“I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good” (Duke Ellington)
Jazz à Vienne 2012

click to magnify image

© jamesmahonemusic.com

Courtesy Alvin Queen

Mulgrew Miller in Spain | 2011

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Remembering Mulgrew Miller

The pianist Mulgrew Miller died on May 29, 2013, following a cerebral hemorrhage. The jazz world is grieving the loss of this “wonderful musician and great spirit,” in the words of fellow pianist Kenny Barron. As saxophonist Loren Schoenberg so aptly says, “Mulgrew could levitate a bandstand.”

Thinking about his piano alone, Miller’s right hand was the great embellisher; the whole keyboard was his canvas. His left hand could stride and swing with great authority, and when the two hands got together, he sent the train down the tracks. Yet he could lay down a carpet of flowers. What a touch. Miller deployed all his gifts and accomplishments anew every time we recorded him, and he always seemed to be with us, grounded in the shared love of the music.

He expressed his credo as a writer with these words: “I strive to compose beautiful melodies and interpret them with a beat that dances.”

Miller was born in 1955 in Greenwood, Miss. At 6, he started playing by picking out hymns and harmonies on the piano, always on the black keys. As he told WBGO’s Gary Walker in an on-air conversation, he didn’t realize that those keys are considered to be the difficult ones to play in …

 >>>  Read Becca Pulliam’s ‘Remembering Mulgrew Miller’ in full. Go to the original at NPR’s JazzSet  >>>

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‘Mulgrew Miller, Influential Jazz Pianist, Dies at 57′  |  Nate Chinen  |  The New York Times  |  May 29, 2013

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“All the Things You Are”  |  The Center for Jazz Studies, Tel Aviv  |  June 2012

Golden Fingers: An Interview with Jazz Piano Legend Mulgrew Miller  |  Bassist Jonah Jonathan  |  February 2012

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MAXJAZZ PIANO SERIES:  Mulgrew Miller
The Official Website

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Dear Poets and Friends,

Poetry.LA just added two intriguing new poets to its expanding collection of online videos: Natalie Díaz and Sarah Vap.

We caught up with them in May at Hitched, a reading series spotlighting emerging poets that Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo curates monthly at Beyond Baroque.

Natalie’s collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012. Sarah’s latest collection, Arco Iris, was published by Saturnalia Books also in 2012.

For more information about the poets including links to buy their books, you can go to the poet’s individual page by clicking on All Poets. Then click that poet’s name.

Best to you,

Hilda Weiss and Wayne Lindberg
Poetry.LA

A video showcase of poets &
poetry venues in Southern California

Editor in Chief
Sally Ashton

Editor
Marjorie Manwaring
Associate Editors
W. Todd Kaneko, Arlene Kim, Anne M. Doe Overstreet
Poet’s Bookshelf Editor
Peter Davis

DMQ Review is pleased to announce the release of the Spring 2013 issue featuring the poetry of Jada Ach, John Amen, Mary Donnelly, Glenn Halak, Elizabyth Hiscox, Michaelsun Stonesweat Knapp, Janet Norman Knox, Mercedes Lawry, Karen An-hwei Lee, Emily O’Neill, Alan Soldofsky, Tim Suermondt, and Anthony Warnke, with artwork by Carolyn Krieg.

In collaboration with Peter Davis, editor of Poet’s Bookshelf: Contemporary Poets On Books That Shaped Their Art, Volumes I & II, the DMQ Review is also pleased to present the Bookshelf essay as well as new poems from Charles Harper Webb as our “Featured Poet.”

clickable

Carolyn Krieg © 2013 All Rights Reserved

ARCHIVES

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]]> http://alyoung.org/2013/06/06/dmq-review-spring-2013/feed/ 1 http://alyoung.org/2013/06/05/canary-a-literary-journal-of-the-environmental-crisis-_-issue-number-20-spring-2013/ http://alyoung.org/2013/06/05/canary-a-literary-journal-of-the-environmental-crisis-_-issue-number-20-spring-2013/#comments Thu, 06 Jun 2013 01:40:25 +0000 Al http://alyoung.org/?p=42910 _______________________________________________

© Carol White

We do not inherit the land from our Ancestors,
we borrow it from our children.

— Native American Proverb

Issue Number 20, Spring 2013

• The World is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth

• Beseech by Catherine Owen

• Blue Border of Extinction by Maya Khosla

• Bumblebees Do Fly by Pierre Dutertre

• Darwin Would Agree by Karen Terrey

• Dowser on the River by Tom Sheehan

• Good Animals by CB Follett

• Hawk Dream by Nellie Hill

• Letters from the Hinterland #4, Rapa Nui by Raymond Greiner

• Litoptern by Hilary Sideris

• May Storms by Nicol Stavlas

• Merenchytraeus solifugus by Ann Taylor

• Not Only Earth by Ellen McCarthy

• Planting a Garden by Ken Poyner

• Reviving the Lexicon by Monique Gagnon German

• Salmon by Susan Kelly-DeWitt

• The Last Tasmanian Tiger: London Zoo 1936 by Barbara Baldwin

• Tiny Ants without Sorrow by Grace Cavalieri

• Totems by Jamey Gallagher

• Where Will They Go? by Gail Newman

Archives: by Issue | by Author Name

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It’s based on Johann Sebastian Bach.*  It’s my Bach studies which turned the introduction to ‘Light My Fire’ into a rock and roll piece.

— Ray Manzarek (alongside guitarist Robbie Krieger in interview with Karl Dallas, UK Morning Star, Friday 30 July 2010)
* [Francesco Cera at the harpsichord on Bach's Harpsichord Concerto #1 in D minor]

Listen

© guitarworld.com

© usmagazine.com

© Matthew Peyton / Getty Images

Ray Manzarek, 74, Keyboardist and a Founder of the Doors, Is Dead

By JON PARELES
© NYTimes, May 20, 2013

Ray Manzarek, who as the keyboardist and a songwriter for the Doors helped shape one of the indelible bands of the psychedelic era, died on Monday at a clinic in Rosenheim, Germany. He was 74.

The cause was bile duct cancer, according to his manager, Tom Vitorino. Mr. Manzarek lived in Napa, Calif.

Mr. Manzarek founded the Doors in 1965 with the singer and lyricist Jim Morrison, whom he would describe decades later as “the personification of the Dionysian impulse each of us has inside.” They would go on to recruit the drummer John Densmore and the guitarist Robby Krieger.

Mr. Manzarek played a crucial role in creating music that was hugely popular and widely imitated, selling tens of millions of albums. It was a lean, transparent sound that could be swinging, haunted, meditative, suspenseful or circuslike. The Doors’ songs were generally credited to the entire group. Long after the death of Mr. Morrison in 1971, the music of the Doors remained synonymous with the darker, more primal impulses unleashed by psychedelia. In his 1998 autobiography, “Light My Fire,” Mr. Manzarek wrote: “We knew what the people wanted: the same thing the Doors wanted. Freedom.”

The quasi-Baroque introduction Mr. Manzarek brought to the Doors’ 1967 single “Light My Fire“ — a song primarily written by Mr. Krieger — helped make it a million-seller. Along with classical music, Mr. Manzarek also drew on jazz, R&B, cabaret and ragtime. His main instrument was the Vox Continental electric organ, which he claimed to have chosen, Mr. Vitorino said, because it was “easy to carry.”

Read Jon Pareles’ obituary in its entirety at the New York Times source
© NYTimes

‘Ray Manzarek, a founding member of The Doors, dead at 74′ | Hiram Lee, World Socialist Web Site,
25 May 2013

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Manzarek, legendary Beat poet Michael McClure & Big Mix in ‘live’ performance

Pianist Ray Manzarek, poet Michael McClure and Big Mix, Mill Valley, CA, August 10, 2011

Michael McClure & Ray Manzarek Official Website

The Ray Manzarek Website

Michael McClure and Ray Manzarek
from the album cover of Love Lion, 1993

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From  a collection dedicated to Ray Manzarek (1939-2013)

FORTY SONGS

I’M STANDING ON THE RIVER OF NIGHT WITH FORTY SONGS
Here’s the river of night with forty songs
I’m standing on the river of night with forty songs
I’ll be stepping in the boat before too long
Stepping in the boat with all these songs
White hair hanging in my beard like moss

Everything I see is movies in a dream
Look at bubbles flowing round the rocks
in the stream
I’ll be stepping in the boat before too long

Deer make noise
As they walk over old dead leaves
I’ll be stepping in the boat before too long
Deer make noise
As they walk over old dead leaves

VOICES
IN
THE
HEAD

Like Ali Baba
And the thieves

When you get home

When you get home
Sit down with your back against a tree

See pictures go by like movies in a dream

© 2013 by Michael McClure

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 Hear ‘Cover to Cover’ with Jack Foley

WEDNESDAY, MAY 29, 3 P.M.
KPFA 94.1 FM
(available via streaming audio at www.kpfa.org)

Today’s show is a tribute to Ray Manzarek (1939-2013). Selections from the Ray Manzarek-Michael McClure CD, The Piano Poems will be heard. Michael McClure writes,

 “On a cold, foggy night in San Francisco after a great Japanese meal, Manzarek and I stepped onto the stage and there were sparks of consciousness – the stage was on fire with poems and piano Improvisations. The symbiosis and the synergy made lights. Then Larry Kassin stepped up to join us with his jazz flute and Lou Judson was recording.

 “This is a live album with its heart still beating – no tricks, gimmicks, or second takes. We are bringing together my poetry and Ray’s improvisations that shape my word-sounds into richer meanings: Piano Poems.

 “There’s no way to be without a politics or an antipolitics, no way to be without art, without anger and generosity, without laughter and kindness.

 “That’s the edge we’re whetting on this album.”

 Gary Snyder called Manzarek and McClure “two great shaman-artists of deep experience and long practice.” They were, in addition to being brilliant artists, deep friends for whom “collaboration” and “love” were synonyms. “It was all joy,” McClure said of their many exciting performances.

 Sleep well, Ray Manzarek.

— Jack Foley

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MICHAEL McCLURE
ISHMAEL REED
AL YOUNG

Saturday, June 8, 2013
7:30pm

SF Jazz Poetry Festival
(June 6-9, 4 nights of jazz poetry)
San Francisco Jazz Center
$15

Click here for details

©123RF.com | © text-blog.com

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KPFA Radio & La Peña Cultural Center present

NANCY MOREJÓN
Fresh from Cuba, the celebrated poet and public intellectual

Presented by AL YOUNG
California Poet Laureate emeritus, novelist, essayist

& Kathleen Weaver 
poet, biographer, translator

Thursday, June 13, 7:30 pm

La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94705
map

$10 advance tickets, $12 door:    www.Lapena.org

benefit for KPFA + La Peña

information: www.kpfa.org/events

NANCY MOREJÓN is the best known and most widely translated woman poet of post-revolutionary Cuba. Born in 1944 in Havana to a militant dock worker and a trade-unionist seamstress, Morejón graduated from Havana University. She was Cuba’s first black woman poet to be internationally acclaimed as a poet. Her distinctive poetry is shaped by an Afro-Cuban sensibility and an eloquent concern for Cuban nationhood, cultural fusion, and the rights of women. She has published more than twenty volumes of poetry, as well as critical works and translations from French and English. Her works in English translation include Looking Within / Mirar adentro, Selected Poems 1954-2000, Where the Island Sleeps Like a Wing, translated by U.S. poet Kathleen Weaver, and With Eyes and Soul/Images of Cuba with photographs by Milton Rogovin.  For many years, Morejón served on the editorial staff of UNEAC (Union of Cuban Writers and Artists). Currently she is president of the Cuban Writers’ Union, UNEAC, and an advisor at Casa de las Americas in Havana.

 Morejón has won Cuba’s prestigious National Literary Award, the National Prize for Poetry, and the National Award in Criticism – as well as many international awards, including the Latin American Studies Association Cuba Prize. Thoroughly bilingual, she has read and lectured at universities in the U.S.  She served as writer in residence at Wellesley College and conducted a two-day symposium on her work at the University of Missouri in Columbia. Howard University Press has published a collection of critical texts on her work: Singular Like a Bird: The Art of Nancy Morejón.

AL YOUNG  is a distinguished writer, poet, fiction writer, anthologist, and educator. His  many honors include Poet Laureate of California, the PEN-Library of Congress Award for Short Fiction, the PEN-USA Award for Non-Fiction, two American Book Awards, and the Richard Wright Award for Excellence in Literature. His writings have been translated into many languages, including Russian, and Urdu. His works in fiction include Seduction By Light and Sitting Pretty; in poetry, Something About the Blues, and Coastal Nights and Inland Afternoons: Poems 2001-2006.

 In the 1970’s Young wrote film scripts for producer Joseph Strick, Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, and Richard Pryor. In the 1980’s and 90’s, as a cultural ambassador for the United States Information Agency, he traveled throughout South Asia, Egypt, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian West Bank. In 2001 he traveled to the Persian Gulf to lecture on American and African American literature and culture in Kuwait and in Bahrain for the U.S. Department of State. Subsequent lecture tours have taken him to Southern Italy in 2004, and back to India in 2005.. Blending story, recitation and song, Young often performs live with musicians. In 2005, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed him Poet Laureate of California.

 Kathleen Weaver is a poet, author of the biography, Peruvian Rebel,The Life and Work of Magda Portal; co-editor of The Penguin Book of Womens’ Poetry and The Other Voice; translator of  Nancy Morejón, Julio Cortázar, Omar Cabezas, and many others.

NOTE: Nancy Morejón and Kathleen Weaver will also appear Sunday, June 9, in San Francisco at the Emerald Tablet

Contact: Bob Baldock  |  bob@kpfa.org  |  510.848.5006

Nancy Morejón reads at the First International Festival of Poetry of Resistance, Toronto 2009

 “Mujer Negra,” a poem by Nancy Morejón translated by Kathleen Weaver @ Tumblr

Excerpt

I still smell the foam of the sea they made me cross.
The night, I can not remember it.
The ocean itself could not remember that …

Fragmento

Todavía huelo la espuma del mar que me hicieron atravesar.
La noche, no puedo recordarla.
Ni el mismo océano podría recordarla …

© La Peña Cultural Center

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Who was she?

 
Photo: Herman Bustamente

Maudelle Shirek, conscience of the Berkeley City Council, dies at 101

SFJazz Center Calendar and Ticket Information

SFJAZZ Poetry Festival: Icons

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POETRY IN MOTOWN | April 2013

Click on image to enlarge

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Trailer

In this powerful film, director Jean-Philippe Tremblay exposes the extraordinary truth behind American mainstream media: censorship, cover-ups, and corporate control. It has been shown at the top film festivals around the world throughout the past several years, yet Link TV’s screening was the first time it was publicly shown in the United States. While American film festivals and media outlets shrunk away from this controversial topic, Link TV could not be more proud to air it.

Shadows of Liberty is airing on KCET and Link TV regularly, and is currently available free online at Shadows.KCETLink.org 

After the screening, we live-streamed a panel discussion about the film moderated by Democracy Now!‘s Amy Goodman and featuring Tremblay, media critic Norman Solomon, and professor Robert McChesney, all featured in the documentary. The film highlights the crucial need to reform the American media system, and stresses the fact that a functioning media is necessary for a vital democracy.

Watch SHADOWS OF LIBERTY now

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