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Music That Heals
for Sidney Bechet
By Rudolph Lewis
There’s a blues fabric
to our lives,
a design and texture
so uniquely our own.
Some see it not at
all. Deaf. Blind.
Hear “Blue Horizon”
beyond the setting sun
in a New Orleans
clarinet, sweeping phrases
in low register,
rising—Sidney Bechet,
improvising, milking
out sweet sounds of
our humanity with
a 2nd line stepping
on a style that says
we made it here.
New Orleans music of
our grandfathers
who had nowhere else
to go after
funeralizing that
which is ever & again eternal.
Do not be surprised,
Dear Brother, when you
down where wild urban
beasts break boundaries
of what is kind,
generous, and humane.
There’s a great river
spreading tributaries
as sensuous as
Coltrane always on his soprano
sax: a rapture
stomping out beauty in melody,
a jazz working men
drum out, a daily misery souls
can wrap arms around.
Soloing on the docks
for a ship grounded in the people’s heart. |
posted 9 December 2005
Sidney
Bichet—Blue Horizon
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Responses
Dear Rudy, this is just beautiful!
Very healing indeed. Thank you for all the wonderful
emails you have sent to me. Sorry I don't get to respond
to each of them. Life is just ridiculously busy.
Even during Advent. Not a good thing I know, but it is
what it is. Wishing you and your family a blessed
Advent and Christmas. With Peace, Pat
You're on a roll with the poetry. You
probably have a whole collection there by now. Good news
(sort of) from Mona Lisa. She sounds like a very upbeat
kinda person, but she didn't commit herself to the return.
I talked to a good friend—Xavier language teacher, wife, mother,
daughter of an 80-year-old, all-living in an apt. in Texas—last
night and she says they're returning, though she's scared as
hell because of the health problems and lack of basic
services. I told her they're pioneers and I'll pray for
them. Jerry's returning too. I admire them so much.
Those are the kind of dedicated and self-sacrificing teachers
and scholars at Black colleges that I admire so much—Miriam
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” |
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Life on Mars
By Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith, author of Life on Mars has been selected as the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In its review of the book, Publishers Weekly noted the collection's "lyric brilliance" and "political impulses [that] never falter." A New York Times review stated, "Smith is quick to suggest that the important thing is not to discover whether or not we're alone in the universe; it's to accept—or at least endure—the universe's mystery. . . . Religion, science, art: we turn to them for answers, but the questions persist, especially in times of grief. Smith's pairing of the philosophically minded poems in the book’s first section with the long elegy for her father in the second is brilliant." Life on Mars follows Smith's 2007 collection, Duende, which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the only award for poetry in the United States given to support a poet's second book, and the first Essence Literary Award for poetry, which recognizes the literary achievements of African Americans. The Body’s Question (2003) was her first published collection. Smith said Life on Mars, published by small Minnesota press Graywolf, was inspired in part by her father, who was an engineer on the Hubble space telescope and died in 2008.
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Treat It Gentle: An Autobiography
By Sidney Bechet
One of the most eloquent
autobiographies ever written by an American artist.—Martin
Williams
A legend on both the
clarinet and the soprano saxophone, one of the most
brilliant exponents of New Orleans jazz, Sidney Bechet
(1897–1959) played with such fellow jazz legends as Louis
Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and Jelly Roll
Morton. Here is his vivid story written in his own words.
Expressive, frank, and hilarious, this classic in jazz
literature re-creates a man, a music, and an era.
Bechet led a
colorful life from New Orleans in the early days of jazz to
France where he finally earned the recognition he deserved..
. .John Chilton’s biography,
Sidney Bechet: The Wizard of Jazz, makes a good
companion piece, filling in the gaps and providing musical
analysis. |
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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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____ 2005
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
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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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