of their raiment
steep

integument, emollient feel for what
might not have been there. Head in the
clouds he'd have said of himself,
she'd
have said elsewhere, his to be above and
below, not know or say, hers to be
alibi, elegy otherwise known...

have said elsernrheren

Above and below, limbo what fabric
intervened. Limbo the bending they moved
in between. Limbo the book of
the
bent knee... Antiphonal thread
attended by thread. Keening string
by thrum, inwardness, netherness...
Violin
strings tied their hair high, limbo
the headrags they wore... The admission
of cloth that it was cover, what
was imminent out of reach, given
what
went for real, unreal,

split,
silhouetted
redress

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	Artist	Song	Album	Label
	Louis Armstrong	West End Blues	Louis Armstrong & Earl Hines	Pathe-Marconi (France)
	Louis Armstrong & Earl Hines	Weather Bird	Louis Armstrong & Earl Hines	Pathe-Marconi (France)
	Earl Hines	A Monday Date	Earl Hines Solo	Columbia
	Earl Hines	Piano Man	Earl Hines & His Grand Terrace Orchestra	RCA
	Maynard Ferguson	That Jones Boy	Birdland Dream Band	Fresh Sounds
	George Russell	All About Rosie	The Birth of the Third Stream	Columbia
	Shorty Rogers	Diablo's Dance	Shorty Rogers & His Giants	RCA
	Charles Mingus	Gunslinging Bird	Mingus Dynasty	Columbia
	Ntozake Shange	Sorry	For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf	Buddha Records
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Count Basie	Little Pony	Count Basie & His Orchestra	Columbia
	Duke Ellington	Primpin' for the Prom	Primpin' for the Prom	RCA - France
	Sarah Vaughn & Billy Eckstine	I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm	The Irving Berlin Song Book	Mercury
	Sarah Vaughn	Let's Call the Whole Thing Off	Sings Gershwin	Mercury
	Langston Hughes	Horn of Plenty	Black America Vol. 5 / The Black Verse	Buddha Records Sunday Series
	Miles Davis	Blue X-Mas (To Whom it May Concern)	Jingle Bell Jazz	Columbia
	Carolina Shout	James P. Johnson	James P. Johnson	Columbia
	Carolina Shout	Fats Waller	Fats Waller Solos	RCA
	I'm Crazy About My Baby	Fats Waller	Fats Waller Sings & Plays	RCA
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Gigi Gryce featuring Clifford Brown	Brown Skins	Gigi Gryce Orchestra	Vogue
	Gigi Gryce featuring Clifford Brown	Deltitnu	Gigi Gryce Orchestra	Vogue
	Zoot Sims	Slingin' Hasch	Zoot Sims Quartet	Vogue
	Woody Herman	Four Brothers	Woody Herman Orchestra	Columbia
	Claude Thornhill	Yardbird Suite	Claude Thornhill Orchestra	Fresh Sounds
	Langton Hughes	Bird in Orbit	Black America Vol. 5 / The Black Verse	Buddha Records Sunday Series
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Modern Jazz Quartet	The Jasmine Tree	Under the Jasmine Tree	Apple
	Bob Brookmeyer	Jive Hoot	Bob Brookmeyer & Friends	Columbia
	Michel Legrand	Jitterbug Waltz	Legrand Jazz	Columbia
	Mary Lou Williams	Perdido	In London	Vogue
	Mary Lou Williams	Kool Bongo	In London	Vogue
	Edward Brathwaite (Kamau Brathwaite)	The Emigrants	Rights of Passage	Argo
	Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble	Tutankhamen (solo by Malachi Favors)	Congliptious	Nessa
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Bessie Jones	Beggin' the Blues	Roots of the Blues	New World Records
	Rose Hemphill	Rolled & Tumbled	Roots of the Blues	New World Records
	Ntozake Shange	Abortion Cycle # 1	For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf	Buddah Records
	Ntozake Shange	One	For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf	Buddah Records
	Kain	Black Amazon Fire Engine Cry Baby	The Blue Guerrilla	Juggernaut Records
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Joseph Jarman	Black Paladins (poem by Henry Dumas)	Black Paladins	Black Saint
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Joseph Jarman	Ginger Song	Black Paladins	Black Saint

Telling It Like It Is, with Daruis Jones & Paul Mooney

2011-11-30T10:30:00.000-08:00

Show description for Sunday 11/27/2011 @ 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

We are honored this afternoon on New Day Jazz to welcome one of the most exciting voices in jazz today, alto saxophonist, bandleader, composer, Darius Jones, in the 5 o'clock hour.

Also this afternoon, on the 4 o'clock hour, writer, actor, comedian, Paul Mooney returns to New Day Jazz. Mr. Mooney will be appearing at the Punch Line, in Sacramento, Dec. 1st - 4th.

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	Artist	Song	Album	Label
	Freddie Hubbard	The Intrepid Fox	Red Clay	CTI
	Dave Holland	Interception	Conference of the Birds	ECM
	Miles Davis	Directions	Paraphernalia	JMY
	Jack Hirschman	Occuparty Arcane	Private Recording	Private Recording
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Darius Jones	Chasing The Ghost	Man'ish Boy	AUM-Fidelity
	Darius Jones	Big Train Rollin'	Man'ish Boy	AUM-Fidelity
	Hamiett Bluiett featuring Quincy Troupe	Snake Back Solos	Nali Kola	Soul Note
	Abbey Lincoln	You Made Me Funny	You Gotta Pay The Band	Verve
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Henry Grimes & Rashied Ali	Moments (Poem)	Spirits Aloft	Porter
	Henry Grimes & Rashied Ali	Rapid Transit (excerpt)	Spirits Aloft	Porter
	Interview With Paul Mooney By Justin Desmangles	Interview With Paul Mooney By Justin Desmangles	Interview With Paul Mooney By Justin Desmangles	Interview With Paul Mooney By Justin Desmangles
	Henry Grimes & Rashied Ali	Rapid Transit (excerpt)	Spirits Aloft	Porter
	Louie Belogenis	Alabama	Tiresias	Porter
	Louie Belogenis	Seven Lives	Tiresias	Porter
	Darius Jones	A Train	Big Gurl (Smell My Dream)	AUM-Fidelity
	Darius Jones	Ol' Metal Faced Bastard	Big Gurl (Smell My Dream)	AUM-Fidelity
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Darius Jones & Matthew Shipp	Overvoid	Cosmic Lieder	AUM-Fidelity
	Darius Jones & Matthew Shipp	Weeja Dell	Cosmic Lieder	AUM-Fidelity
	Darius Jones Interviewed By Justin Desmangles	Darius Jones Interviewed By Justin Desmangles	Darius Jones Interviewed By Justin Desmangles	Darius Jones Interviewed By Justin Desmangles
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Dinah Washington	Cold, Cold Heart	Alabama	Oxford American

William Parker and Freedom Today

2011-11-07T10:53:00.000-08:00

Show description for Sunday 11/6/2011 @ 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

This afternoon, poet, philosopher, bassist, composer, William Parker returns to the program in the 5 o'clock hour. A preeminent figure in the development of the new music, Mr. Parker is a towering presence in international art & culture. His most recent release, on his own Centering Records, Crumbling In the Shadows Is Fraulein Miller's Stale Cake, is an extraordinary collection of solo bass performances. We will be listening in on many of his most recent projects, including those with David S. Ware, Planetary Unknown, and Craig Taborn, Out of This World's Distortions.

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	Artist	Song	Album	Label
	William Parker	Pointed Acceptance	Crumbling In the Shadows Is Fraulein Miller's Stale Cake	Centering Records
	William Parker & Hamid Drake	Anaya Dancing	Summer Snow	AUM-Fidelity
	William Parker & Hamid Drake	Konte	Summer Snow	AUM-Fidelity
	Farmers By Nature	Out Of This World's Distortions Grow Aspens and Other Beautiful Things	Out of This World's Distortions	AUM-Fidelity
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	David S. Ware / Cooper-Moore / William Parker / Muhammad Ali	Duality is One	Planetary Unknown	AUM-Fidelity
	David S. Ware / Cooper-Moore / William Parker / Muhammad Ali	Divination	Planetary Unknown	AUM-Fidelity
	William Parker	Velocity	Crumbling In the Shadows Is Fraulein Miller's Stale Cake	Centering Records
	William Parker	If There's A Hell Below	I Plan To Stay A Believer: The Inside Songs Of Curtis Mayfield	AUM-Fidelity
	William Parker Organ Quartet	The Struggle	Uncle Joe's Spirit House	Centering Records
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	William Parker & Hamid Drake	Sky	Summer Snow	AUM-Fidelity
	William Parker & Hamid Drake	Earth	Summer Snow	AUM-Fidelity
	Interview With William Parker By Justin Desmangles	Interview With William Parker By Justin Desmangles	Interview With William Parker By Justin Desmangles	Interview With William Parker By Justin Desmangles
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	William Parker	Green Mountains for Bill Dixon	Crumbling In the Shadows Is Fraulein Miller's Stale Cake	Centering Records

Will Alexander & Deep Time

2011-10-31T12:33:00.000-07:00

Show description for Sunday 10/30/2011 @ 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Our guest this afternoon, in the 5 o'clock hour, poet Will Alexander. His most recent book, Compression & Purity, is new from City Lights. Also featured this week, new music from alto saxophonist and composer Darius Jones. His new disc, featuring Adam Lane on bass, and Jason Nazary on drums, is Big Gurl (Smell My Dream). We will also be listening in on the extraordinary 3 disc collection from William Parker Crumbling In the Shadows Is Fraulein Miller's Stale Cake.

Few poets writing today can compare with L.A.-based surrealist Will Alexander in terms of the intensity of his imagination or his radically experimental approach to language as material object. Through the use of automatic writing, Alexander practices a surrealism of the word, creating densely textured layers of signification from its sounded and written forms. Compression & Purity, volume five of our Spotlight poetry series, is Alexander's seventh full-length collection. Known for his visionary epics influenced by poets like Césaire, Artaud and Lamantia, Alexander here returns to shorter forms to address his ecological, cosmological and historical concerns. Highlights include monologues from the perspective of "The Blood Penguin" and "The Pope at Avignon," a song by the "Water on New Mars," and an homage to Cesar Vallejo, "Combustion & Leakage." In true surrealist fashion, the book also includes both an autobiographical lyric essay, "My Interior Vita," describing the evolution of Alexander's artistic consciousness through jazz and surrealism, and his disavowal of the autobiographical process, "On Anti-Biography." An imaginative tour de force, Compression & Purity confirms Alexander's reputation among surrealism's foremost contemporary practitioners.

"This new & rich gathering of Will Alexander's works – always in progress – marks him again as the true successor among us to the likes of Surreal & deeply explorative figures like Breton & Césaire. No other poet writing in America today does it the way that Alexander does – a range of words & images that startle & create new pathways for language & the mind-in-freedom (“alchemical, mesmeric, totalic,” as he names them in these pages). Compression & Purity, so aptly titled, is the work of a true American & world master – & a joy to have & read." —Jerome Rothenberg

“Even at its most confounding, most silent level, this work will unavoidably enter and leave you by a genetic thread of conscious mind woven beyond your 'domestic horizon,; your ‘provincial description' to a vibrating ‘celebration of un-brokeneness.’ This song, in the genealogical terms of cognitive evolution, sings us backwards ‘or forwards’ into a state where we are undifferentiated from the cosmos and can speak, as Will Alexander does, in the full range at once of carbon from dust to diamond.” —Ed Roberson

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	Artist	Song	Album	Label
	Darius Jones Trio	E-Gaz	Big Gurl (Smell My Dream)	AUM - Fidelity
	Darius Jones Trio	Michelle Loves Willie	Big Gurl (Smell My Dream)	AUM - Fidelity
	Darius Jones Trio	A Train	Big Gurl (Smell My Dream)	AUM - Fidelity
	William Parker	Green Mountains (for Bill Dixon)	Crumbling In the Shadows Is Fraulein Miller's Stale Cake.	Centering Records
	William Parker	Philadelphia Clay	Crumbling In the Shadows Is Fraulein Miller's Stale Cake.	Centering Records
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Henry Threadgill Zooid	Lying Eyes	This Brings Us To, Vol. 2	Pi Recordings
	Henry Grimes & Rashied Ali	Larger Astronomical Time	Spirits Aloft	Porter Records
	Odean Pope featuring Marshall Allen	The Track	Universal Sounds	Porter Records
	Roscoe Mitchell & Muhal Richard Abrams	Romu	Spectrum	Mutable
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Alice Coltrane	Leo	Translinear Light	Impulse
	John Coltrane	India	The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings	Impulse
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Wasimxzama Khan Naseri	Kavali	Music In The World Of Islam: Human Voice / Lutes	Topic
	Dunya Yunis	Abu Zeluf	Music In The World Of Islam: Human Voice / Lutes	Topic
	Gadabursi Somali of Ogaden	Leader/Chorus Song (excerpt)	Music In The World Of Islam: Human Voice / Lutes	Topic
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Interview With Will Alexander By Justin Desmangles	Interview With Will Alexander By Justin Desmangles	Interview With Will Alexander By Justin Desmangles	Interview With Will Alexander By Justin Desmangles
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	John Coltrane	Chasing The Trane	The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings

Making Moves with Dizzy Gillespie & His Orchestra

2011-10-23T20:48:00.000-07:00

A Happy Birthday to Dizzy Gillespie!

Show description for Sunday 10/23/2011 @ 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

This afternoon we will focus on the contributions of the Dizzy Gillespie Afro-Cuban Orchestra. As part of these efforts, we will also explore the music recorded by Charlie Parker as featured soloist with Machito & His Orchestra, including Mango Mangue, as well as Okidoke. In bringing attention to this period, the great composer, arranger Tadd Dameron will also be featured, including his earliest efforts with Harlan Leonard, the small groups featuring Fats Navarro, and the neglected masterwork, The Magic Touch, recorded for Riverside. Along the way we will hear poetry from Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Claude McKay, Margaret Walker, Sterling Brown, and Langston Hughes. (Pictured at right, Harriet Tubman)

Runagate Runagate

by Robert Hayden

Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness

and the darkness thicketed with shapes of terror

and the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuing

and the night cold and the night long and the river

to cross and the jack-muh-lanterns beckoning beckoning

and blackness ahead and when shall I reach that somewhere

morning and keep on going and never turn back and keep on going

Runagate

Many thousands rise and go

many thousands crossing over

O mythic North

O star-shaped yonder Bible city

Some go weeping and some rejoicing

some in coffins and some in carriages

some in silks and some in shackles

Rise and go or fare you well

No more auction block for me

no more driver’s lash for me

If you see my Pompey, 30 yrs of age,

new breeches, plain stockings, negro shoes;

if you see my Anna, likely young mulatto

branded E on the right cheek, R on the left,

catch them if you can and notify subscriber.

Catch them if you can, but it won’t be easy.

They’ll dart underground when you try to catch them,

plunge into quicksand, whirlpools, mazes,

turn into scorpions when you try to catch them.

And before I’ll be a slave

I’ll be buried in my grave

North star and bonanza gold

I’m bound for the freedom, freedom-bound

and oh Susyanna don’t you cry for me

Runagate

II.

Rises from their anguish and their power,

Harriet Tubman,

woman of earth, whipscarred,

a summoning, a shining

Mean to be free

And this was the way of it, brethren brethren,

way we journeyed from Can’t to Can.

Moon so bright and no place to hide,

the cry up and the patterollers riding,

hound dogs belling in bladed air.

And fear starts a-murbling, Never make it,

we’ll never make it. Hush that now,

and she’s turned upon us, levelled pistol

glinting in the moonlight:

Dead folks can’t jaybird-talk, she says;

you keep on going now or die, she says.

Wanted Harriet Tubman alias The General

alias Moses Stealer of Slaves

In league with Garrison Alcott Emerson

Garrett Douglas Thoreau John Brown

Armed and known to be Dangerous

Wanted Reward Dead or Alive

Tell me, Ezekiel, oh tell me do you see

mailed Jehovah coming to deliver me?

Hoot-owl calling in the ghosted air,

five times calling to the hants in the air.

Shadow of a face in the scary leaves,

shadow of a voice in the talking leaves:

Come ride-a my train

Oh that train, ghost-story train

through swamp and savanna movering movering,

over trestles of dew, through caves of the wish,

Midnight Special on a sabre track movering movering,

first stop Mercy and the last Hallelujah.

Come ride-a my train

Mean mean mean to be free.

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	Countee Cullen	Heritage	Anthology of Negro Poets	Folkways
	Dizzy Gillespie featuring Chano Pozo	Minor Walk	Dizzy Gillespie Vol. 1/2	RCA - France
	Dizzy Gillespie featuring Chano Pozo	Cubana Be Cubana Bop	Dizzy Gillespie Vol. 1/2	RCA - France
	Machito & His Orchestra featuring Charlie Parker	Mango Mangue	Afro-Cuban Jazz	Verve
	Langston Hughes	the Negro Speaks of Rivers	Anthology of Negro Poets	Folkways
	Langston Hughes	I, Too	Anthology of Negro Poets	Folkways
	James Moody	Cu-Ba	James Moody & His Modernists	Blue Note
	Tadd Dameron Septet	Jahbero	Tadd Dameron Septet	Blue Note
	Bud Powell Trio	Un Poco Loco	The Amazing Bud Powell	Blue Note
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Margaret Walker	For My People	Anthology of Negro Poets	Folkways
	Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra	Things to Come	Bebop	New World Records
	Kenny Clarke & His 52nd St. Boys	Royal Roost	Jazz In Revolution	New World Records
	Machito & His Orchestra featuring Charlie Parker	Okidoke	Afro-Cuban Jazz	Verve
	Dizzy Gillespie featuring Chano Pozo	Algo Bueno (Woody'n You)	Dizzy Gillespie Vol. 1/2	RCA - France
	Modern Jazz Quartet	Woody'n You	Nica's Dream	New World Records
	Gwendolyn Brooks	The Preacher Ruminates	Anthology of Negro Poets	Folkways
	Gwendolyn Brooks	The Children of the Poor	Anthology of Negro Poets	Folkways
	Charles Mingus	Ysabels' Table Dance	Tijuana Moods	RCA
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Woody Herman & His Orchestra	Lemon Drop	Bebop	New World Records
	Elliott Lawrence	Elevation	Jazz In Revolution	New World Records
	Dizzy Gillespie featuring Kenny Hagood	Ool Ya Koo	Dizzy Gillespie Vol. 1/2	RCA - France
	James Moody	Tropicana	James Moody & His Modernists	Blue Note
	Tadd Dameron	On A Misty Night	The Magic Touch	Riverside
	Sarah Vaughn	A Ship Without A Sail	Great Songs From Hit Shows Volume 2	Mercury
	Sarah Vaughn	He's Only Wonderful	Great Songs From Hit Shows Volume 2	Mercury
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Dizzy Gillespie	Groovin' High	In The Beginning	Prestige
	Tadd Dameron featuring Barbara Winfield	If You Could See Me Now	The Magic Touch	Riverside
	Sterling Brown	Long Gone	Anthology of Negro Poets	Folkways
	Dodo Marmarosa Trio	Mellow Mood	Jazz In Revolution	New World Records
	Charlie Parker	Relaxin' at Camarillo	Bebop	New World Records
	Dexter Gordon - Wardell Gray Quintet	The Chase Part 1 & 2	Jazz In Revolution	New World Records
	Claude McKay	St. Issac's Church	Anthology of Negro Poets	Folkways
	Claude McKay	The Tropics in New York	Anthology of Negro Poets	Folkways
	Claude McKay	Intro / If We Must Die	Anthology of Negro Poets	Folkways
	Randy Weston	Con Alma	African Nite	Inner City
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Harlan Leonard & His Rockets	A-La-Bridges	Jazz In Revolution	New World Records
	Dizzy Gillespie featuring Chano Pozo	Good Bait	Dizzy Gillespie Vol. 1/2	RCA - France
	Dizzy Gillespie & Charlie Parker	Hot House	In the Beginning	Prestige
	Tadd Dameron	Dial B for Beauty	The Arranger's Touch	Prestige
	Tadd Dameron	You're A Joy	The Magic Touch	Riverside
	Tadd Dameron	Swift as the Wind	The Magic Touch	Riverside
	Dizzy Gillespie featuring Joe Carroll	Jump-Did-Le-Ba	Dizzy Gillespie Vol. 1/2	RCA - France
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Sarah Vaughn	Embraceable You	Sarah Vaughn	Emarcy

Does the Secret Mind Whisper? Nov. 11, 2011

2011-10-04T09:35:00.000-07:00

• Friday NOV 11

"Does the Secret Mind Whisper?"
Will Alexander, Maria Damon and Justin Desmangles
a symposium on Bob Kaufman, Black surrealism, and cultural poetics
7:30 pm @ Meridian Gallery, 535 Powell Street,

Co-sponsored with Before Columbus Foundation

“…the ‘secret mind’ represents the convergence of multiple cultural trajectories. It is the political unconscious of the US, which registers all the ‘secret, terrible hurts’ (Kaufman, “Bagel Shop Jazz”) visited upon people who belong to an ‘America not on any map’ (Will Alexander), the disenfranchised who may ruminate silently on these social, spiritual and bodily injuries but who may speak of them openly only at their peril.”

—Maria Damon, Jacket2, “Poetry in 1960, A Symposium”

"Does the Secret Mind Whisper?" was the gnomic open question posed by poet Bob Kaufman in an early City Lights broadside by that title. In collaboration with the Before Columbus Foundation, the Poetry Center hosts an evening symposium under that rubric, in order to take up the nature of Kaufman's legacy and practice, and its extensions into the 21st Century. Featured guests include poet-scholars Will Alexander and Maria Damon, in conversation with Bay Area writer, radio host/dj and cultural worker Justin Desmangles.

BOB KAUFMAN (1925–1986) was a key participant in the 1950s San Francisco poetry renaissance and the Beat movement. Author of three renowned poetry broadsides, Abomunist Manfesto, Second April, and Does the Secret Mind Whisper?, published in the late 1950s by City Lights Books, his poetry in print remained elusive until two collections came out in the mid-1960s. The landmark Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness (1965), published by New Directions, has remained in print for better than four decades. Golden Sardine (1967) became a signature City Lights Pocket Poets volume alongside the works of renowned contemporaries Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. During Kaufman's last decade, editor Raymond Foye assembled the volume of fugitive works, Ancient Rain: Poems 1956–1978 (New Directions, 1981). The posthumous collection, Cranial Guitar: Selected Poems, appeared in 1996 (Coffee House Press). Following Kaufman's death in 1986, a two-hour feature program, Bob Kaufman, Poet, was produced by David Henderson for KPFA-FM and aired nationally through the Pacifica network. Regarded in France as "the American Rimbaud," Bob Kaufman has been celebrated internationally for his particular mode of Surrealism, permeated by a profound affinity for the outcasts of American society, the poor and punished. The late saxophonist and jazz song composer Steve Lacy called Kaufman "the greatest jazz poet, and the beatest of the Beats."

WILL ALEXANDER (see bio above) has previously published the essay "Bob Kaufman: The Footnotes Exploded" in Conjunctions 29: Tributes.

MARIA DAMON (see bio above) his written on Bob Kaufman, extensively in her early book The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry (University of Minnesota) and more recently online at Jacket2.

JUSTIN DESMANGLES hosts the radio program New Day Jazz, currently at KDVS-90.3 FM, and available online, a heady blend of music and cultural commentary, focused on the African-American cultural continuum. Frequent guests offer a largesse of inquiring and informed commentary, via conversations with, e.g., scholars William W. Cook and James Tatum on African American Writers and Classical Tradition; A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshlemen on their collaborative translation of Aimé Césaire's Solar Throat Slashed; Robin D.G. Kelley on his stellar biography Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original; and jazz pianist Matthew Shipp on the legacy of Bud Powell. Chair of the Before Columbus Foundation, which hosts the annual American Book Award, Justin Desmangles has organized numerous public programs, at San Francisco Public Library and Yoshi's jazz club in San Francisco's Fillmore neighborhood, among other venues.

In a series of public programs on the life and legacy of Bob Kaufman under the title "Does the Secret Mind Whisper?" he recently brought together AACM co-founder Roscoe Mitchell with Kaufman's poetry in performances of original compositions. An upcoming November 14 Benefit for the Before Columbus Foundation at Yoshi's San Francisco will reunite Roscoe Mitchell and Amiri Baraka in duo performance, and feature the new Ishmael Reed Band.

African American Writers & Classical Tradition, Winner of the American Book Award 2011

2011-09-20T12:36:00.000-07:00

African American Writers & Classical Tradition is the most exciting work of of literary criticism to emerge in decades. Indeed, it lays the groundwork for an entirely new field of study. Rarely can it be said that the reading of literary criticism is a joyful process, yet with this book, William W. Cook and James Tatum (pictured above, right to left), have produced just that. Written with great humor, at times tremendous passion, the reader is swept into the excitement of surprise and new discovery, following the adventure unearthed in the vast resources of classical Latin and ancient Greek literature employed by African American poets, novelists, and political thinkers. Once familiar, canonized figures, such as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, and Ralph Ellison, are illuminated in fresh, often startling ways. Neglected masters, Melvin B. Tolson, and George S. Schulyer, are revived, given new life, and shown to have vital relevance to today’s times, cutting to the very core of the most contentious and controversial issues in America. Relatively obscure artists, such as Fran Ross, author of Oreo, are given their proper place alongside the aforementioned giants, and the greatness of poet Rita Dove is affirmed in the brilliant concluding chapter. There is a tremendous sense of momentum in the pages of this book, a momentum propelled by the lifelong friendship of its authors, Cook & Tatum. Their shared wisdom, wit, and delight in the task of bringing this complex and subtle story to us, one so uniquely American, is felt throughout the work. African American Writers & Classical Tradition, presents a new, and much needed, image of American literature, indeed, of American history. One that is vivid, compelling, and crackling with the electricity of folklore and mythology rooted to ancient sources, in both Africa and Europe, giving light to the present moment, our times.

We Kiss In A Shadow

2011-09-12T11:49:00.000-07:00

Happy Birthday to Sonny Rollins, pictured above, born Sept. 7th

Show description for Sunday 9/11/2011 @ 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

"Always bear in mind that people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone's head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children." - Amilcar Cabral, (September 12, 1924 – January 20, 1973)

". . . the hottest places in hell are reserved for those, who in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence is betrayal." Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1967, "Why I Oppose the War In Vietnam"

Photograph, at right, by Seydou Keïta

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	Eric Dolphy & Booker Little	Miss Ann	Far Cry	New Jazz
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Solar Throat Slashed: Part Two with Clayton Eshleman

2011-08-31T19:58:00.000-07:00

Show description for Sunday 8/28/2011 @ 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Our guest today on the 5 o'clock hour, Clayton Eshleman (pictured at right), discussing his most recent work, in collaboration with A. James Arnold, Solar Throat Slashed, the unexpurgated 1948 edition of the masterwork by Aimé Césaire.

Soleil cou coupé (Solar Throat Slashed) is Aimé Césaire’s most explosive collection of poetry. Animistically dense, charged with eroticism and blasphemy, and imbued with an African and Vodun spirituality, this book takes the French surrealist adventure to new heights and depths. A Césaire poem is an intersection at which metaphoric traceries create historically aware nexuses of thought and experience, jagged solidarity, apocalyptic surgery, and solar dynamite. The original 1948 French edition of Soleil cou coupé has a dense magico-religious frame of reference. In the late 1950s, Césaire was increasingly politically focused and seeking a wider audience, when he, in effect, gelded the 1948 text—eliminating 31 of the 72 poems, and editing another 29. Until now, only the revised 1961 edition, called Cadastre, has been translated. The revised text lacks the radical originality of Soleil cou coupé. This Wesleyan edition presents all the original poems en face with the new English translations. Includes an introduction by A. James Arnold and notes by Clayton Eshleman.

“Not only do Eshleman and Arnold give us excellent translations of Césaire’s at times syntactically knotty, etymologically abstruse, and semantically bedeviling verse; they also contextualize the poems—with an introduction by Arnold and endnotes by Eshleman—with crucial historical information and lucid discussions of the complexities of the poems’ language.”—Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora

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	Bud Powell	Blue Pearl	Bud!: The Amazing Bud Powell Volume 3	Blue Note
	Bud Powell	John's Abbey	Time Waits	Blue Note
	Mushtaq Singh	The Respite	An Evening of International Poetry	Alliance Records
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	Carmen McRae	How Did He Look?	Bittersweet	Focus
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Aime Cesaire: Solar Throat Slashed, Part One with A. James Arnold

2011-08-24T21:45:00.000-07:00

Show description for Sunday 8/21/2011 @ 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Our guest today on the 5 o'clock hour, A. James Arnold, discussing his most recent work, in collaboration with Clayton Eshelman, Solar Throat Slashed, the unexpurgated 1948 edition of the masterwork by Aimé Césaire.

A. JAMES ARNOLD is an emeritus professor of French at the University of Virginia. He is the lead editor of Césaire's complete literary works in French (in progress) and author of Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire.

“Not only do Eshleman and Arnold give us excellent translations of Césaire’s at times syntactically knotty, etymologically abstruse, and semantically bedeviling verse; they also contextualize the poems—with an introduction by Arnold and endnotes by Eshleman—with crucial historical information and lucid discussions of the complexities of the poems’ language.”—Brent Hayes Edwards, author of The Practice of Diaspora

“Since Césaire first came into our view, he has seemed to some of us to be, with Breton and Artaud, one of the three truly unbounded poets of Surrealism—not so much lyrical, as with some other, more readily accessible poets (Eluard and Desnos the finest among them), but as Diderot had it over two centuries ago: the maker of a poetry that was and had to be ‘barbaric, vast and wild.’ It is the genius of the present gathering to rescue from previous editings and literary compromises the full force of Césaire’s remarkable 1948 work, Soleil cou coupé/Solar Throat Slashed. The result—in both the original French and in Eshleman’s and Arnold’s remarkable and no-holds-barred translation—is a reconstituted masterwork of the twentieth century and ample grist for the century to come.”—Jerome Rothenberg, editor of Technicians of the Sacred

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10 Years That Shook The City

2011-08-21T22:20:00.000-07:00

Show description for Sunday 8/14/2011 @ 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Our guest this afternoon on the 5 o'clock hour, Chris Carlsson, author, activist and most recently editor of the newly published collection of essays Ten Years That Shook the City

A collection of first-person and historical essays spans the tumultuous decade from 1968, the year of the San Francisco State College strike, to 1978 and the twin traumas of the Jonestown massacre and the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. This volume provides a broad look at the diverse ways those ten years shook the City and shaped the world we live in today. From community gardening to environmental justice, gay rights and other identity-based social movements, anti-gentrification efforts, neighborhood arts programs and more, many of the initiatives whose origins are described here have taken root and spread far beyond San Francisco.

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An Open Statement to the Fans of The Help: On behalf of the Association of Black Women Historians

2011-08-11T20:27:00.000-07:00

Friday, August 12, 2011

An Open Statement to the Fans of The Help:

On behalf of the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), this statement provides historical context to address widespread stereotyping presented in both the film and novel version of The Help. The book has sold over three million copies, and heavy promotion of the movie will ensure its success at the box office. Despite efforts to market the book and the film as a progressive story of triumph over racial injustice, The Help distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers. We are specifically concerned about the representations of black life and the lack of attention given to sexual harassment and civil rights activism.

During the 1960s, the era covered in The Help, legal segregation and economic inequalities limited black women's employment opportunities. Up to 90 per cent of working black women in the South labored as domestic servants in white homes. The Help’s representation of these women is a disappointing resurrection of Mammy—a mythical stereotype of black women who were compelled, either by slavery or segregation, to serve white families. Portrayed as asexual, loyal, and contented caretakers of whites, the caricature of Mammy allowed mainstream America to ignore the systemic racism that bound black women to back-breaking, low paying jobs where employers routinely exploited them. The popularity of this most recent iteration is troubling because it reveals a contemporary nostalgia for the days when a black woman could only hope to clean the White House rather than reside in it.

Both versions of The Help also misrepresent African American speech and culture. Set in the South, the appropriate regional accent gives way to a child-like, over-exaggerated “black” dialect. In the film, for example, the primary character, Aibileen, reassures a young white child that, “You is smat, you is kind, you is important.” In the book, black women refer to the Lord as the “Law,” an irreverent depiction of black vernacular. For centuries, black women and men have drawn strength from their community institutions. The black family, in particular provided support and the validation of personhood necessary to stand against adversity. We do not recognize the black community described in The Help where most of the black male characters are depicted as drunkards, abusive, or absent. Such distorted images are misleading and do not represent the historical realities of black masculinity and manhood.

Furthermore, African American domestic workers often suffered sexual harassment as well as physical and verbal abuse in the homes of white employers. For example, a recently discovered letter written by Civil Rights activist Rosa Parks indicates that she, like many black domestic workers, lived under the threat and sometimes reality of sexual assault. The film, on the other hand, makes light of black women’s fears and vulnerabilities turning them into moments of comic relief.

Similarly, the film is woefully silent on the rich and vibrant history of black Civil Rights activists in Mississippi. Granted, the assassination of Medgar Evers, the first Mississippi based field secretary of the NAACP, gets some attention. However, Evers’ assassination sends Jackson’s black community frantically scurrying into the streets in utter chaos and disorganized confusion—a far cry from the courage demonstrated by the black men and women who continued his fight. Portraying the most dangerous racists in 1960s Mississippi as a group of attractive, well dressed, society women, while ignoring the reign of terror perpetuated by the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council, limits racial injustice to individual acts of meanness.

We respect the stellar performances of the African American actresses in this film. Indeed, this statement is in no way a criticism of their talent. It is, however, an attempt to provide context for this popular rendition of black life in the Jim Crow South. In the end, The Help is not a story about the millions of hardworking and dignified black women who labored in white homes to support their families and communities. Rather, it is the coming-of-age story of a white protagonist, who uses myths about the lives of black women to make sense of her own. The Association of Black Women Historians finds it unacceptable for either this book or this film to strip black women’s lives of historical accuracy for the sake of entertainment.

Ida E. Jones is National Director of ABWH and Assistant Curator at Howard University. Daina Ramey Berry, Tiffany M. Gill, and Kali Nicole Gross are Lifetime Members of ABWH and Associate Professors at the University of Texas at Austin. Janice Sumler-Edmond is a Lifetime Member of ABWH and is a Professor at Huston-Tillotson University.

Word Count: 766

Suggested Reading:

Fiction:

Like one of the Family: Conversations from A Domestic’s Life, Alice Childress

The Book of the Night Women by Marlon James

Blanche on the Lam by Barbara Neeley

The Street by Ann Petry

A Million Nightingales by Susan Straight

Non-Fiction:

Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household by Thavolia Glymph

To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors by Tera Hunter

Labor of Love Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present by Jacqueline Jones
Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics and the Great Migration by Elizabeth Clark-Lewis

Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody

Any questions, comments, or interview requests can be sent to: ABWHTheHelp@gmail.com

ABWH Statement The Help (pdf)

To Undertake My Corners Open

2011-08-10T12:29:00.000-07:00

Show description for Sunday 8/7/2011 @ 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Now to talk to me about black studies as if it's something that concerned [only] black people is an utter denial. This is the history of Western Civilization. I can't see it otherwise. This is the history that black people and white people and all serious students of modern history of the world have to know. To say it's some kind of ethnic problem is a lot of nonsense. - C.L.R. James, (1969)

O-Jazz-O

by Bob Kaufman

Where the string
At
some point,
Was umbilical jazz,
Or perhaps,
In memory,
A long lost bloody cross,
Buried in some steel cavalry.
In what time
For whom do we bleed,
Lost notes, from some jazzman's
Broken needle.
Musical tears from lost
Eyes.
Broken drumsticks, why?
Pitter patter, boom dropping
Bombs in the middle
Of my emotions
My father's sound
My mother's sound,
Is love,
Is life

pictured at right, Yves Tanguy, Dame a l'Absence, 1942

pictured above, Henry Treadgill, photo by Claudio Casanova

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	Michael Bisio	Zephyr Revisited	Travel Music	michaelbisio.com
	Henry Threadgill Zooid	After Some Time	This Brings Us To (Volume 1)	Pi
	Al Young	Sundays In Democracies	Something About the Blues	Sourcebooks
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	Henry Threadgill Zooid	Lying Eyes	This Brings Us To (Volume 2)	Pi
	Farmers By Nature	Sir Snacktray Speaks	Out of This Worlds Distortions	AUM-Fidelity
	Wordwind Chorus (Reginald Lockett)	A Veteran Contemplates the Fate of His Immigrant Students	We Are of the Saying	Wordwind Chorus
	Darius Jones & Matthew Shipp	Bleed	Cosmic Lieder	AUM-Fidelity
	Darius Jones & Matthew Shipp	Ultima Thule	Cosmic Lieder	AUM-Fidelity
	Al Young	Conjugal Visits	Something About the Blues	Sourcebooks
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	Michael Bisio	Livin' Large	Travel Music	michaelbisio.com
	Henry Threadgill Zooid	To Undertake My Corners Open	This Brings Us To (Volume 1)	Pi
	David S. Ware	Duality Is One	Planetary Unknown	AUM-Fidelity
	Farmers By Nature	Out Of This World's Distortions Grow Aspens and Other Beautiful Things	Out of This World's Distortions	AUM-Fidelity
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Henry Threadgill Zooid	It Never Moved	This Brings Us To (Volume 2)	Pi
	Wordwind Chorus (Reginald Lockett)	The Movement	We Are of the Saying	Wordwind Chorus
	Odean Pope featuring Marshall Allen	Custody of the American Spirit	Universal Sounds	Porter
	Henry Threadgill Zooid	Extremely Sweet William	This Brings Us To (Volume 2)	Pi
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Corey Wilkes & Abstrakt Pulse	Levitation	Cries From Tha Ghetto	Pi
	Marc Ribot	Spirits	Spiritual Unity	Pi
	Ran Blake & Jeanne Lee	Newswatch	You Stepped Out of a Cloud	Owl
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	Art Ensemble of Chicago	Everyday's a Perfect Day	[Sirius Calling]	Pi

I heard Erzulie singing on the waters of night

2011-08-04T18:13:00.000-07:00

Show description for Sunday 7/31/2011 @ 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Desmangles

Let me bring some relief to my name,
famous for hiding runaway slaves
and future kings, sons of Europe,
whose marriage, arranged by Laveau,
brought stock to the fortunes of Creoles
and voodoo tyrants alike.

Let me display the roots and tethered vines,
the fetid swamp which covers this secret
with protoplasm, and basalt theory.
Wreckage from a promise kept,
beneath the fire of the fortaleza,
the villa of inquisitional escapees
mattering with Dahomey chiefs,
the ouster of Napoleon,
and the coinage of Négritude,
Césaire's notebooks, leaves
on the brackish ponds of my namesake.

And just below the freedom
of a million castles burned,
a slave masters whips drys
in the window of a museum,
near the blouse of my Corrina.

For a Bluesman's pluck and dash,
a railroad capsizes. The iron rails
of a ship going nowhere
in particular except home.

There, my swamp secret begins,
in the foliage of this poem.

The first breath
in a long song unsung.

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	Phineas Newborn Jr.	What Is This Thing Called Love?	Phineas' Rainbow	RCA
	Dave Brubeck	Waltz Limp	Countdown: Time In Outer Space	Columbia
	George Russell	Concerto For Billy The Kid	The Jazz Workshop	RCA
	Eddie Heywood	The Continental	Eddie Heywood 1946-1947	Chronological Classics
	Tommy Flanagan	Ugly Beauty	Thelonica	Enja
	Chick Corea	Eronel	Trio Music	ECM
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	Steve Lacy & Mal Waldron	Let's Call This	Let's Call This	Hat Art
	Mary Lou Williams	45 Degree Angle	The Jazz Piano	RCA-France
	John Lewis	Silver	Orchestra U.S.A.	RCA
	Duke Ellington	Primpin' For The Prom	Primpin' For The Prom	CBS-France
	Duke Ellington & Jimmy Blanton	Blues	Duke Ellington & Jimmy Blanton	RCA
	Dexter Gordon	Shiny Stockings	Gettin' Around	Blue Note
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	Jelly Roll Morton	King Porter Stomp	Blues And Stomps From Original Piano Rolls	Biograph
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	Air	King Porter Stomp	Air Lore	Novus
	Steve Lacy & Mal Waldron	Well You Needn't	Let's Call This	Hat Art
	Chick Corea	Little Rootie Tootie	Trio Music	ECM
	Tommy Flanagan	Off Minor	Thelonica	Enja
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Dizzy Gillespie	Bebop	For Musicians Only	Verve
	Bud Powell	Tempus Fugit	Jazz Giant	Verve
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	Les McCann & Eddie Harris	Comapred To What	Swiss Movement	Atlantic

Empathy, Curiosity and the Ecstasy of Discovery in the Poetry of David Meltzer

2011-07-30T16:29:00.000-07:00

Show description for Sunday 7/24/2011 @ 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Our guest this afternoon, on the the 5 o'clock hour, is poet David Meltzer, talking about his most recent book, When I Was A Poet, new from City Lights. Born in 1937, David Meltzer is a poet associated with both the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance. He was also included in Don Allen's seminal anthology, The New American Poetry. A child prodigy, Meltzer performed on the radio and TV in New York beginning in the late '40s. In 1957, after a few years in Los Angeles, where he was a part of the circle around Wallace Berman's Semina magazine, Meltzer moved to San Francisco, where he associated with such poets as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Spicer. One of the pioneers of jazz poetry readings, Meltzer formed a psychedelic folk-rock group, Serpent Power, with his late wife Tina and poet Clark Coolidge, recording for Vanguard records in the late '60's. He continues to perform with the music and poetry review, Rockpile. In addition to his many books of poetry, Meltzer published 10 erotic novels in the late '60s and early '70s, including the critically acclaimed Agency Trilogy, revisiting the genre in 1995 with Under. He has edited many anthologies, including San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets (City Lights, 2001).

A newly published report shows that the number of homeless children in Sacramento public schools has more than doubled in recent years, yet Mayor Kevin Johnson has issued no response whatsoever to this issue or the report itself. We must demand answers and accountability! Contact Mayor Johnson, and let him know he cannot ignore the homeless children of this city! Demand answers and accountability!

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	Herbie Nichols	Riff Primatif	The Third World	Blue Note
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	Sonny Rollins featuring Thelonious Monk

Speech to Congress of Black African Writers 1959 By Frantz Fanon

2011-07-20T09:31:00.000-07:00

Colonial domination, because it is total and tends to over-simplify, very soon manages to disrupt in spectacular fashion the cultural life of a conquered people. This cultural obliteration is made possible by the negation of national reality, by new legal relations introduced by the occupying power, by the banishment of the natives and their customs to outlying districts by colonial society, by expropriation, and by the systematic enslaving of men and women.

Three years ago at our first congress I showed that, in the colonial situation, dynamism is replaced fairly quickly by a substantification of the attitudes of the colonising power. The area of culture is then marked off by fences and signposts. These are in fact so many defence mechanisms of the most elementary type, comparable for more than one good reason to the simple instinct for preservation. The interest of this period for us is that the oppressor does not manage to convince himself of the objective non-existence of the oppressed nation and its culture. Every effort is made to bring the colonised person to admit the inferiority of his culture which has been transformed into instinctive patterns of behaviour, to recognise the unreality of his 'nation', and, in the last extreme, the confused and imperfect character of his own biological structure.

Vis-à-vis this state of affairs, the native's reactions are not unanimous While the mass of the people maintain intact traditions which are completely different from those of the colonial situation, and the artisan style solidifies into a formalism which is more and more stereotyped, the intellectual throws himself in frenzied fashion into the frantic acquisition of the culture of the occupying power and takes every opportunity of unfavourably criticising his own national culture, or else takes refuge in setting out and substantiating the claims of that culture in a way that is passionate but rapidly becomes unproductive.

The common nature of these two reactions lies in the fact that they both lead to impossible contradictions. Whether a turncoat or a substantialist the native is ineffectual precisely because the analysis of the colonial situation is not carried out on strict lines. The colonial situation calls a halt to national culture in almost every field. Within the framework of colonial domination there is not and there will never be such phenomena as new cultural departures or changes in the national culture. Here and there valiant attempts are sometimes made to reanimate the cultural dynamic and to give fresh impulses to its themes, its forms and its tonalities. The immediate, palpable and obvious interest of such leaps ahead is nil. But if we follow up the consequences to the very end we see that preparations are being thus made to brush the cobwebs off national consciousness to question oppression and to open up the struggle for freedom.

A national culture under colonial domination is a contested culture whose destruction is sought in systematic fashion. It very quickly becomes a culture condemned to secrecy. This idea of clandestine culture is immediately seen in the reactions of the occupying power which interprets attachment to traditions as faithfulness to the spirit of the nation and as a refusal to submit. This persistence in following forms of culture which are already condemned to extinction is already a demonstration of nationality; but it is a demonstration which is a throw-back to the laws of inertia. There is no taking of the offensive and no redefining of relationships. There is simply a concentration on a hard core of culture which is becoming more and more shrivelled up, inert and empty.

By the time a century or two of exploitation has passed there comes about a veritable emaciation of the stock of national culture. It becomes a set of automatic habits, some traditions of dress and a few broken-down institutions. Little movement can be discerned in such remnants of culture; there is no real creativity and no overflowing life. The poverty of the people, national oppression and the inhibition of culture are one and the same thing. After a century of colonial domination we find a culture which is rigid in the extreme, or rather what we find are the dregs of culture, its mineral strata. The withering away of the reality of the nation and the death-pangs of the national culture are linked to each other in mutual dependences. This is why it is of capital importance to follow the evolution of these relations during the struggle for national freedom. The negation of the native's culture, the contempt for any manifestation of culture whether active or emotional and the placing outside the pale of all specialised branches of organisation contribute to breed aggressive patterns of conduct in the native. But these patterns of conduct are of the reflexive type; they are poorly differentiated, anarchic and ineffective. Colonial exploitation, poverty and endemic famine drive the native more and more to open, organised revolt. The necessity for an open and decisive breach is formed progressively and imperceptibly, and comes to be felt by the great majority of the people. Those tensions which hitherto were non-existent come into being. International events, the collapse of whole sections of colonial empires and the contradictions inherent in the colonial system strengthen and uphold the native's combativity while promoting and giving support to national consciousness.

These new-found tensions which are present at all stages in the real nature of colonialism have their repercussions on the cultural plane. In literature, for example, there is relative over-production. From being a reply on a minor scale to the dominating power, the literature produced by natives becomes differentiated and makes itself into a will to particularism. The intelligentsia, which during the period of repression was essentially a consuming public, now themselves become producers. This literature at first chooses to confine itself to the tragic and poetic style; but later on novels, short stories and essays are attempted. It is as if a kind of internal organisation or law of expression existed which wills that poetic expression become less frequent in proportion as the objectives and the methods of the struggle for liberation become more precise. Themes are completely altered; in fact, we find less and less of bitter, hopeless recrimination and less also of that violent, resounding, florid writing which on the whole serves to reassure the occupying power. The colonialists have in former times encouraged these modes of expression and made their existence possible. Stinging denunciations, the exposing of distressing conditions and passions which find their outlet in expression are in fact assimilated by the occupying power in a cathartic process. To aid such processes is in a certain sense to avoid their dramatisation and to clear the atmosphere. But such a situation can only be transitory. In fact, the progress of national consciousness among the people modifies and gives precision to the literary utterances of the native intellectual. The continued cohesion of the people constitutes for the intellectual an invitation to go farther than his cry of protest. The lament first makes the indictment; then it makes an appeal. In the period that follows, the words of command are heard. The crystallisation of the national consciousness will both disrupt literary styles and themes, and also create a completely new public. While at the beginning the native intellectual used to produce his work to be read exclusively by the oppressor, whether with the intention of charming him or of denouncing him through ethnical or subjectivist means, now the native writer progressively takes on the habit of addressing his own people.

It is only from that moment that we can speak of a national literature. Here there is, at the level of literary creation, the taking up and clarification of themes which are typically nationalist. This may be properly called a literature of combat, in the sense that it calls on the whole people to fight for their existence as a nation. It is a literature of combat, because it moulds the national consciousness, giving it form and contours and flinging open before it new and boundless horizons; it is a literature of combat because it assumes responsibility, and because it is the will to liberty expressed in terms of time and space.

On another level, the oral tradition - stories, epics and songs of the people - which formerly were filed away as set pieces are now beginning to change. The storytellers who used to relate inert episodes now bring them alive and introduce into them modifications which are increasingly fundamental. There is a tendency to bring conflicts up to date and to modernise the kinds of struggle which the stories evoke, together with the names of heroes and the types of weapons. The method of allusion is more and more widely used. The formula 'This all happened long ago' is substituted by that of 'What we are going to speak of happened somewhere else, but it might well have happened here today, and it might happen tomorrow'. The example of Algeria is significant in this context. From 1952-3 on, the storytellers, who were before that time stereotyped and tedious to listen to, completely overturned their traditional methods of storytelling and the contents of their tales. Their public, which was formerly scattered, became compact. The epic, with its typified categories, reappeared; it became an authentic form of entertainment which took on once more a cultural value. Colonialism made no mistake when from 1955 on it proceeded to arrest these storytellers systematically.

The contact of the people with the new movement gives rise to a new rhythm of life and to forgotten muscular tensions, and develops the imagination. Every time the storyteller relates a fresh episode to his public, he presides over a real invocation. The existence of a new type of man is revealed to the public. The present is no longer turned in upon itself but spread out for all to see. The storyteller once more gives free rein to his imagination; he makes innovations and he creates a work of art. It even happens that the characters, which are barely ready for such a transformation - highway robbers or more or less antisocial vagabonds - are taken up and remodelled. The emergence of the imagination and of the creative urge in the songs and epic stories of a colonised country is worth following. The storyteller replies to the expectant people by successive approximations, and makes his way, apparently alone but in fact helped on by his public, towards the seeking out of new patterns, that is to say national patterns. Comedy and farce disappear, or lose their attraction. As for dramatisation, it is no longer placed on the plane of the troubled intellectual and his tormented conscience. By losing its characteristics of despair and revolt, the drama becomes part of the common lot of the people and forms part of an action in preparation or already in progress.

Where handicrafts are concerned, the forms of expression which formerly were the dregs of art, surviving as if in a daze, now begin to reach out. Woodwork, for .example, which formerly turned out certain faces and attitudes by the million, begins to be differentiated. The inexpressive or overwrought mask comes to life and the arms tend to be raised from the body as if to sketch an action. Compositions containing two, three or five figures appear. The traditional schools are led on to creative efforts by the rising avalanche of amateurs or of critics. This new vigour in this sector of cultural life very often passes unseen; and yet its contribution to the national effort is of capital importance. By carving figures and faces which are full of life, and by taking as his theme a group fixed on the same pedestal, the artist invites participation in an organised movement.

If we study the repercussions of the awakening of national consciousness in the domains of ceramics and pottery-making, the same observations may be drawn. Formalism is abandoned in the craftsman's work. Jugs, jars and trays are modified, at first imperceptibly, then almost savagely. The colours, of which formerly there were but few and which obeyed the traditional rules of harmony, increase in number and are influenced by the repercussion of the rising revolution. Certain ochres and blues, which seemed forbidden to all eternity in a given cultural area, now assert themselves without giving rise to scandal. In the same way the stylisation of the human face, which according to sociologists is typical of very clearly defined regions, becomes suddenly completely relative. The specialist coming from the home country and the ethnologist are quick to note these changes. On the whole such changes are condemned in the name of a rigid code of artistic style and of a cultural life which grows up at the heart of the colonial system. The colonialist specialists do not recognise these new forms and rush to the help of the traditions of the indigenous society. It is the colonialists who become the defenders of the native style. We remember perfectly, and the example took on a certain measure of importance since the real nature of colonialism was not involved, the reactions of the white jazz specialists when after the Second World War new styles such as the be-bop took definite shape. The fact is that in their eyes jazz should only be the despairing, broken-down nostalgia of an old Negro who is trapped between five glasses of whisky, the curse of his race, and the racial hatred of the white men. As soon as the Negro comes to an understanding of himself, and understands the rest of the world differently, when he gives birth to hope and forces back the racist universe, it is clear that his trumpet sounds more clearly and his voice less hoarsely. The new fashions in jazz are not simply born of economic competition. We must without any doubt see in them one of the consequences of the defeat, slow but sure, of the southern world of the United States. And it is not utopian to suppose that in fifty years' time the type of jazz howl hiccupped by a poor misfortunate Negro will be upheld only by the whites who believe in it as an expression of nigger-hood, and who are faithful to this arrested image of a type of relationship.

We might in the same way seek and find in dancing, singing, and traditional rites and ceremonies the same upward-springing trend, and make out the same changes and the same impatience in this field. Well before the political or fighting phase of the national movement an attentive spectator can thus feel and see the manifestation of new vigour and feel the approaching conflict. He will note unusual forms of expression and themes which are fresh and imbued with a power which is no longer that of invocation but rather of the assembling of the people, a summoning together for a precise purpose. Everything works together to awaken the native's sensibility and to make unreal and inacceptable the contemplative attitude, or the acceptance of defeat. The native rebuilds his perceptions because he renews the purpose and dynamism of the craftsmen, of dancing and music and of literature and the oral tradition. His world comes to lose its accursed character. The conditions necessary for the inevitable conflict are brought together.

We have noted the appearance of the movement in cultural forms and we have seen that this movement and these new forms are linked to the state of maturity of the national consciousness. Now, this movement tends more and more to express itself objectively, in institutions. From thence comes the need for a national existence, whatever the cost.

A frequent mistake, and one which is moreover hardly justifiable is to try to find cultural expressions for and to give new values to native culture within the framework of colonial domination. This is why we arrive at a proposition which at first sight seems paradoxical: the fact that in a colonised country the most elementary, most savage and the most undifferentiated nationalism is the most fervent and efficient means of defending national culture. For culture is first the expression of a nation, the expression of its preferences, of its taboos and of its patterns. It is at every stage of the whole of society that other taboos, values and patterns are formed. A national culture is the sum total of all these appraisals; it is the result of internal and external extensions exerted over society as a whole and also at every level of that society. In the colonial situation, culture, which is doubly deprived of the support of the nation and of the state, falls away and dies. The condition for its existence is therefore national liberation and the renaissance of the state.

The nation is not only the condition of culture, its fruitfulness, its continuous renewal, and its deepening. It is also a necessity. It is the fight for national existence which sets culture moving and opens to it the doors of creation. Later on it is the nation which will ensure the conditions and framework necessary to culture. The nation gathers together the various indispensable elements necessary for the creation of a culture, those elements which alone can give it credibility, validity, life and creative power. In the same way it is its national character that will make such a culture open to other cultures and which will enable it to influence and permeate other cultures. A non-existent culture can hardly be expected to have bearing on reality, or to influence reality. The first necessity is the re-establishment of the nation in order to give life to national culture in the strictly biological sense of the phrase.

Thus we have followed the break-up of the old strata of culture, a shattering which becomes increasingly fundamental; and we have noticed, on the eve of the decisive conflict for national freedom, the renewing of forms of expression and the rebirth of the imagination. There remains one essential question: what are the relations between the struggle - whether political or military - and culture? Is there a suspension of culture during the conflict? Is the national struggle an expression of a culture? Finally, ought one to say that the battle for freedom, however fertile a posteriori with regard to culture, is in itself a negation of culture? In short is the struggle for liberation a cultural phenomenon or not?

We believe that the conscious and organised undertaking by a colonised people to re-establish the sovereignty of that nation constitutes the most complete and obvious cultural manifestation that exists. It is not alone the success of the struggle which afterwards gives validity and vigour to culture; culture is not put into cold storage during the conflict. The struggle itself in its development and in its internal progression sends culture along different paths and traces out entirely new ones for it. The struggle for freedom does not give back to the national culture its former value and shapes; this struggle which aims at a fundamentally different set of relations between men cannot leave intact either the form or the content of the people's culture. After the conflict there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonised man.

This new humanity cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism both for itself and for others. It is prefigured in the objectives and methods of the conflict. A struggle which mobilises all classes of the people and which expresses their aims and their impatience, which is not afraid to count almost exclusively on the people's support, will of necessity triumph. The value of this type of conflict is that it supplies the maximum of conditions necessary for the development and aims of culture. After national freedom has been obtained in these conditions, there is no such painful cultural indecision which is found in certain countries which are newly independent, because the nation by its manner of coming into being and in the terms of its existence exerts a fundamental influence over culture. A nation which is born of the people's concerted action and which embodies the real aspirations of the people while changing the state cannot exist save in the expression of exceptionally rich forms of culture.

The natives who are anxious for the culture of their country and who wish to give to it a universal dimension ought not therefore to place their confidence in the single principle of inevitable, undifferentiated independence written into the consciousness of the people in order to achieve their task. The liberation of the nation is one thing; the methods and popular content of the fight are another. It seems to me that the future of national culture and its riches are equally also part and parcel of the values which have ordained the struggle for freedom.

And now it is time to denounce certain pharisees. National claims, it is here and there stated, are a phase that humanity has left behind. It is the day of great concerted actions, and retarded nationalists ought in consequence to set their mistakes aright. We, however, consider that the mistake, which may have very serious consequences, lies in wishing to skip the national period. If culture is the expression of national consciousness, I will not hesitate to affirm that in the case with which we are dealing it is the national consciousness which is the most elaborate form of culture.

The consciousness of self is not the closing of a door to communication. Philosophic thought teaches us, on the contrary, that it is its guarantee. National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension. This problem of national consciousness and of national culture takes on in Africa a special dimension. The birth of national consciousness in Africa has a strictly contemporaneous connexion with the African consciousness. The responsibility of the African as regards national culture is also a responsibility with regard to African-Negro culture. This joint responsibility is not the fact of a metaphysical principle but the awareness of a simple rule which wills that every independent nation in an Africa where colonialism is still entrenched is an encircled nation, a nation which is fragile and in permanent danger.

If man is known by his acts, then we will say that the most urgent thing today for the intellectual is to build up his nation. If this building up is true, that is to say if it interprets the manifest will of the people and reveals the eager African peoples, then the building of a nation is of necessity accompanied by the discovery and encouragement of universalising values. Far from keeping aloof from other nations, therefore, it is national liberation which leads the nation to play its part on the stage of history. It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows. And this two-fold emerging is ultimately the source of all culture.

Reproduced from The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance Farrington, Grove Press

I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion

2011-07-17T22:44:00.000-07:00

Show description for Sunday 7/17/2011 @ 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM

All those ships that never sailed
The ones with their seacocks open
That were scuttled in their stalls...
Today I bring them back
Huge and transitory
And let them sail
Forever.

All those flowers that you never grew-
that you wanted to grow
The ones that were plowed under
ground in the mud-
Today I bring them back
And let you grow them
Forever.

All those wars and truces
Dancing down these years-
All in three flag swept days
Rejected meaning of God-

My body once covered with beauty
Is now a museum of betrayal.
This part remembered because of that one's touch
This part remembered for that one's kiss-
Today I bring it back
And let you live forever.

I breath a breathless I love you
And move you
Forever.

Remove the snake from Moses' arm...
And someday the Jewish queen will dance
Down the street with the dogs
And make every Jew
Her lover.

Bob Kaufman, poet. (from, The Ancient Rain)

Betye Saar, Ragtime, 2005, mixed media box assemblage, 19" x 20" x 2" Pictured above

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	Artist	Song	Album	Label
	Tennessee Williams (read by Montgomery Clift)	Opening Soliloquy	The Glass Menagerie	Caedmon
	Art Tatum	Out Of Nowhere	Jazz Piano 2	RCA - France
	Teddy Wilson	Someday Sweetheart	Jazz Piano 2	RCA - France
	Billy Kyle	Night Whispers	Jazz Piano 2	RCA - France
	Count Basie	I Never Knew	Jazz Piano 2	RCA - France
	Count Basie	Little Pony	From King Oliver To Ornette Coleman	CBS - France
	Charles Brown	Drifitn' Blues	Driftin' Blues	Aladdin
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Ella Fitzgerald	This Time's The Dream's On Me	Sings The Harold Arlen Songbook	Verve
	Kenneth Patchen	23rd St. Runs Into Heaven	Reads His Poetry	Folkways
	Kenneth Patchen	The Lions Of Fire	Reads His Poetry	Folkways
	Willie "The Lion" Smith	Relaxin'	Jazz Piano 2	RCA - France
	Fat's Waller	Carolina Shout	Jazz Piano 2	RCA - France
	Hampton Hawes	Diablo's Dance	Jazz Piano 2	RCA - France
	Sylvia Plath	Ouija	Sylvia Plath Reads Her Poetry	Caedmon
	Miles Davis	Sweet Sue, Just You	What Is Jazz?	Columbia
	Kenny Dorham	Lotus Blossom	2 Horns 2 Rhythm	Riverside
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Claude McKay	Tropics In New York	Anthology Of Negro Poets	Folkways
	Tommy Flanagan	Ballad	Jazz Piano 2	RCA - France
	Oscar Peterson	Fine & Dandy	Jazz Piano 2	RCA - France
	Tennessee Williams (read by Montgonery Clift & Jessica Tandy)	excerpt for Scene 3	The Glass Menagerie	Caedmon
	Ella Fitzgerald	Let's Take A Walk Around The Block	Sings The Harold Arlen Songbook	Verve
	Ella Fitzgerald	Ill Wind	Sings The Harold Arlen Songbook	Verve
	Gwendolyn Brooks	Song Of The Front Yard	Anthology Of Negro Poets	Anthology Of Negro Poets
	Charles Brown	Rolling Like A Pebble In The Sand	Driftin' Blues	Aladdin
	Avery Parrish	After Hours	Jazz Piano 2	RCA - France
	Sterling Brown	Long Gone	Anthology Of Negro Poets	Anthology Of Negro Poets
	Thelonious Monk	Round Midnight	Thelonious Monk Solo	Vogue
	Bud Powell	Thelonious	Jazz Piano 2	RCA - France
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Ishmael Reed	Judas	Conjure	Pangaea
	Bud Powell	Topsy Turvy	Jazz Piano 2	RCA - France
	John Lewis	Promenade In Paris	Jazz Piano 2	RCA - France
	Langston Hughes	Borderline	Reads and Talks About His Poems	Spoken Arts Records
	Langston Hughes	Genius Child	Reads and Talks About His Poems	Spoken Arts Records
	Langston Hughes	Suicide's Note	Reads and Talks About His Poems	Spoken Arts Records
	Langston Hughes	Little Lyric ( Of Great Importance)	Reads and Talks About His Poems	Spoken Arts Records
	Langston Hughes	Motto	Reads and Talks About His Poems	Spoken Arts Records
	Langston Hughes	Flatted Fifths	Reads and Talks About His Poems	Spoken Arts Records
	Charlie Parker	The Bird	The Charlie Parker Story	Warner Brothers
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Richard Pryor	God	Are You Serious?	Laff

Margaret Walker, Lee Morgan, and those blues in the night . . .

2011-07-12T16:13:00.001-07:00

Paulene Myers, actress (with back to camera), Raymond Patterson, poet, Margaret Walker, Paula Giddings's afro towering over Margaret Walker, Herbert Martin (center), Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis, critic, unidentified woman,Lorenzo Thomas, poet.

Show description for Sunday 7/10/2011 @ 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Lee Morgan , one of the greatest trumpet players in the history of jazz, is celebrated today on New Day Jazz, along with the life and poetry of Margaret Walker.

"Margaret Walker is of the great creators and teachers of literature." - Amiri Baraka

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	Artist	Song	Album	Label
	Margaret Walker	Kissie Lee	Anthology Of Negro Poets	Folkways
	Ella Fitzgerald	Blues In The Night	Sings The Harold Arlen Songbook	Verve
	Ella Fitzgerald	Let's Fall In Love	Sings The Harold Arlen Songbook	Verve
	Ella Fitzgerald	Stormy Weather	Sings The Harold Arlen Songbook	Verve
	Margaret Walker (read by Gloria Foster)	We Have Been Believers	A Hand Is On The Gate	Verve-Folkways
	Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers	Roots & Herbs	Roots & Herbs	Blue Note
	Lee Morgan	Short Count	The Sixth Sense	Blue Note
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Shirley Horn	Travelin' Light	Travelin' Light	ABC-Paramount
	Shirley Horn	Sunday In New York	Travelin' Light	ABC-Paramount
	Shirley Horn	I Could Have Told You	Travelin' Light	ABC-Paramount
	Lee Morgan	You're Mine You	City Lights	Blue Note
	Lee Morgan	City Lights	City Lights	Blue Note
	Margaret Walker	Old Molly Means	Anthology Of Negro Poets	Folkways
	Grachan Moncur III	Monk In Wonderland	Evolution	Blue Note
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Margaret Walker	For My People	Anthology Of Negro Poets	Folkways
	Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers	Sakeena's Vision	The Big Beat	Blue Note
	Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers	Calling Miss Khadija	Indestructible!	Blue Note
	Margaret Walker	Stackalee	Anthology Of Negro Poets	Folkways
	Lee Morgan	Since I Fell For You	Candy	Blue Note
	Louis Armstrong	Stardust	Louis Armstrong Favorites Vol. 4	Columbia
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Lee Konitz	I Remember You	Motion	Verve

New Music, New Poetry: Odean Pope, Farmers By Nature, Al Young, Ishmael Reed, Matthew Shipp, William Parker

2011-07-03T21:04:00.000-07:00

Patrice Lumumba, pictured above, (July 2, 1925 – January 17, 1961) Know your history, know your culture. Your independence depends on your remembrance. Each one, teach one.

Show description for Sunday 7/3/2011 @ 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM

PLEASE NOTE: MR. BARAKA HAS BEEN RESCHEDULED TO A LATER DATE

This week, on the 5 o'clock hour, poet, playwright, essayist, and activist, Amiri Baraka, returns to New Day Jazz to discuss the recent biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, by the late Manning Marable.

New Day Jazz

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	Artist	Song	Album	Label
	Odean Pope	Custody Of The American Spirit	Universal Sounds	Porter
	Odean Pope	Mwalimu	Universal Sounds	Porter
	Odean Pope	The Binder	Universal Sounds	Porter
	Ishmael Reed	If I Am A Welfare Queen Where Are My Jewels And Furs?	For All We Know	Konch Records
	Al Young	Sundays In Democracies	Something About The Blues	Sourcebooks
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Farmers By Nature	Mud, Mapped	Out Of This Worlds Distortions	AUM-Fidelity
	William Parker Organ Quartet	The Struggle	Uncle Joe's Spirit House	Centering Records
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Matthew Shipp	The New Fact	Art Of The Improviser	Thirsty Ear
	Matthew Shipp	3 In 1	Art Of The Improviser	Thirsty Ear
	Al Young	Straight, No Chaser	Something About The Blues	Sourcebooks
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Odean Pope	Blues	Universal Sounds	Porter
	William Parker Organ Quartet	Jacques Groove	Uncle Joe's Spirit House	Centering Records
	William Parker Organ Quartet	Ennio's Tag	Uncle Joe's Spirit House	Centering Records
	Al Young	Conjugal Visits	Something About The Blues	Sourcebooks
	Ishmael Reed	Army Nurse	For All We Know	Konch Records
	Farmers By Nature	For Fred Anderson	Out Of This Worlds Distortions	AUM-Fidelity
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Art Ensemble of Chicago	Dreaming Of The Master	Thelonious Sphere Monk: Dreaming Of The Masters Vol. 2

"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?" - Frederick Douglass

2011-07-01T10:45:00.000-07:00

Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too great enough to give frame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory....

...Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation's sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation's jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the "lame man leap as an hart."

But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!

"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, 0 Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth."

Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, "may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!" To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow-citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery, the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate; I will not excuse"; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.

But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, "It is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, an denounce less; would you persuade more, and rebuke less; your cause would be much more likely to succeed." But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgment that the slave is a moral, intellectual, and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write. When you can point to any such laws in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then will I argue with you that the slave is a man!

For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and ciphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian's God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!

Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Amercans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively and positively, negatively and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their mastcrs? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.

What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is passed.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation's ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival....

...Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. "The arm of the Lord is not shortened," and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from "the Declaration of Independence," the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. -- Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are distinctly heard on the other.

The far off and almost fabulous Pacific rolls in grandeur at our feet. The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. The fiat of the Almighty, "Let there be Light," has not yet spent its force. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light. The iron shoe, and crippled foot of China must be seen in contrast with nature. Africa must rise and put on her yet unwoven garment. 'Ethiopia, shall, stretch. out her hand unto Ood." In the fervent aspirations of William Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in saying it:

God speed the year of jubilee
The wide world o'er!
When from their galling chains set free,
Th' oppress'd shall vilely bend the knee,
And wear the yoke of tyranny
Like brutes no more.
That year will come, and freedom's reign,
To man his plundered rights again
Restore.

God speed the day when human blood
Shall cease to flow!
In every clime be understood,
The claims of human brotherhood,
And each return for evil, good,
Not blow for blow;
That day will come all feuds to end,
And change into a faithful friend
Each foe.

God speed the hour, the glorious hour,
When none on earth
Shall exercise a lordly power,
Nor in a tyrant's presence cower;
But to all manhood's stature tower,
By equal birth!
That hour will come, to each, to all,
And from his Prison-house, to thrall
Go forth.

Until that year, day, hour, arrive,
With head, and heart, and hand I'll strive,
To break the rod, and rend the gyve,
The spoiler of his prey deprive --
So witness Heaven!
And never from my chosen post,
Whate'er the peril or the cost,
Be driven.

The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Volume II
Pre-Civil War Decade 1850-1860
Philip S. Foner
International Publishers Co., Inc., New York, 1950

Rain by Aime Cesaire

2011-06-28T15:46:00.000-07:00

After I had by iron by fire by ash visited the most celebrated places in history
after I had by ash fire earth and stars courted with my wild dog and leechlike
fingernails the authoritarian field of protoplasms
I found myself as usual in the old days in the middle of a factory of vipers'
nests in a ganges of cacti in an elaboration of thorny pilgrimages - and as
usual I was salivated by limbs and tongues born a thousand years before
the earth - and as usual I made my morning prayer the one that protects
me from the evil eye and that I address to the rain under the aztec color of
its name

Rain who so gently washes a perverse injection from the earth's academic
vagina
All-powerful rain who on the chopping block makes the fingers of the
rock's leap
Rain who force-feeds an army of worms no mulberry forest could nourish
Rain inspired strategist who pushes across the mirror of the air your zigzag
army of numberless riverbanks that cannot not surprise the best-kept
boredom
Rain wasp nest beautiful milk whose piglets we are
Rain I see your hair which is a perpetual explosion of sandbox tree fireworks
your hair of misinformation promptly denied
Rain who in your most reprehensible excesses takes care not to forget that
Chiriqui maidens pull suddenly from their night corsage a lamp of thrilling
fireflies
Inflexible rain who lays eggs whose larvae are so proud that nothing can
make them mount the stern of the sun and salute it like an admiral
Rain who is a fresh fish fan behind which courteous races hide to watch
victory with its dirty feet pass by
Greetings to you queen rain in the depths of the eternal goddess whose hands
are multiple and whose destiny is unique thou sperm thou brain thou fluid
Rain capable of everything except washing away the blood that flows on the
fingers of the murderers of entire peoples surprised in the soaring forests
of innocence

Aime Cesaire (photo by Denise Colomb)
(translation by A. James Arnold & Clayton Eshleman)
Solar Throat Slashed, The Unexpurgated 1948 Edition, Wesleyan University Press

Homage to Aime Cesaire in Poetry & Jazz

2011-06-26T21:20:00.001-07:00

New Day Jazz

Justin Desmangles

Jazz music for lovers and the lonely.

Genre
Jazz

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Show Description for Sunday 06/26/2011
This afternoon, a special celebration of Aime Cesaire, honoring his birthday, June 26, 1913. Also, a new essay by Cecil Brown, below. If Racism is Over, Why are Whites Still Kicking Me in the Ass? Next week, Amiri Baraka reviews the new biography, Malcolm X, A Life Of Reinvention, by Manning Marable. Painting by Romare Bearden, 16 Mill Hands Lunch Bucket

	Artist	Song	Album
	Bud Powell	Cleopatra's Dream	The Scene Changes	Blue Note
	JulianAdderley	Alison's Uncle	Somethin' Else	Blue Note
	John Agard	Stereotype	An Evening Of International Poetry	Alliance Records
	John Agard	Grafitti In A British Rail Waiting Room	An Evening Of International Poetry	Alliance Records
	Max Roach featuring Anthony Braxton	Dance Griot	Birth And Rebirth	Black Saint
	Walt Dickerson Sirone Andrew Cyrille	Life Rays	Life Rays	Soul Note
-----------------------------air break-----------------------------
	Walt Dickerson & Sun Ra	Visions	Visions	Steeple Chase
	Mahmood Jamal	A Gift Of Blood	An Evening Of International Poetry	Alliance Records
	Mahmood Jamal	Silence	An Evening Of International Poetry	Alliance Records
	Gil Evans / Steve Lacy	Reincarnation Of A Lovebird	Paris Blues	Owl
	Steve Lacy	Virgin Jungle	The Door	Novus
	Okot P'Bitek	Acholi Song / Song Of The Prisoner	An Evening Of International Poetry	Alliance Records
	Clifford Brown	George's Dilemma	Study In Brown	Emarcy
-----------------------------air break-----------------------------
	Aime Cesaire (read by Justin Desmangles)	Rain (translated by A. James Arnold & Clayton Eshleman)	Solar Throat Slashed	Wesleyan Universtiy Press
	Jackie Byard	Parisian Thoroughfare	The Jaki Byard Experience	Prestige
	Mari Evans (read by Roscoe Lee Browne & James Earl Jones)	This Ain't No Mass Thing	A Hand Is On The Gate	Verve - Folkways
	Sam Rivers	Involution	Dimensions & Extensions	Blue Note
-----------------------------air break-----------------------------
	Aime Cesaire (read by Justin Desmangles)	Secret Society (translated by A. James Arnold & Clayton Eshleman)	Solar Throat Slashed	Wesleyan Universtiy Press
	Aime Cesaire (read by Justin Desmangles)	Attack On Morals (translated by A. James Arnold & Clayton Eshleman)	Solar Throat Slashed	Wesleyan Universtiy Press
	Rahsaan Roland Kirk	Rahsaanica	Natural Black Inventions: Root Strata	Atlantic
	Rahsaan Roland Kirk	Raped Voices	Natural Black Inventions: Root Strata	Atlantic
	Rahsaan Roland Kirk	Haunted Feelings	Natural Black Inventions: Root Strata	Atlantic
	Solar Throat Slashed	Prelude Back Home	Natural Black Inventions: Root Strata	Atlantic
-----------------------------air break-----------------------------
	Max Roach featuring Andy Bey	Members, Don't Git Weary	Members, Don't Git Weary	Atlantic

Weatherbird Language Alive

2011-06-17T09:25:00.000-07:00

Show description for Sunday 6/12/2011 @ 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

This afternoon, on the 5 o'clock hour, we will listen to Toni Morrison read from the text of her lecture in acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature 1993

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Toni Morrrison, Nobel Lecture December 7, 1993

2011-06-10T19:03:00.000-07:00

Nobel Lecture December 7, 1993

Listen to an Audio Recording of Toni Morrison's Nobel Lecture

33 min.

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"Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind but wise." Or was it an old man? A guru, perhaps. Or a griot soothing restless children. I have heard this story, or one exactly like it, in the lore of several cultures.

"Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind. Wise."

In the version I know the woman is the daughter of slaves, black, American, and lives alone in a small house outside of town. Her reputation for wisdom is without peer and without question. Among her people she is both the law and its transgression. The honor she is paid and the awe in which she is held reach beyond her neighborhood to places far away; to the city where the intelligence of rural prophets is the source of much amusement.

One day the woman is visited by some young people who seem to be bent on disproving her clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she is. Their plan is simple: they enter her house and ask the one question the answer to which rides solely on her difference from them, a difference they regard as a profound disability: her blindness. They stand before her, and one of them says, "Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead."

She does not answer, and the question is repeated. "Is the bird I am holding living or dead?"

Still she doesn't answer. She is blind and cannot see her visitors, let alone what is in their hands. She does not know their color, gender or homeland. She only knows their motive.

The old woman's silence is so long, the young people have trouble holding their laughter.

Finally she speaks and her voice is soft but stern. "I don't know", she says. "I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands."

Her answer can be taken to mean: if it is dead, you have either found it that way or you have killed it. If it is alive, you can still kill it. Whether it is to stay alive, it is your decision. Whatever the case, it is your responsibility.

For parading their power and her helplessness, the young visitors are reprimanded, told they are responsible not only for the act of mockery but also for the small bundle of life sacrificed to achieve its aims. The blind woman shifts attention away from assertions of power to the instrument through which that power is exercised.

Speculation on what (other than its own frail body) that bird-in-the-hand might signify has always been attractive to me, but especially so now thinking, as I have been, about the work I do that has brought me to this company. So I choose to read the bird as language and the woman as a practiced writer. She is worried about how the language she dreams in, given to her at birth, is handled, put into service, even withheld from her for certain nefarious purposes. Being a writer she thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency - as an act with consequences. So the question the children put to her: "Is it living or dead?" is not unreal because she thinks of language as susceptible to death, erasure; certainly imperiled and salvageable only by an effort of the will. She believes that if the bird in the hands of her visitors is dead the custodians are responsible for the corpse. For her a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public.

She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love. But she knows tongue-suicide is not only the choice of children. It is common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience.

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek - it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

The old woman is keenly aware that no intellectual mercenary, nor insatiable dictator, no paid-for politician or demagogue; no counterfeit journalist would be persuaded by her thoughts. There is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like paté-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness.

Underneath the eloquence, the glamor, the scholarly associations, however stirring or seductive, the heart of such language is languishing, or perhaps not beating at all - if the bird is already dead.

She has thought about what could have been the intellectual history of any discipline if it had not insisted upon, or been forced into, the waste of time and life that rationalizations for and representations of dominance required - lethal discourses of exclusion blocking access to cognition for both the excluder and the excluded.

The conventional wisdom of the Tower of Babel story is that the collapse was a misfortune. That it was the distraction, or the weight of many languages that precipitated the tower's failed architecture. That one monolithic language would have expedited the building and heaven would have been reached. Whose heaven, she wonders? And what kind? Perhaps the achievement of Paradise was premature, a little hasty if no one could take the time to understand other languages, other views, other narratives period. Had they, the heaven they imagined might have been found at their feet. Complicated, demanding, yes, but a view of heaven as life; not heaven as post-life.

She would not want to leave her young visitors with the impression that language should be forced to stay alive merely to be. The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie. When a President of the United States thought about the graveyard his country had become, and said, "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here. But it will never forget what they did here," his simple words are exhilarating in their life-sustaining properties because they refused to encapsulate the reality of 600, 000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war. Refusing to monumentalize, disdaining the "final word", the precise "summing up", acknowledging their "poor power to add or detract", his words signal deference to the uncapturability of the life it mourns. It is the deference that moves her, that recognition that language can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it. Language can never "pin down" slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.

Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction. But who does not know of literature banned because it is interrogative; discredited because it is critical; erased because alternate? And how many are outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged tongue?

Word-work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference - the way in which we are like no other life.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

"Once upon a time, ..." visitors ask an old woman a question. Who are they, these children? What did they make of that encounter? What did they hear in those final words: "The bird is in your hands"? A sentence that gestures towards possibility or one that drops a latch? Perhaps what the children heard was "It's not my problem. I am old, female, black, blind. What wisdom I have now is in knowing I cannot help you. The future of language is yours."

They stand there. Suppose nothing was in their hands? Suppose the visit was only a ruse, a trick to get to be spoken to, taken seriously as they have not been before? A chance to interrupt, to violate the adult world, its miasma of discourse about them, for them, but never to them? Urgent questions are at stake, including the one they have asked: "Is the bird we hold living or dead?" Perhaps the question meant: "Could someone tell us what is life? What is death?" No trick at all; no silliness. A straightforward question worthy of the attention of a wise one. An old one. And if the old and wise who have lived life and faced death cannot describe either, who can?

But she does not; she keeps her secret; her good opinion of herself; her gnomic pronouncements; her art without commitment. She keeps her distance, enforces it and retreats into the singularity of isolation, in sophisticated, privileged space.

Nothing, no word follows her declaration of transfer. That silence is deep, deeper than the meaning available in the words she has spoken. It shivers, this silence, and the children, annoyed, fill it with language invented on the spot.

"Is there no speech," they ask her, "no words you can give us that helps us break through your dossier of failures? Through the education you have just given us that is no education at all because we are paying close attention to what you have done as well as to what you have said? To the barrier you have erected between generosity and wisdom?

"We have no bird in our hands, living or dead. We have only you and our important question. Is the nothing in our hands something you could not bear to contemplate, to even guess? Don't you remember being young when language was magic without meaning? When what you could say, could not mean? When the invisible was what imagination strove to see? When questions and demands for answers burned so brightly you trembled with fury at not knowing?

"Do we have to begin consciousness with a battle heroines and heroes like you have already fought and lost leaving us with nothing in our hands except what you have imagined is there? Your answer is artful, but its artfulness embarrasses us and ought to embarrass you. Your answer is indecent in its self-congratulation. A made-for-television script that makes no sense if there is nothing in our hands.

"Why didn't you reach out, touch us with your soft fingers, delay the sound bite, the lesson, until you knew who we were? Did you so despise our trick, our modus operandi you could not see that we were baffled about how to get your attention? We are young. Unripe. We have heard all our short lives that we have to be responsible. What could that possibly mean in the catastrophe this world has become; where, as a poet said, "nothing needs to be exposed since it is already barefaced." Our inheritance is an affront. You want us to have your old, blank eyes and see only cruelty and mediocrity. Do you think we are stupid enough to perjure ourselves again and again with the fiction of nationhood? How dare you talk to us of duty when we stand waist deep in the toxin of your past?

"You trivialize us and trivialize the bird that is not in our hands. Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon's hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly - once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

"Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.

"Tell us about ships turned away from shorelines at Easter, placenta in a field. Tell us about a wagonload of slaves, how they sang so softly their breath was indistinguishable from the falling snow. How they knew from the hunch of the nearest shoulder that the next stop would be their last. How, with hands prayered in their sex, they thought of heat, then sun. Lifting their faces as though is was there for the taking. Turning as though there for the taking. They stop at an inn. The driver and his mate go in with the lamp leaving them humming in the dark. The horse's void steams into the snow beneath its hooves and its hiss and melt are the envy of the freezing slaves.

"The inn door opens: a girl and a boy step away from its light. They climb into the wagon bed. The boy will have a gun in three years, but now he carries a lamp and a jug of warm cider. They pass it from mouth to mouth. The girl offers bread, pieces of meat and something more: a glance into the eyes of the one she serves. One helping for each man, two for each woman. And a look. They look back. The next stop will be their last. But not this one. This one is warmed."

It's quiet again when the children finish speaking, until the woman breaks into the silence.

"Finally", she says, "I trust you now. I trust you with the bird that is not in your hands because you have truly caught it. Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done - together."

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1991-1995, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1997

Amiri Baraka Reviews Manning Marable's Malcolm X: A Life Of Reinvention

2011-06-04T18:28:00.000-07:00

On Mar 30 I waited for a car that Manning Marable was supposed to send to pick me up at my house so that we could meet later that day in his office at Columbia University because he wanted to interview me as part of an oral history project.

I had met with him two weeks before to discuss how Columbia would handle my papers, that is when we scheduled this last project. But the car never came. I called another driver I knew, a friend of mine and we drove to Columbia, but Marable was not there. It seemed no one at the Africana studies department knew where he was. Finally some one word got to me that Manning had gone back into the hospital.

I went back home, the next day I got the news on the internet that he had died.The strangeness of that missed appointment was weird enough, but the fact that his last work on Malcolm X was to be released two days later made the whole ending of our living relationship a frustrating incomplete denouement.

Initially, a friend of mine gave me a copy of the book at a happy discount. Taking it on one of my frequent trips out of town, I began to read. I gave that first copy to my wife when I returned because she had also, as many other people had, been clamoring to read it. As well as asking me relentlessly had I read it.

I bought another copy of the book at the Chicago airport, and I guess started to get into the book seriously. I have known Manning for a number of years. Actually I met him while he was still teaching in Colorado. I even worked under him, when I taught briefly at Columbia University, when he was chairman of the Africana Studies Dept. at Columbia.

As well, I have appreciated one of his books, the DuBois (“Black Radical Democrat”) work and at least appreciated the theme of “How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America”, as well as the entire stance of his acknowledgement of the important aspects of American (Black American) history which had to be grasped.

But as recently as a few weeks ago, ironically I had written him a letter about his journal Souls regarding an essay that quoted a man* who had been accused of participating in the assassination, making some demeaning remarks about Malcolm. My letter questioned the“intelligence” of including the quote since it offered nothing significant to the piece. This was not just loose criticism; I really wanted to know just what purpose the inclusion served. ( *This man Thomas 15X is the same one quoted by Marable as saying that it was the Nation of Islam that burned Malcolm’s house down.)

But with the publication of what some have called “his magnum opus”“Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” it is not just Marable’s inclusion of tidbits of presumed sexual scandal that should interest readers, that I question, but more fundamentally, what was the consciousness that created this work?

First of all I don’t think we can just bull’s-eye the writer’s intentions, we must include Marable’s consciousness as the overall shaper of his intentions, as well as his method. Originally from Ohio, Marable was a freshman in college in 1969; he did not graduate until1971. He has been attached to Academic institutions since 1974, Smith, Tuskegee, Univ. of San Francisco, Cornell, Colgate, Purdue, Ohio State, University of Colorado, Columbia.

It is no denigration of his life to say that Manning was an academic, a well principled one, but an academic nevertheless. But Marable did have a political aspect to his life, which I understood and is why I think he was a very principled academic. He did understand that the “purely” academic was fabrication of the essentially unengaged. That whatever you might do, there was a conscious political stance that your political consciousness had to assume, even if you refused to take it.

So his “membership” in the1970’s National Political Assembly chaired by Richard Hatcher, Mayor of Gary, Indiana, Rep Charles Diggs, the congressman from Detroit and myself as chairman of the Congress of African Peoples, signified that he was aware and a partisan of that attempt to raise and institutionalize Black political consciousness as a way to organize Black people nationally to struggle for Black political power.

In 1974 Marable joined the Democratic Socialists of America, and for a time was even a Vice Chairman of that organization which is called “Left” but is not Marxist and certainly not a Marxist-Leninist organization. It is one of those organizations like the group that split from Lenin’s 2nd International which he called socialists in word but chauvinists in reality.

So it is important that we recognize the specific political base upon which Manning’s“observations” may be judged. He is not simply “observing”. He is making judgments.So that, for instance, for Marable to consistently, throughout his book, call the Nation of Islam a “sect” is a judgment not an observation. The NOI certainly has and had more influence on society than DSA, certainly on Black people. The meaning as a small break awaygroup of a religious order only used now to connote a “jocular or illiterate” character (according to the OUD) is spurious.

But then in relationship to revolutionary Marxism or Marxism –Leninism, DSA certainly fits the description. My point being that Marable must be judged by what he says not by what others say he “intended”. The best thing about the book, of course, is that it raises Malcolm X to the height of our conversation again, and this is a very good thing in this Obama election period. (Post racialit ain’t!)

The very profile of Malcolm’s life, the outline of his life of struggle needs to be spread across the world again, if only to re-awaken the fiercest “blackness” in us to fight this newly packaged “same ol’ same ol”’emergence of white supremacy and racism. Whatever Marable is saying or pointing out, in the end, is to convince us of the superiority of social democracy which he refers to as “the Left”, which is anything from DSA to the Trotskyists. The characterization of Bayard Rustin’s “superior” reasoning in a debate with Malcolm or the response of James Farmer to Malcolm’s bringing a“body guard” to Farmer’s house, “Do you think I want to kill you?” tries to render Malcolm some paranoid case when indeed there were people plotting very actively to kill him.

Ultimately, it is Marable’s own political line that renders the book weakened by his consistent attempts to “reduce” Malcolm’s known qualities and status with many largely unsubstantiated injections,many described by Marable himself as “rumors”. Is there, for instance, any real evidence of Malcolm’s or Betty’s sexual trysts?

People who knew Charles Kenyatta, for example, in Harlem, will quickly recall a vainglorious fool & liar. Could much of this rumor material actually have come from Marable’s “official” sources, the FBI, CIA, BOSS, NYPD, as well as those in the NOI who hated him?

About Malcolm, a sentence like Marable’s “That evening Sharon 6X may have joined him in his hotel” is inexcusable.When I wrote the FBI asking them to release surveillance materials they had gathered on me, at first the director even denied such papers existed. It was Allen Ginsberg’s lawyer that finally got an admission that such papers existed, and that I could get them for ten cents a page. But when I got the papers, it was my wife, Amina, who said how do we know that the information they haven’t crossed out is stuff they want us to see and so confuse us about what was really going on.

I would submit that is exactly what those agencies would do in this case! To assume because you are given “access” to certain information, that that information is not “cooked”, as people around law enforcement say, is to labor in deep naiveté as to whom you are dealing with!

Marable never made any pretensions about being a “revolutionary”. His hookup with the DSA is open acknowledgment that he rejected Lenin’s prescription for a revolutionary organization, or party of the advanced, or such concepts as “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. In fact the DSA says they are not a party, aligning themselves very clearly with Lenin’s opponents in the 2nd International.

Such people, social democrats, are open opponents of revolution, so that at base Marable was opposed to the political logic of Malcolm’s efforts to make revolution. Marable is even more dismissive of the Nation of Islam which he brands a “cult”, a “sect”, dismissing the fact that even as a religious organization, the NOI had a distinct political message, and that it was this message, I think, more than the direct attraction of Islam, that drew the thousands to it

If Marable was giving a deeper understanding of Elijah Muhammad’s call for Five States in the south, he would have mentioned the relationship of this concept to Lenin’s formulation of an Afro American Nation in the black belt south (called that because that is the largest single concentration of Afro Americans in the US).

It was not simply some Negro fantasy. If Marable actually understood the political legitimacy of Malcolm’s Black Nationalism and how Malcolm’s constant exposure to the revolutionary aspects of the Civil Rights movement and the more militant Black Liberation Movement shaped his thinking and made his whole presentation more overtly political and that this was not only negative to the core of the NOI bureaucracy but certainly to the FBI,&c.

They have even written Malcolm X was much safer to them in the Nation than as a loose cannon roaming the planet outside of it. They understood that what Malcolm was saying, even in The Ballot or the Bullet was dangerous stuff. That his admission that all white people might not be the Devil was not morphing into a Dr. King replica but an understanding, as he said at Oxford University, that when Black people made their revolution there would be some white people joining them.

The meeting with the Klan was not Malcolm’s idea, certainly it was Elijah Muhammad’s as it had been Marcus Garvey’s idea before him. Malcolm’s Black Nationalism became more deliberately a Revolutionary Nationalism, such as Mao Tse Tsung (or Cabral or Nkrumah) spoke of, necessary to rally the nation’s forces together to make lst a national revolution to overthrow foreign domination and followed by a revolution to destroy capitalism.

Importantly, Marable does draw a clearer picture of Malcolm’s childhood and early days, especially indicating the Garvey influence his parents taught him and how that would make him open to what Elijah Muhammad taught, unlike the obscure flashbacks of Spike Lee’s version of Malcolm’s early days.

Though Marable ascribes some wholly political “defiance” to the conked hair and zoot suits of the 40’s rather than understanding that there was also a deep organic cultural expression that is always evident in Black life. It is not just a formal reaction to white society. African pants are similarly draped. Access to straightening combs or conkolene are a product of the period, and certainly if any straight hair is gonna be imitated, there was some here before the Latinos.

The “antibourgeois” attitude of the Black youth culture is organic and an expression of the gestalt of black life in the US and Marable seems not to wholly understand it. For instance his take on BeBop as the music of “the hepcats (sic) who broke most sharply from swing, developing a black oriented sound at the margins of musical taste and commercialism”.

BeBop was a revolutionary music, dismissing Tin Pan Alley commercialism and raising the blues and improvisation again as principal to black music.The essential “disconnection “ in the book is Marable’s failure to understand the revolutionary aspects of Black Nationalism, as a struggle for “ Self Determination, Self Respect and Self Defense”. A struggle for equal democratic rights expressed on the sidewalks of an oppressor nation by an oppressed Afro American nationality.

What the book does is try to remove Malcolm from the context and character of an Afro American revolutionary and “make him more human” by dismantling that portrait by redrawing him with the rumors, assumptions, speculations, questionable guesses and the intentionally twisted seeing of the state and his enemies.

Was Captain Joseph (who later changed his name to Yusuf Shah) close to Malcolm? He appeared on television calling Malcolm “Benedict Arnold”and told Spike Lee that I had come up to the Mosque and stood up to question Malcolm and Malcolm told me to “sit down until you get rid of that white woman”.

I met Malcolm only once, the month before he was murdered. This was in Muhammad Babu’s room at the Waldorf Astoria. Babu had just finished leading the revolution in Zanzibar, and would later become Minister of Economics for Tanzania( which was Zanzibar and Tanganyika). At that meeting Malcolm responded to my demeaning of the NAACP by saying I should be trying, instead, to join the NAACP, to make a point about Black people needing a “United Front”.

That idea was not an attempt at “trying to become respectable”, to paraphrase Marable, Malcolm had come to realize that no sectarianism could make the revolution we needed. Interestingly, Stokely Carmichael also called for the building of a Black United Front, and Martin Luther King, when he visited my house in Newark, a week before he was murdered, called for the same political strategy.

It was such a front that was a major part of the national democratic coalition that elected Obama. As for Yusuf Shah, when Spike Lee repeated Shah’s wild allegations about me in his book How I Made The Movie X, I asked a college friend of mine, who had become my part time lawyer, Hudson Reed,to file a suit against Shah demanding he be questioned in court for any “exculpatory”evidence relating to the murder of Malcolm X, particularly as to the involvement of himself and organized crime.

A short time later, Shah, who had moved to Massachusetts, died in his sleep. Marable reports that Captain Joseph/Yusuf Shah’s FBI file was “empty”! It is Marable’s misunderstanding of the revolutionary aspect of Black Nationalism that challenges the portrait not only of Malcolm but of the period and its organizations as well. He treats the split between Malcolm X and the NOI much like he assumes the police did. (Though this is patently false.) As a struggle between “two warring blackgangs”, a sect splitting from the main.

So that there is much more from Marable framing Malcolm’s murder as directed by the NOI, rather than the state. Marable’s general portrait of Malcolm is as doomed and confused individual about whom he could say that “Malcolm extensively read history but he was not a historian”. As if the academic title “HISTORIAN” conferred a more scientific understanding of history than any grassroots’ scholar might have. Simple class bias.

To say of the NOI that it was not a radical organization obscures the Black Nationalist confrontation with the white racist oppressor nation. Marable thinks that the Trots of the SWP or the members of the CP or the Committees of Correspondence are more radical. That means he has not even understood Lenin’s directive as pointed out in Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism, in The National Question, “…The revolutionary character of a national movement under the conditions of imperialist oppression does not necessarily presuppose the existence of proletarian elements in the movement, the existence of a revolutionaryor a republican programme of the movement, the existence of a democratic basis of the movement.

The struggle that the Emir of Afghanistan is waging for the independence of Afghanistan is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the monarchist view o fthe Emir and his associates, for it weakens, disintegrates and undermines imperialism; whereas the struggle waged by such ‘desperate’democrats and ‘socialists’, ‘revolutionaries’ and republicans…was a reactionary struggle. …

Lenin was right in saying that the national movement of the oppressed countries should be appraised not from the point of view of formal democracy but from the point of view of the actual results , as shown by the general balance sheet of struggle against imperialism” –Foundations of Leninism, p77

Marable thinks that the Trots like the SWP or the soi disant Marxistsin CPUSA or the Committees of Correspondence (a breakaway from the CPUSA) or the DSA are more radical than the NOI or Malcolm X. Perhaps on paper. But not in the real world of the Harlem streets.

Malcolm came out the NOI, Dr. King from the reformist SCLC. But both men were more objectively revolutionary on those Harlem streets or in those southern marches than any of the social democratic formations and the social democrats ought to face this. Marable spends most of his time trying to make the NOI Malcolm’s murderers. Information from FBI, BOSS, CIA, NYPD, would tend to push this view, for obvious reasons.

In this vein Marable says that Malcolm’s Africa trips “made his murder all the more necessary from an institutional standpoint.” That Malcolm’s actions “had been all too provocative” to Elijah Muhammad and the NOI. But what about the Imperialist U.S. state and its agencies of detection and murder? They would be more provoked and better able to end such provocation. If there’s a well-known murderer of Malcolm X still running loose as Marable and others have pointed out, how is it he remains free and we must presume that those agencies of the state know this as well as Marable and the others!

But even as he keeps hammering away that it was the Nation of Islam, he still says contradictorily “The fatwa, or death warrant , may or may not have been signed by Elijah Muhammad, there is no way of knowing.” Many of Marable’s claims fall under the same category. He even quotes Malcolm after he was refused entrance into France tha the had been making a “serious mistake” by focusing attention on the NOI Chicago headquarters “thinking all my problems were coming from Chicago and they’re not”.

Asked then from where, Malcolm said “From Washington”.Marable also tells us that even today the FBI refuses to release its reports on Malcolm’s assassination. Yet he will quote one of those agencies without question. Of Betty Shabazz’ death Marable says flatly, of Malcolm’s daughter Qubilah…”her disturbed twelve-year old son set fire one night to his grandmother’s apartment”. How does he know this? Is an official government “information” release that impressive? There are many doubts about that murder; shouldn’t some of them have been investigated?Some of the characterizations in the book are simply incorrect and suffer from only knowing about the movement on paper. Marable saying about Stokely Carmichael, after splitting with “pacifist” Bob Moses and SNCC that he would subsequently join the Black Panthers” is such an example.

Carmichael didn’t join the Panthers; he was “drafted”along with Rap Brown. Marable says in effect that Malcolm misunderstood Martin Luther King’s influence on Black people. He didn’t misunderstand that influence, he was trying to provide an alternative to it.

Though ultimately I believe both leaders later conclusion that a United Front would be the most formidable instrument to achieve equal rights and self-determination for the Afro American people. I would have liked to see Malcolm and Martin in the same organization, and for that matter Garvey & DuBois. They could argue all day and all night and in the end some of us might not agree on the majority’s decision, but like theCongress of the United States we’d have to say “I don’t even agree with that…but that’s what we voted to do”!

Interestingly, on the back of the book are three academics who represent the same social democratic thought as Prof Marable. Gates, who disparages Africa, looks for racism in Cuba not Cambridge and says the Harvard Yard is his nation. My friend Cornell West who in response to me calling out at the Left Forum, “Where are the socialists, where are the communists” shouts“I’m a Christian!” And Michael Eric Dyson who wrote a book on Dr. King calling it the “True Dr. King’ somewhat like Marable’s approach to Malcolm.

But who and what else in the paper “Garden of Even” of “Post Racial America”. So it is necessary that we rid ourselves of the real leaders of our struggle, in favor of Academics who want to tell us we werefollowing flawed leaders with flawed ideas. We don’t need equal rights and self-determination, an appointment to an Ivy League school will do just fine.

--Amiri Baraka

5/4 /11

New Ark

Remebering Gil Scott-Heron

2011-06-04T15:26:00.000-07:00

My mother turned me on to Gil Scott Heron. Reflections played often in her circle. It was the year of Survival, and Hotter Than July. But Reflections, when it was on people listened in a different way, and I noticed.
The normal get-down-boogie-stop-shuffle-bounce would be accompanied by the affirmative nodding, uh-huh, right-on, and tell it, of people acknowledging truth being spoken. There is a freedom there, when truth is heard, a freedom we long for. Gil Scott had that gift.
Right away I started borrowing that record into my room. Listening to it repeatedly, in my own time, trying to make his rap mine. At school Gil Scott’s couplets, metaphors and rhymes started making their way into my own. I memorized classics like B-Movie and the poem from Inner City Blues. From behind the words I watched with secret joy the power words could reveal and disclose.
That was 30 years ago, and tonight Gil Scott is gone. On to the ancestors, as we say. But the music, the poetry, lives on in our blood, our lives, our breath with his. You, me, and others.
Back then I had no idea that I was being initiated into a world of art and culture and that I would dedicate my life to it. That would become my life’s work, as it has. Gil Scott is the reason I chose to be who I am today.
Gil Scott was an exemplar of black literature.
As a self-proclaimed Bluesologist, Gil Scott resuscitated the living heritage of rap’s connection with earlier blues poetry forms. See Ted Joans‘ The 38.
Simple-minded critics have called him the Godfather of Rap, a title he refused, directing them to his primary sources of inspiration, Langston Hughes, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar‘s Lyrics of the Lowly Life. As Amiri Baraka said, jazz without the blues is a music without memory, it can be equally said of hip-hop without Gil Scott. (And hip-hop needs it’s memory very badly now, wouldn’t you say?)
There is a general prohibition against speaking the truth about the lives of black men in America. Gil Scott broke through that prohibition, every chance he had, telling our stories, our peoples’ stories, our peoples’ lives. With extraordinary empathy, with gentleness, with violence, bitterness and love. With heartache, passion, and tenderness. Also joy. His music contained the full panorama of our black experience in America. He rejected none of us, and held us all close, even the most hurtful and backward among us, in song. He loved us.
It was through Gil Scott that I found the courage to seek my own voice, speak my own truth, first imitating him, as a child. He helped cut through the demonic clamor of racism and sickness that surrounded. He still does.

Justin Desmangles, Chair of the Before Columbus Foundation, host of New Day Jazz on KDVS at UC Davis

When You Are Who You Are: Homage To Gil Scot-Heron, Poet

2011-05-29T21:26:00.000-07:00

Show description for Sunday 5/29/2011 @ 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Please note: MP3 begins at 1:04:00, rather than 00:00:00

This afternoon, an homage to the great poet, musician and artist, Gilbert "Gil" Scot-Heron (April 1, 1949 - May 27, 2011)

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	Artist	Song	Album	Label
	Art Ensemble Of Chicago	Dreaming Of The Master	Nice Guys	ECM
	Gil Scot-Heron	Is That Jazz?	Reflections	Arista
	Gil Scot-Heron	Morning Thoughts	Reflections	Arista
	Gil Scot-Heron	Inner City Blues (Poem: "The Siege Of New Orleans")	Reflections	Arista
	Miles Davis	Black Satin	On The Corner	Columbia
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Miles Davis	Black Satin	On The Corner	Columbia
	Miles Davis	John McLaughlin	Bitches Brew	Columbia
	Gil Scot-Heron	The Revolution Will Not Be Televised	Pieces Of A Man	Flying Dutchman
	Gil Scot-Heron	Save The Children	Pieces Of A Man	Flying Dutchman
	Gil Scot-Heron	Lady Day & John Coltrane	Pieces Of A Man	Flying Dutchman
	John Coltrane	Acknowledgement	A Love Supreme	Impulse
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Gil Scot-Heron	Pieces Of A Man	Pieces Of A Man	Flying Dutchman
	Gil Scot-Heron	Grandma's Hands	Reflections	Arista
	Gil Scot-Heron	Gun	Reflections	Arista
	Miles Davis	Water Babies	Water Babies	Columbia
	Gil Scot-Heron	Did You Hear What They Said?	Free Will	Flying Dutchman
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Gil Scot-Heron	B Movie	Reflections	Arista
	The Last Poets	Mean Machine	This Is Madness	Celluloid
	Gil Scot-Heron	When You Are You Are	Pieces Of A Man	Flying Dutchman

It's After The End Of The World, Don't You Know That Yet? Celebrating Sun Ra, Remembering Malcolm X

2011-05-22T21:37:00.000-07:00

Show description for Sunday 5/22/2011 @ 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Our annual celebration of Sun Ra (born Herman Poole Blount, Le Sony'r Ra, May 22, 1914 – May 30, 1993) Also, on the 5 o'clock hour, an excerpt from the last recorded speech by Malcolm X ( May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965), born Malcolm Little and also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz

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	Artist	Song	Album	Label
	Sun Ra & His Myth Science Arkestra	Adventure - Equation	Cosmic Tones For Mental Therapy	Evidence
	Sun Ra & His Myth Science Arkestra	Moon Dance	Cosmic Tones For Mental Therapy	Evidence
	Sun Ra	Heliocentric	The Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra	ESP
	Sun Ra	Outer Nothingness	The Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra	ESP
	Sun Ra	Other Worlds	The Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra	ESP
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Sun Ra	Cogitation	Monorails And Satellites	Evidence
	Sun Ra	Skylight	Monorails And Satellites	Evidence
	Sun Ra & His Outer Space Arkestra	The Bridge	The Singles	Evidence
	Sun Ra & His Outer Space Arkestra	Rocket #9	The Singles	Evidence
	Sun Ra & His Myth Science Arkestra	The Outer Heavens	Art Forms Of Dimensions Tomorrow	Evidence
	Sun Ra & His Astro-Galatic Infintiy Arkestra	Enlightenment	The Singles	Evidence
	Sun Ra featuring David Henderson	Love In Outer Space	The Singles	Evidence
	Sun Ra	Mayan Temple	The Singles	Evidence
	Sun Ra & His Intergalatic Solar Arkestra	It's After The End Of The World	Soundtrack To The Film Space Is The Place	Evidence
	Sun Ra & His Intergalatic Solar Arkestra	Under Different Stars	Soundtrack To The Film Space Is The Place	Evidence
	Sun Ra & His Intergalatic Solar Arkestra	Discipline 33	Soundtrack To The Film Space Is The Place	Evidence
	Sun Ra & His Intergalatic Solar Arkestra	Watusa	Soundtrack To The Film Space Is The Place	Evidence
	Sun Ra & His Intergalatic Solar Arkestra	Calling Planet Earth	Soundtrack To The Film Space Is The Place	Evidence
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Sun Ra & His Myth Science Arkestra	Angels & Demons At Play	Angels & Demons At Play	Evidence
	Sun Ra	We Travel The Spaceways	Greatest Hits:Easy Listening For Intergalatic Travel	Evidence
	Sun Ra	Twin Stars Of Thence	Lanquidity	Evidence
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Malcolm X	Excerpt One (Mecca, Non-violence, The Press)	Feb. 14, 1965, Detroit	Private Recording
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Malcolm X	Excerpt Two ( Decolonisation, Kennedy as Neo-colonialist, Africa & Human Rights)	Feb. 14, 1965, Detroit	Private Recording
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Sun Ra featuring John Gilmore & June Tyson	Enlightenment	Nuits de la Fondation Maeght Volume 1	Nuits de la Fondation Maeght
	Sun Ra	Astro Black	Astro Black	Impulse

I. Reed Juice! on Joan Walsh, Progessives & Obama

2011-05-08T20:21:00.000-07:00

Show description for Sunday 5/8/2011 @ 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Ishmael Reed returns to discuss his new novel, Juice!

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	Artist	Song	Album	Label
	Betty Carter	This Is Always	Inside Betty Carter	United Artists
	Betty Carter	Beware My Heart	Inside Betty Carter	United Artists
	Betty Carter	Some Other Time	Inside Betty Carter	United Artists
	Betty Carter	Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most	Inside Betty Carter	United Artists
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Sarah Vaughn	All I Do	Sarah + 2	Roulette
	Sarah Vaughn	I Understand	Sarah + 2	Roulette
	Sarah Vaughn	Baby Won't You Please Come Home	Sarah + 2	Roulette
	Sarah Vaughn	When Lights Are Low	Sarah + 2	Roulette
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Chico Hamilton Quintet	Concerto Of Jazz Themes From The Soundtrack Of Sweet Smell Of Success	The Sweet Smell Of Success	Decca
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Modern Jazz Quartet	Odds Against Tomorrow	Dedicated To Connie	Atlantic
	Roscoe Mitchell & Amiri Baraka	In Town	MLK Concert at Yoshi's SF Jan. 17, 2011	Private Recording
	Roscoe Mitchell & Amiri Baraka	Selections From Un Poco Low Coup	MLK Concert at Yoshi's SF Jan. 17, 2011	Private Recording
	Julian "Cannonball" Adderley	Love For Sale	Somethin' Else	Blue Note
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Julian "Cannonball" Adderley	One For Daddy-O	Somethin' Else	Blue Note
	Julian "Cannonball" Adderley	Dancing In The Dark	Somethin' Else	Blue Note
	John Coltrane	I'm Old Fashioned	Blue Train	Blue Note
	John Coltrane	Lazy Bird	Blue Train	Blue Note
	Wynton Kelly	Keep It Moving (excerpt)	Kelly Blue	Riverside
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Interview With Ishmael Reed By Justin Desmangles	Interview With Ishmael Reed By Justin Desmangles	Interview With Ishmael Reed By Justin Desmangles	Interview With Ishmael Reed By Justin Desmangles
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Albert Ayler	Mothers	Holy Ghost	Revenant

Lady Day Spring Toned, April Warmly

2011-04-18T08:21:00.000-07:00

Show description for Sunday 4/17/2011 @ 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Our annual celebration of Our Lady, the great Lady Day, Miss Billie Holiday!

New Day Jazz

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	Artist	Song	Album	Label
	Billie Holiday	Your Mother's Son In Law	Quintessential	Columbia
	Billie Holiday	It's Like Reaching For The Moon	Quintessential	Columbia
	Billie Holiday	Pennies From Heaven	Quintessential	Columbia
	Billie Holiday	They Can't Take That Away From Me	Quintessential	Columbia
	Billie Holiday	If Dreams Come True	Quintessential	Columbia
	Billie Holiday	Now They Call It Swing	Quintessential	Columbia
	Countee Cullen	From The Dark Tower	A Hand Is On The Gate	Folkways
	Langston Hughes	I've Known Rivers	A Hand Is On The Gate	Folkways
	Robert Hayden	Frederick Douglass	A Hand Is On The Gate	Folkways
	Paul Laurence Dunbar	We Wear The Mask	A Hand Is On The Gate	Folkways
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Eric Dolphy	Eclipse	Out There	New Jazz
	Jayne Cortez	Essence Of Rose Solitude	Celebrations & Solitudes	Strata-East
	Billie Holiday	Solitude	Quintessential	Columbia
	Billie Holiday	Solitude	First Verve Sessions	Verve
	Sonny Rollins	Solitude	Way Out West	Contemporary
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Billie Holiday	Getting Some Fun Out Of Life	Quintessential	Columbia
	Billie Holiday	A Sail Boat In The Moonlight	Quintessential	Columbia
	Billie Holiday	He Ain't Got Rhythm	Quintessential	Columbia
	Billie Holiday	Billie's Blues	Quintessential	Columbia
	Billie Holiday	Spreadin' The Rhythm Around	Quintessential	Columbia
	Ntozake Shange	Sorry	For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf	Buddha
	Billie Holiday	Ain't Nobodies Business If I Do	Billie Holiday	Decca
	Billie Holiday	Do Your Duty	Billie Holiday	Decca
	Billie Holiday	Now Or Never	Billie Holiday	Decca
	Ntozake Shange	One	For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf	Buddha
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Billie Holiday	God Bless The Child	Lady Sings The Blues	Verve
	Sonny Rollins	God Bless The Child	The Bridge	RCA
	Billie Holiday	God Bless The Child	Billie's Blues	Columbia
	Eric Dolphy	God Bless The Child	Status	Fantasy
	Billie Holiday	Nice Work If You Can Get It	At Newport	Verve
	Billie Holiday	Willow Weep For Me	At Newport	Verve
	Mahmood Jamal	A Gift Of Blood	An Evening of International Poetry	Alliance
	Mahmood Jamal	Silence	An Evening of International Poetry	Alliance
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Sterling Brown	An Old Woman Remembers	A Hand Is On The Gate	Folkways
	Richard Wright	Between The World And Me	A Hand Is On The Gate	Folkways
	Billie Holiday	Strange Fruit	Lady Sings The Blues	Verve
	Billie Holiday	Strange Fruit	Strange Fruit	Commodore
	Billie Holiday	Born To Love	Quintessential	Columbia
	Billie Holiday	Let's Call The Whole Thing Off	Quintessential	Columbia
	Billie Holiday	This Years Kisses	Quintessential	Columbia
	Billie Holiday	Cheek To Cheek	Lady Sings The Blues	Verve
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Billie Holiday	Lady Sings The Blues	Lady Sings The Blues	Verve
	Herbie Nichols	Lady Sings The Blues	The Third World	Blue Note
	Ronald Stone	Lady Day Spring Toned	New Jazz Poets	Broadside
	Archie Shepp	Lady Sings The Blues	Live In San Francisco	Impulse

LADY DAY SPRING TONED - Ronald Stone

2011-04-17T21:22:00.000-07:00

LADY DAY SPRING TONED - Ronald Stone

Lady Day Spring-toned
april-warmly
bluesky-silently
"Heart in my soul
has got this solo"
(Charley Parker-birds
overhead
overbird
overhead
overheard
(a-flat minor fart-
ing perfume
of magenta smells
from a far corner
of a microsmic universe)
stand still
In nowhere air
Lady Day's heart
in her soul
(21-dimensionless-
dimension overtones
from 5 dimensional
Pagliacci scenes
we see only 3 dimensionally)
solos
Phony American Charley Morality
ate my flesh
but my soul was
West of horizons to
phony American Charley Morality
Everybody knows trouble
double-trouble
triple-trouble
I've seen
like a motherless child
traveling light
through 5 dimensional scenes
foolish fools
see as 3 dimensional scenes
I hungered for you're -my-
thrill-don't-explain love (no, don't explain love)
I thirsted for easy-living-
for-you-love
Trying to find love
found me pain
Trying to give love
gave me pain
Spikes spiking skin pain
swarms of insects stinging pain
Starfire pain
burning in every pore
burning in every blood vessel
burning in every bone marrow
Pain eating like cancer
Pain screaming so loud it's silent
I'm gone now
I'm gone now
Wow I'm gone
21st heaven melody !
Wink-smile-wink rhythm
Cosmic harmony
All 3 bound me
in future futureless
silent sounds
Love's strange fruits
in some other spring
where no pain sings
here in nowhere

African American Writers & Classical Tradition

2011-04-03T22:16:00.000-07:00

Show description for Sunday 4/3/2011 @ 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

This afternoon on the 5 o'clock hour we are joined by James Tatum (pictured above, left), professor emeritus of classics at Dartmouth, to discuss his most recent work, co-authored with William W. Cook (above, right), professor emeritus of English and African American studies at Dartmouth, African American Writers and Classical Tradition.

"This book is a magisterial treatment of sophisticated Black literary artists who deployed the deep and rich resources of Greek and Latin classical texts. The complex phenomenon of Afro-classicism is laid bare for all to apprehend and appreciate!" - Cornel West, Princeton University

"Traditionally, African American literature has been treated like an orphan, shifted from one special-interest home to another where only a few can get that extra serving of porridge. Rarely has the genre been treated as seriously as by Cook and Tatum. Knowing them, I'm sure that this excellent book, African American Writers and Classical Tradition, is the result of many hours of deliberation. They debunk for all time that African American literature is monotraditional." - Ishmael Reed

New Day Jazz

Justin Desmangles

Jazz music for lovers and the lonely.

Genre

Jazz

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	Artist	Song	Album	Label
	William Parker	I'm So Proud / Ya He Yey Ya	I Plan To Stay A Believer	AUM-Fidelity
	William Parker & Hamid Drake	Earth	Summer Snow Volume 2	AUM-Fidelity
	William Parker & Hamid Drake	Pahos	Summer Snow Volume 2	AUM-Fidelity
	Ralph Towner & Paolo Fresu	Sacred Place (Reprise)	Chiaroscuro	ECM
	Ralph Towner & Paolo Fresu	Two Miniatures	Chiaroscuro	ECM
	Ralph Towner & Paolo Fresu	Postlude	Chiaroscuro	ECM
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	The Band with Muddy Waters	Mannish Boy	The Last Waltz	Warner Brothers
	James Carter	Layin' In The Cut	Layin' In The Cut	Atlantic
	Odean Pope	Blues	Universal Sounds	Porter
	Michael Bisio	Alabama	Travel Music	michaelbisio.com
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Abbey Lincoln with The Staple Singers	The Music Is The Magic	Devil's Got Your Tongue	Verve
	Abbey Lincoln	Bird Alone	You Gotta Pay The Band	Verve
	Ornette Coleman	Word For Bird	In All Languages	Harmolodic-Verve
	Ornette Coleman	Space Church (Continous Services)	In All Languages	Harmolodic-Verve
	Darius Jones & Matthew Shipp	Bleed	Cosmic Lieder	AUM-Fidelity
	Darius Jones & Matthew Shipp	Ultima Thule	Cosmic Lieder	AUM-Fidelity
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Darius Jones	Meekness	Man'ish Boy	AUM-Fidelity
	Interview With James Tatum By Justin Desmangles	Interview With James Tatum By Justin Desmangles	Interview With James Tatum By Justin Desmangles	Interview With James Tatum By Justin Desmangles
	Bob Dylan & The Band	Bessie Smith	The Basement Tapes

—-The New Invasion of Africa—– by Amiri Baraka

2011-03-29T10:17:00.000-07:00

—-The New Invasion of Africa—–

by Amiri Baraka

So it wd be this way

That they wd get a negro

To bomb his own home

To join with the actual colonial

Powers, Britain, France, add Poison Hillary

With Israeli and Saudi to make certain

That revolution in Africa must have a stopper

So call in the white people who long tasted our blood

They would be the copper, overthrow Libya

With some bullshit humanitarian scam

With the negro yapping to make it seem right (far right)

But that’s how Africa got enslaved by the white

A negro selling his own folk, delivering us to slavery

In the middle of the night. When will you learn poet

And remember it so you know it

Imperialism can look like anything

Can be quiet and intelligent and even have

A pretty wife. But in the end, it is insatiable

And if it needs to, it will take your life.