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Charlie Parker
CDs
The Essential Charlie Parker /
Charlie Parker: A Studio Chronicle 1940-1948
/
Charlie Parker with Strings
Diz 'N Bird at Carnegie Hall /
The Best of Charlie Parker /
Jazz at Massey Hall /
Boss Bird
South of the Border
/
Confirmation /
Ornithology /
YardBird Suite
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bird on the
wing
By DB Cox you
traded
your
cabaret card
for
somebody’s
idea
of paradise
&
now --
you’re
standing
outside
a club on
52nd
street,
the
rain, beating
a
philly-joe solo
on
the brim of
your
fedora
can’t
even get
your
foot
in
the front door
of
the jazz joint
they
named for you –
bird,
the man
who
could glide over
chorus
after chorus
smooth,
sure, & fast
as
your little sister’s
ass,
& never run
out
of things to say
bird,
“liberator of paris,”
“king
of bebop” --
gets
another royal
welcome
home
so,
what now --
the
jazz clubs
are
being replaced,
one-by-one,
with
strip dives
&
they’re playing
rock
& roll
over
at the
paramount
--
claiming,
bop’s
just
an outline
of
the past,
a
graveyard ghost…
* * *
but
you can
come
with me --
if
you wanna go
to
kansas city
a
place where you
can
play without
a
goddam license
&
you won’t have to be
charlie
parker with strings;
you
can be free --
a bird-on-the-wing...
posted 12 November 2004 |
DB Cox is Blues musician/poet, originally
from South Carolina, now resides in Watertown, Massachusetts. He
has had writing published on-line in: Verse Libre Quarterly,
LauraHird.COM, Zygote In My Coffee, Remark, Underground Voices,
Sacramento Poetry Art & Music, and others.
His work has appeared in print in: Aesthetica, Circle
Magazine, Shadow Poetry, My Favorite Bullet, Mystery Island
Magazine and Open Wide Magazine.
He has played guitar since the age of 14.
After graduating from high school in 1966, he did a 4 year stint
with the U.S. Marines. After his discharge, he moved to Boston,
Massachusetts to attend the Berklee School of Music, where he
eventually found the blues circuit. He loves writing for the
same reason he loves playing the guitar -- a way to communicate
how he feels, at a given time, on a given day.
donniebegood@comcast.net
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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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Incognegro: A Memoir of
Exile and Apartheid
By Frank B. Wilderson, III
Wilderson, a professor,
writer and filmmaker from
the Midwest,
presents a gripping account
of his role in the downfall
of South African apartheid
as one of only two black
Americans in the African
National Congress (ANC).
After marrying a South
African law student, Wilderson reluctantly
returns with her to South
Africa in the early 1990s,
where he teaches
Johannesburg and Soweto
students, and soon joins the
military wing of the ANC.
Wilderson's stinging
portrait of Nelson Mandela
as a petulant elder eager to
accommodate his white
countrymen will jolt readers
who've accepted the
reverential treatment
usually accorded him. After
the assassination of
Mandela's rival, South
African Communist Party
leader Chris Hani, Mandela's
regime deems Wilderson's
public questions a threat to
national security; soon,
having lost his stomach for
the cause, he returns to
America.
Wilderson has a
distinct, powerful voice and
a strong story that shuffles
between the indignities of
Johannesburg life and his
early years in Minneapolis,
the precocious child of
academics who barely
tolerate his emerging
political consciousness.
Wilderson's observations
about love within and across
the color line and cultural
divides are as provocative
as his politics; despite
some distracting
digressions, this is a
riveting memoir of
apartheid's last days.—Publishers
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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If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update 28 December
2011
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