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Illinois Jacquet CDs
Flying Home /
Jumpin at Apollo /
Mayhem in Manhattan /
The Illinois Jacquet Story /
Desert Winds /
Bottoms Up /
The Blues: That's Me /
The Comeback /
The Soul Explosion
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breakdown
lane
—for Illinois Jacquet
By
DB Cox the bus rolls
somewhere
between sundown
and tupelo
the old
gunfighter sleeps
sitting
up—uneasy
turning an old
movie
over in his head
a monochrome
masterpiece
from
yesteryear—
surrounded by
other bandits
always willing
to give away
what they could
never get back—
a little red
blood between blue lines
back before the
whole goddamn thing
wore thin as the
ass of his pants
& he found
himself alone—
displaced in
time
surrounded by
bloodless souls
contemporary
mercenaries
who could wrap a
five-note minor scale
around the neck
of a 7th chord
& strangle
it into submission—
fucking
mercy-killers
sighting down
the barrels
of saxophones
& trombones
like a terrorist
death-squad
sending a
message
with too many
words
to jean baptiste
illinois jacquet—
saying something
like: “fuck the melody”
the grand old
man groans in his sleep
dreaming of a 49
buick roadmaster
burning fast
in the breakdown lane—
posted 11/12/04 |
Illinois Jacquet--Flying Home /
Illinois Jacquet—Imagination /
Illinois Jacquet—C Jam Blues /
Jammin the Blues (1944)
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Jean-Baptiste 'Illinois' Jacquet—Legendary
jazz, blues tenor saxophonist—Sunday, 25
July 2004—Nate Guidry—Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette—Jean-Baptiste "Illinois"
Jacquet, a powerful-sounding tenor
saxophonist whose legendary solo on Lionel
Hampton's "Flying Home" set in motion a
style for generations of young musicians,
died Thursday in his New York home of a
heart attack. He was 81. In 1991, Mr.
Jacquet performed with saxophonists Hank
Crawford, Ernie Watts and Nathan Davis
during the 21st Annual Pitt Jazz Seminar and
Concert. "He was a powerhouse tenor player
capable of shaking the arena with one note,"
said Davis, who directs the jazz studies
program at the University of Pittsburgh.
"The first tenor saxophonist I ever heard
was Illinois Jacquet. A preacher who lived
near us when I was a kid growing up in
Kansas City introduced me to his music. His
influence was enormous. Stanley Turrentine
was influenced by Illinois. There's a legion
of tenor players who came from Texas who
were influenced by Illinois. When people
think of Illinois, they think all he was was
a honker, but he had a gentle side. He was a
complete musician." So much so that he even
mastered the bassoon. During his long and
illustrious career, Mr. Jacquet performed
with such greats as Louis Armstrong, Nat
King Cole, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker
and Ella Fitzgerald. He was born Jean-Baptiste
Jacquet in Broussard, La., a tiny town in
the heart of Cajun and Creole country. Mr.
Jacquet's mother was a Sioux Indian and his
father, Gilbert Jacquet, a French-Creole
railroad worker and part-time musician. Mr.
Jacquet's nickname, Illinois, came from the
Indian word lliniwek," which means superior
men. He dropped the name Jean-Baptiste when
the family moved from Louisiana to Houston
because there were so few French-speaking
people there. . . .—Post-Gazette |
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Jean-Baptiste
Illinois Jacquet (October 31,
1922—July 22, 2004) was
was born to a Sioux mother and a Creole father in
Broussard,
Louisiana and moved to Houston, Texas, as an infant,
and was raised
there as one of six siblings. His father, Gilbert
Jacquet, was a part-time bandleader. As a child he
performed in his father's band, primarily on the
alto saxophone.
His older brother
Russell Jacquet
played trumpet and his brother Linton played drums.
At 15, Jacquet began playing with the
Milton Larkin Orchestra,
a Houston-area dance band. In 1939, he moved to Los
Angeles, California, where he met Nat King Cole. Jacquet
would sit in with the trio on occasion. In 1940, Cole
introduced Jacquet to Lionel Hampton who had returned to
California and was putting together a big band. Hampton
wanted to hire Jacquet, but asked the young Jacquet to
switch to
tenor saxophone.
In 1942, at age 19,
Jacquet soloed on the Hampton Orchestra's recording of
"Flying Home", one of the very first times a honking
tenor sax was heard on record. The record became a hit.
The song imme diately
became the climax for the live shows and Jacquet became
exhausted from having to "bring down the house" every
night. The solo was built to weave in and out of the
arrangement and continued to be played by every
saxophone player who followed Jacquet in the band,
notably
Arnett Cobb
and
Dexter Gordon,
who achieved almost as much fame as Jacquet in playing
it. It is one of the very few jazz solos to have been
memorized and played very much the same way by everyone
who played the song.He quit the Hampton band in 1943 and
joined
Cab Calloway's
Orchestra. Jacquet appeared with Cab Calloway's band in
Lena Horne's
movie
Stormy Weather.
In 1944, he returned to California and started a small
band with his brother Russell and a young
Charles Mingus.
It was at this time that he appeared in the
Academy Award-nominated
short film
Jammin' the Blues
with
Lester Young.
He also appeared at the first
Jazz at the Philharmonic
concert. In 1946, he moved to
New York City,
and joined the
Count Basie
orchestra, replacing
Lester Young.
Jacquet continued to perform (mostly in Europe) in small
groups through the 1960s and 1970s. Jacquet led the
Illinois Jacquet Big Band from 1981 until his death.
Jacquet became the first jazz musician to be an
artist-in-residence at
Harvard University
in 1983. He played "C-Jam
Blues"
with President
Bill Clinton
on the White House lawn during Clinton's inaugural ball
in 1993.
His solos of the early and mid-1940s and his
performances at the Jazz at the Philharmonic concert
series, greatly influenced
rhythm and blues
and
rock and roll
saxophone style, but also continue to be heard in jazz.
His honking and screeching emphasized the lower and
higher registers of the tenor saxophone. Despite a
superficial rawness, the style is still heard in skilled
jazz players like
Arnett Cobb,
who also became famous for playing "Flying Home" with
Hampton, as well as
Sonny Rollins,
Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis
and
Jimmy Forrest.
Jacquet
died in his home in Queens, New York of a heart attack
on Thursday July 22, 2004. He was 81 years of age.—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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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—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
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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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
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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