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BAG: Point
from which creation begins
The Black
Artists' Group of St. Louis
By Benjamin
Looker
Reviews
From 1968 to 1972, St. Louis was
home to the Black Artists’ Group (BAG), a seminal arts collective that
nurtured African American experimentalists working in theater, visual
arts, dance, poetry, and jazz.
Inspired by a newly assertive
cultural nationalism, over the course of the 1960s scores of black
artistic cooperatives had sprung up around the country, and these
ideological and aesthetic impulses resonated with BAG’s founders. In an
abandoned warehouse in the city’s central core, a generation of
innovative artists created a moment of intense and vibrant cultural
life, surrounded by the physical and economic evisceration that typified
that decade’s “urban crisis.”
Working to raise black
consciousness and explore the far reaches of interdisciplinary
performance, members established a local arts academy for area youths,
navigated a relentless calendar of original multimedia productions, and
articulated an uncompromising social agenda. As debates over civil
rights, nationalism, and the role of the arts in contemporary struggles
all found form in BAG, the organization quickly became one of the
Midwest’s most significant exemplars of the emergent Black Arts Movement
of the 1960s.
This book narrates the group’s
development against the backdrop of St. Louis spaces and institutions,
examines work by its major artists, and follows the collective’s
musicians in their eventual move to Paris and on to New York, where
they played a leading role in Lower Manhattan’s “loft jazz” scene of the
1970s.—Publisher,
Missouri Historical Society Press
In this brilliant evocation of a
great cultural flowering in the late 1960s, Benjamin Looker boldly
plants the flag of St. Louis in the middle of the history of jazz and
restores that often neglected city to its rightful place in the
narrative of African American arts. The rich detail, careful research,
and clarity of writing make this book a pleasure to read and set new
standards for studies of American culture and urban history.
—John
Szwed, Author of So What: The Life of Miles Davis
Looker's meticulously researched
monograph on the important Black Artists' Group is an invaluable
contribution to the historical literature on American experimentalism,
providing unique and trenchant insights on how African American artists
negotiate complex relationships among aesthetics, social and political
forces, and community activism. In particular, the book illuminates the
process by which musical ideas developed outside of the canonical
cultural centers of the United States eventually gained international
recognition as among the most audacious, risk-taking new sounds of the
late twentieth century.—George
E. Lewis, Improviser and Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music,
Columbia University
As a young man coming of age in St.
Louis during the Black Power and Black Arts Movements, I am sure that my
creative spirit was ignited through my exposure to BAG. I was always
around these artists at rehearsals, readings, rap sessions, and
performances, just a kid trying to be someplace out of harm's way, on a
mission of self-discovery. I found myself by being exposed to the roots
of my cultural heritage. The Black Artists' Group inspired me to do the
work that I do today.—Ron
Himes, Founder and Producing Director, St. Louis Black Repertory Company
Benjamin Looker is a native of Ann Arbor,
Michigan. He graduated from Washington University in 2000 with majors in
urban studies and music, before earning an M.A. from Goldsmiths College,
University of London. Looker was recently a Fulbright Scholar to Canada,
and is currently a graduate student in the American Studies Program at
Yale University.
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Julius Arthur Hemphill
(January 24, 1938,
Fort Worth, Texas - April 2, 1995, New York City) was born in Fort
Worth, Texas (also, incidentally, the hometown of
Ornette Coleman), and studied the
clarinet before learning saxophone.
Gerry Mulligan was an early influence. He performed mainly on alto
saxophone; less often soprano and tenor saxophones and flute.
Hemphill joined the United States
Army in 1964, and served for several years, and later performed with
Ike Turner for a brief period. In 1968, Hemphill moved to
St. Louis, Missouri and co-founded the
Black Artists' Group (BAG), a multidisciplinary arts collective that
brought him into contact with artists such as saxophonists
Oliver Lake and
Hamiet Bluiett, trumpeters
Baikida Carroll and Floyd LeFlore, and writer/director Malinke
Robert Elliott.
Hemphill moved to New York City in
the mid-1970s, and was active in the then-thriving
free jazz community. He taught saxophone lessons to a number of
notable musicians, including
David Sanborn and
Tim Berne. Hemphill was probably best known as the founder of the
World Saxophone Quartet, a group he formed in 1976, after
collaborating with
Anthony Braxton in several saxophone-only ensembles. Hemphill left
the World Saxophone Quartet in the early 1990s, and formed a saxophone
quintet.
Hemphill recorded over twenty
albums as a leader, about ten records with the
World Saxophone Quartet and also recorded or performed with
Björk,
Bill Frisell,
Anthony Braxton and others. Late in his life, ill-health (including
diabetes and heart surgery) forced Hemphill to stop playing
saxophone, but he continued writing music until his death. His saxophone
sextet, led by
Marty Ehrlich, also released several albums of Hemphill's music, but
without Hemphill playing. The most recent is titled The Hard Blues,
recorded live in
Lisbon after Hemphill's death.
The best source on Hemphill's life
and music is a multi-hour oral history interview that he conducted for
the
Smithsonian Institution in March and April 1994, and which is held
at the Archives Center of the National Museum of American History in
Washington, D.C.
Source:
Wikipedia
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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Hopes and Prospects
By Noam Chomsky
In this urgent new book, Noam Chomsky
surveys the dangers and prospects of our
early twenty-first century. Exploring
challenges such as the growing gap
between North and South, American
exceptionalism (including under
President Barack Obama), the fiascos of
Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S.-Israeli
assault on Gaza, and the recent
financial bailouts, he also sees hope
for the future and a way to move
forward—in the democratic wave in Latin
America and in the global solidarity
movements that suggest "real progress
toward freedom and justice." Hopes and
Prospects is essential reading for
anyone who is concerned about the
primary challenges still facing the
human race. "This is a classic Chomsky
work: a bonfire of myths and lies,
sophistries and delusions. Noam Chomsky
is an enduring inspiration all over the
world—to millions, I suspect—for the
simple reason that he is a truth-teller
on an epic scale. I salute him." —John
Pilger
In dissecting the rhetoric and logic of
American empire and class domination, at
home and abroad, Chomsky continues a
longstanding and crucial work of
elucidation and activism . . .the
writing remains unswervingly rational
and principled throughout, and lends
bracing impetus to the real alternatives
before us.—Publisher's
Weekly
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
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George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
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Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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