New Day: Ted Joans

Showing posts with label Ted Joans. Show all posts

Monday, September 12, 2011

We Kiss In A Shadow

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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	Artist	Song	Album	Label
	Bill Evans Trio	Witchcraft	Portrait In Jazz	Riverside
	George Russell	Nardis	Ezz-thetics	Riverside
	Eric Dolphy	17 West	Out There	New Jazz
	Sarah Vaughn	I'm Glad There Is You	Sarah Vaughn	Emarcy
	Sarah Vaughn	Summertime	Afterhours	Columbia
	Billie Holiday	Summertime	The Quintessential	Columbia
	Billie Holiday	A Sailboat in the Moonlight	The Quintessential	Columbia
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Sonny Rollins	There Is No Greater Love	Way Out West	Contemporary
	Sonny Rollins	A Night In Tunisia	More From The Vanguard	Blue Note
	Thelonious Monk Trio	Bye-Ya	Thelonious Monk Trio	Prestige
	Thelonious Monk	Work	Thelonious Monk & Sonny Rollins	Prestige
	Hank Mobley	52nd Street Theme	Mobley's Message	Prestige
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Hank Mobley	Message From The Border	Mobley's Second Message	Prestige
	Ella Fitzgerald	Bewitched	Rodgers & Hart Songbook	Verve
	Ella Fitzgerald	Love Is Here To Stay	Gershwin Songbook	Verve
	Ella Fitzgerald	I Didn't Know About You	Ellington Songbook	Verve
	Eric Dolphy & Booker Little	Miss Ann	Far Cry	New Jazz
	Ron Carter	Rally	Where?	New Jazz
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Ted Joans (read by Justin Desmangles)	Passed On Blues: Homage to a Poet	Teducation	Coffee House
	Eric Dolphy & Booker Little	Status Seeking	Status	Prestige
	Mal Waldron	Don't Explain	Mal 2	Prestige
	Mal Waldron	Dee's Dilemma	Mal 1	Prestige
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Sonny Rollins	Strode Rode	Saxophone Colossus	Prestige
	Thelonious Monk	Brilliant Corners	Brilliant Corners	Riverside
	Sonny Rollins	We Kiss In A Shadow	East Broadway Rundown	Impulse
========================== Airbreak ==========================
	Ornette Coleman	The Garden Of Souls	New York Is Now!	Blue Note
	Ornette Coleman	We Now Interrupt For A Commerical

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Remembering Gil Scott-Heron

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

Sunday, February 13, 2011