________________________________________________

Justin Desmangles, host —
New Day Jazz

Photo: Al Young

KDVS-FM

Show description for Sunday, July 18, 2010,
3:00 pm – 5:00 pm PDT

This afternoon, on the four o’clock hour, we are joined by Harvey G. Cohen, author of the recently published, Duke Ellington’s America.As part of our focus, this afternoon, on Ellington, we will revisit many of the earliest small group recordings lead by various members of the orchestra, including Johnny Hodges, Barney Bigard and Rex Stewart. Also included in this afternoons broadcast will be selections from the Ellington-Strayhorn oeuvre, such as “Day Dream,” “Johnny Come Lately” and “After All.”

Two collaborating master pianist-composers perform “Johnny Come Lately”

Along the way we will listen in on many poems written contemporaneous with the Ellington era, including works by Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Arna Bontemps, Margaret Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks.

New Day Jazz

Justin Desmangles
Jazz music for lovers and the lonely.

Missed the Show?

Download the MP3 streams:
Click here to find links posted at the KDVS archives

________________________________________________

Press release from the University of Chicago Press

Harvey G. Cohen
Duke Ellington’s America
720 pages, 12 halftones  6 x 9  © 2010
Cloth $40.00
ISBN: 9780226112633   Published May 2010
E-book from $5.00 to $40.00 (about e-books)
ISBN: 9780226112657

Few American artists in any medium have enjoyed the international and lasting cultural impact of Duke Ellington. From jazz standards such as “Mood Indigo” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” to his longer, more orchestral suites, to his leadership of the stellar big band he toured and performed with for decades after most big bands folded, Ellington represented a singular, pathbreaking force in music over the course of a half-century. At the same time, as one of the most prominent black public figures in history, Ellington demonstrated leadership on questions of civil rights, equality, and America’s role in the world.

With Duke Ellington’s America, Harvey G. Cohen paints a vivid picture of Ellington’s life and times, taking him from his youth in the black middle class enclave of Washington, D.C., to the heights of worldwide acclaim. Mining extensive archives, many never before available, plus new interviews with Ellington’s friends, family, band members, and business associates, Cohen illuminates his constantly evolving approach to composition, performance, and the music business—as well as issues of race, equality and religion. Ellington’s own voice, meanwhile, animates the book throughout, giving Duke Ellington’s America an intimacy and immediacy unmatched by any previous account.

By far the most thorough and nuanced portrait yet of this towering figure, Duke Ellington’s America highlights Ellington’s importance as a figure in American history as well as in American music.

Read an excerpt

________________________________________________

CULTURE’S AMBASSADOR
By Peter Keepnews
Published: May 27, 2010
©2010 The New York Times

[Click image to magnify]

© John Pratt/Keystone Features — Getty Images

Duke Ellington in 1963

DUKE ELLINGTON’S AMERICA
By Harvey G. Cohen
Illustrated. 688 pp. The University of Chicago Press. $40

The idea of a substantial book about a major musical figure that pays relatively little attention to his music might seem counterintuitive — or, to put it less politely, pointless. That “Duke Ellington’s America” succeeds as well as it does is a tribute both to its author and to its subject.

Arguing that Duke Ellington’s “significance went far beyond the musical realm,” Harvey G. Cohen, a cultural historian who teaches at King’s College London, places Ellington’s life as a public figure and “culture hero” in a larger social and political context. Others have written about his connection to the civil rights movement, or the many State Department tours on which he and his remarkable band functioned as cultural ambassadors during the cold war. Cohen makes such matters his primary concern.

To read the rest, go to the New York Times Book Review original

________________________________________________

________________________________________________

Courtesy photo

Visit the Charles Lloyd Blogspot

________________________________________________

Dorothy Darr

Listen and watch Dorothy Darr’s video of  Charles Lloyd and his ‘new’ Quartet

Photo © Roger Mitchell

Jason Moran, piano; Reuben Rogers, acoustic bass; leader Charles Lloyd; Eric Harland, drums at the Melbourne International Jazz Festival, 10 May 2010

“As the notes of Prayer floated across the auditorium, serenity seemed to settle on those assembled. When Lloyd spoke, it with his characteristic grace and humility. “We are honoured to be here. We don’t understand the planet or how they’ve worked the game out, but we still want to play this music,” he said.

Click here for the full review at Ausjazz Blog

Charles Lloyd at Facebook

________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________

FIRST-EVER Poetry Contest at Beyond Baroque!

© Emily Winters

The cherished heart of L.A.’s poetry community is conducting its first-ever poetry contest. All poets of our region [California poets only] will benefit from boosting Beyond Baroque at a time of urgent financial need. Winners will further benefit from cash prizes and the reading/reception held in their honor. There can be no losers.

Prizes: $500, $250, $100

Final Judge: Tony Barnstone (Professor at Whittier College, NEA Fellow, Pushcart Prize winner)

CONTEST RULES

1. Submit up to three unpublished poems, 40-line limit.

2. All themes and styles welcome.

3. Deadline September 1, 2010 (postmarked)

4. No ID on poems. Cover sheet must include poet’s name, address, phone, e-mail address and poem titles.

5. Send entries, including $15 reading fee, to:

Beyond Baroque Contest
681 Venice Blvd.
Venice, CA 90291

Checks payable to Beyond Baroque 7. No SASE [stamped, self-addressed envelopes]. Poems will not be returned.

Note: A reading/reception will be held for the three cash winners and five top finalists at Beyond Baroque on Sunday, October 17, 2010.

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

Anonymous
Mary Armstrong
Marjorie Becker
Nels Christenson
Conflux Press
Bill Hickok & Gloria Vando
Sherman Pearl
Ellen & Herb Reich
Carol Stagers
Lynne Thompson

A LITTLE ABOUT BEYOND BAROQUE

Beyond Baroque is one of the United States’ leading independent Literary/Arts Centers and public spaces dedicated to literary and cultural production, contact, interaction, and community building. Founded in 1968, it is based in the Old Town Hall in Venice, California, near the Pacific Ocean. It offers a program of readings, free workshops, publishing, bookstore, archiving, and education.

The Center launched its own imprint, Beyond Baroque Books, in 1998, dedicated to emerging, overlooked, out of print, and experimental writing, as well as the history and legacy of experimental and alternative writing, poetry, and the arts in Los Angeles.

Call 310.822.3006 for more information.
www.beyondbaroque.org

__________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________

SUNDAY, JULY 11, 3:00
Poetry Flash
at DIESEL, A Bookstore

© Tom Killion | The Golden Gate from Grizzly Peak

Contributors reading for
The Place That Inhabits Us:
Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed

DAN CLURMAN
SUSAN KOLODNY
PRISCILLA LEE
JACK MARSHALL
RICHARD SILBERG
AL YOUNG

DIESEL, A BOOKSTORE, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, near Rockridge BART | 510. 653.9965

map

Diesel’s cool literary video

The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed is an anthology put together by Sixteen Rivers Press relating to our wide watershed, the poets gathered together in a wide-cast net, poets living and dead, famous and much less so, some living here, some from other countries. The poems came half and half from a national call for submissions and from a pool of poems nominated by members of the Sixteen Rivers collective.

In his generous foreword Robert Hass says: “At a certain moment, a group of early-twenty-first-century poets made a selection of poems about the place that mattered to them, so that this book is about the experience of place—and about being given the remembered expression of the experience of place by others who have lived here. And that begins to be a culture.”

This beautifully designed and edited anthology celebrates and represents the life of poetry in northern California.

Pamela Biery: “Poems About Home” ~ Sacramento News review of The Place That Inhabits Us

°Poetry Flash°

°Diesel Bookstore°

°Sixteen Rivers Press°

_______________________________________

________________________________________________

The First Poem of Summer

a video|poem by Mary Ann Sullivan

© 2010 Mary Ann Sullivan

More Mary Ann Sullivan at poetryfish

Chora and Nous

Letter to Poetry Magazine

© tatiana tulskaya

Who is Mary Ann Sullivan?

________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________

Click on image to enlarge

Photo: Tom Sewell | NY Times

W.S. Merwin

W. S. Merwin to Be Named Poet Laureate

By PATRICIA COHEN, New York Times
Published: June 30, 2010

W. S. Merwin acknowledges that his relatively reclusive life on a former pineapple plantation built atop a dormant volcano in Maui, Hawaii, will be disturbed by the Library of Congress’s announcement on Thursday naming him the country’s poet laureate.

“I do like a very quiet life,” Mr. Merwin said by telephone after learning of his appointment. “I can’t keep popping back and forth between here and Washington.” He said he does relish “being part of something much more public and talking too much,” however, and the job of the nation’s premier poet will enable him to do both.

>>> To view this article in its entirety, go to the New York Times original >>>

__________________________________________________________

Watch W.S. Merwin (excerpt from The Poet’s View)

__________________________________________________________

Online poems by W.S. Merwin

__________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________

clickable

Cover photo: Jamie Grill/Getty Images | Book design: Joann Hill
© Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group

When 17-year-old Veronica and Dessy go to Prague to attend a summer writer’s program for college students, they experience romance, conflicts, and, ultimately, the strengthening of their friendship.

Best friends Dessy and Veronica arrive in Europe with wildly different plans. Dessy hopes to heal her newly broken heart by diving into the creative writing workshop that brought the girls to Prague. Veronica’s plan, meanwhile, is to conquer as many hot-dudes as possible in one month — and help Dessy recycle her heart in the process.

_______________________________________________

“For Al Young and Stuart Dybek —
my Prague mentors”

_______________________________________________

REVIEW

Filled with outrageous, hilarious situations, sprightly and quirky characters, and a new setting, Field Guide for Heartbreakers is a cute, lively read. Two invigorating and vastly different main characters help add to the hilarity and endearment of this book. Stylistic writing and talented mindset help tie everything together.

Dessy is practiced and logical, not one to immediately throw caution to the wind. Still hung up on her ex and fault focused, she is a mix of damaged and naïve. She is a well designed character, her quirks, attributes and flaws coming across strongly. She complements Veronica and though she finds herself in some awkward and obnoxious situations on account of her friend, she is, in the end, a great friend. She starts out strongly developed but grows further and the way Tracy plays this out adds spark into the book. Both through her interactions with Veronica and her classmates in Prague as well as her analysis of both her own writing and others in her class help brings things together.

Veronica is rambunctious, boy crazy, blunt and apt to do stupid things. She is overdramatic and exaggerates yet through Dessy’s eyes, the reader can understand the affection and appreciation. As with Dessy, Veronica starts out with much of her personality exposed but she grows and changes as the book progresses. Despite this, she still holds many of the same quirks including her penchant for using euphemisms and sayings wrong. The banter between her and Dessy is engaging and amusing, cropping up at unexpected moments.

The “hot-dudes” the girls meet and go after make up a large part of the characters, coming in a variety of personalities. Some are in their same program- college guys- while others are locals or visiting the area. The way they handle the situations is vastly different and even when things heat up and turn dramatic, the way they care for each other remains the same.

The plot is a tangle of love and betrayal and the addition of Corky, their roommate bent on tormenting and maybe killing them, adds another level. As things heat up, the reader is forced to choose which friend their feelings most relate to. Tracy handles this area beautifully, not forcing the reader to side with Dessy simply because it’s in her perspective. Dessy’s emotions come through the pages to the reader but so do Veronica’s. Their interactions with males is comical but the desire for love and attention is palpable. Much of their driving forces are understandable, lurking even in the simplest of places.

Rapt with Prague culture and scenery, the setting alone is a fantastic element of the story. The descriptions are beautiful and the reader can get a sense of being there with each place the girls visit. In character narrative, spunk and manner of speaking help bring this book to life as well, from the “hot dudes” to the many other adjunct words and phrases thrown in. Tracy ’s writing style is a bold one, exceeding the usual boundaries and spurring the life into her characters.

A fantastic take on a love based premise, a unique setting and colorful characters meld together to make Field Guide for Heartbreakers a fantastic, fun read. The plot is paced steadily with plenty of comedy to break up the emotion and keep the reader from growing bored. The writing class adds another element as its writing within a book, rather than art or photography that seems to crop up often in novels. Tracy tests her limits and handles it beautifully in execution.

– Flamingo at A Good Addiction: Book Reviews, June 13, 2010
(Amazon customer review)

Visit Kristen Tracy online at www.kristentracy.com

Visit www.hyperionteens.com

_____________________________________

Listen

__________________________________________________________

Dan Kiacz: “Lone Wolf”  |  Screenprint

programs
alumni
quartz mountain

June 12-27, 2010

For two weeks, Monday through Monday, poet-novelist-essayist Al Young will be working with Oklahoma’s aspiring high school writers. A close look will reveal what this singular state arts program is promoting, attracting, sustaining, funding and achieving. Theater, music, dance, film, painting, sculpture, creative writing — Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute covers the spectrum.

Click each panel for details

Photo of Al Young © Richard Ressman

summer faculty

tentative schedule of summer events 2010

____________________________

___

____________________________________________________________

View the original event announcement at AlYoung.org

RICHARD BELCHER

Richard P. Belcher, Jr. comes from a background in film production as a professional gaffer and lighting director. For 15 years he also produced his own films and videos before becoming a photographer. Follow his editing of the HOLD THE LIGHT video right here from this page, or at Richard’s Putah Creek Photo page now evolving at Facebook.

Boadiba

Ishmael Reed

Shailja Patel

Claire Ortalda/Floyd Salas

Organized by PEN-Oakland, this benefit reading for Doctors Without Borders was staged at the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California on the evening of Friday, April 30th, 2010.

Emcee: Wanda Sabir  |  Produced by Kim McMillon  |  James P. Belcher, who captured the poet-performers on DVD video, is in the process of editing his footage. Part of this process entails trimming each reading down to 10-minute units, the maximum duration that YouTube allows for general uploads.

____________________________________________________________

PEN-Oakland thanks the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California for hosting this fundraising event in the wake of earthquakes that devastated Haiti, Chile and Tibet.

Doctors without Borders | Médecins sans Frontières

Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California ~ 1433 Madison Street ~ Oakland, CA 94612 ~ Phone: 51.0. 832.7600 ~ http://iccnc.org

Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California’s (ICCNC) Vision: “An exemplary and socially responsible Islamic and cultural center that helps engender consciousness and appreciation of Islamic and cultural values, ideals and ethics to generate a conscientious and socially responsible human being.”

____________________________________________________________

page under construction

____________________________________________________________

___________________________________________

Django Reinhardt “et son orchestra” at Bal Tabarin, 1944 ~ A dance sequence inter-cut with shots of Marlene Dietrich (and off-camera laughter possibly from French jazz pundit Charles Delaunay), this is footage so rare that you’ll even spot a colored GI in uniform with a colored partner out there on the dance floor, jitterbugging like everybody else. Through all of it, the nimble two-fingered Django tears up Cole Porter’s “Night and Day.”

Courtesy photo

Django Reinhardt

Djangology

Minor Swing

Nuages (Clouds)

Body and Soul

Blues for Ike

Honeysuckle Rose
(With Duke Ellington, Django goes electric)

Brazil

DJANGO ~ The Modern Jazz Quartet in live performance at the Zelt Muzik Festival; Freiburg, Germany, 1987 ~ John Lewis, composer and pianist; Milt Jackson, vibes; Percy Heath, drums; Connie Kay, drums. A classic musical tribute to the brilliant Gypsy jazz guitarist

___________________________________________

DJANGO DEVOTEES RHAPSODIZE

Django biographer Michael Dregni’s affectionate interview at Jerry Jazz Musician

Django Reinhardt: The Famous Jazz Guitarist Documentary Film at Guitar Wow

THE COMPLETE DJANGO REINHARDT HMV SESSIONS
Mosaic Records
[Limited edition boxed set]

Al Young

Courtesy of Dan I. Slobin Archives

The poet at age 13, Detroit 1953

DJANGOLOGY

From the moment the sound of Django Reinhardt reached my conscious ears, a whole, old world arose in me that felt instantly familiar. That my record-collector father, a tuba and bass player, was crazy about jazz music, sweet or hot, was a given. I’ve written of this at length in Bodies & Soul, the first of four books of musical memoirs, all of them collector’s items now like those those scratchy, exquisite 78’s Django & the Quintette du Hot Club de France recorded so long ago. Not only does time float by like those clouds of Django’s wistful ballad “Nuages,” time teases memory and shades events. Now that I’ve lived long enough to understand how each event is actually a process wiggly and meaty with back-story, I celebrate this brilliant, unlettered Gypsy guitarist.

Surely in the run-up to World War Two, music — like wind and sea, like sunshine and fog — oozed through the belly-membrane of a starch-eating pregnant girl hurrying out of Mississippi rain to a dry, warm place. I like to imagine the prenatal me who soaked up measureless shares of songs and melodies that hovered in the air, soothing or ruffling our blood while my mother carried me here. Some might say Django takes his cue from such early American jazz guitarists as Eddie Lang and Carl Kress. But when the Oklahoma guitarist Charlie Christian heard those Hot Club disks, he fell under Django’s spell and morphed some of what he’d heard and liked into electrifying solos he recorded with Benny Goodman.

Charlie Christian, 1941

As a poet who still operates under the influence of music, I love traveling through Django’s veins back to places that no longer exist: a room, a rendezvous, nights of pleasure and panic, visits with idols like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, German soldiers dancing outside the Paris club where the gig and Nazi-occupied Paris herself was all yours, rushing by taxi from the wartime London club where you and Grappelli are playing “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” for the very first time,  then during the break between sets, rushing by taxi with violinist Stephane Grappelli to Berkeley Square, where, according to Grappelli, you two sat on a bench and, listening hard for that nightingale, heard nothing but foot and car traffic.

In friendship, new and ever renewable, here’s to another century, Django.

© 2010 Al Young

Peter S. Beagle

© Jayme Lynn Blaschke

DJANGO

My father was no jazz fan. He didn’t not like jazz; it just wasn’t something he listened to, or – as far as I could ever tell – thought about much. He didn’t object to my listening to jazz LPs or radio stations, when I could find air checks of Count Basie, whom he vaguely knew, and Louis Jordan, whom he didn’t. But it was my dad, all the same, who introduced me to Django Reinhardt, on a few old 78s from the Hot Club days. “Sweet Sue” was one, as I remember it, and there was a tune with Rex Stewart on trumpet, called “Solid Old Man.”  There was almost more surface noise than there was music … but not quite.

“They sound almost Jewish,” my father said. “If you listen.”  He told me then, for the first time, about the itinerant klezmer bands that used to play for weddings and other celebrations in Matsev, the desperately poor Polish shtetl where he was born. I remember this in particular, because he almost never talked about Matsev – he couldn’t, not without crying. But Django’s sound, and Stephane Grappelli’s violin, and the distinctive chunk-chunk rhythm of the rest of the Quintette – Django’s brother Joseph, Roger Chaput and Louis Vola – brought back something warmly thoughtful that I’d never heard. “They played together,” he said, “gypsies and Jews, in those bands. They understood each other’s music, so they understood each other.”

Not long before I was born, in the fall of 1938, Django, Stephane, and the others laid down four tunes with Larry Adler, the great harmonica player – or “mouth organ,” as he always preferred to call it. “Body and Soul,” “Melancholy Baby,” “I Got Rhythm,” “Lover Come Back To Me” … I have turned to those four tracks for countless years whenever I felt despairing, hopeless – blue. I can’t speak for anyone else, but there’s never been any way I could possibly remain unhappy, taking the joy in that music, that playing, into myself, not even in the worst times. That a musician with three working fingers on his fretting hand could make such a sound in the world … The late Jerry Reed said of him simply, “I’ve got the usual ten, and there’s no way in the world I could create that fire, that spirit. I don’t know how he did it.”

Nor, of course, do I. But I think often of Django’s death, at the age of 43, on his way to play billiards in Samois-sur-Seine, where they still hold a guitar festival for him every year. The story is that he collapsed in the street from a brain hemorrhage, and might have survived if he hadn’t insisted on getting up and doggedly heading for the billiards parlor he never reached. I used to bewail his stubbornness, and curse the doctor who took almost a day to arrive from Paris. But I don’t do that anymore, not for a long time. Django was here to play music, and when he was done he went somewhere else – probably to play billiards, or to fish. He’d bail on a club gig to go fishing.

I’ve been reminded since beginning this essay that in recent years Django has finished in 66th place in a list of the greatest Belgians – 76th, if you’re a French-speaking Walloon. But he spoke no Dutch, and very little French, and he was born in a gypsy wagon that merely happened to be passing through Belgium at the time. Django was a gypsy: he was always from somewhere else.

Oakland, California 13 May 2010 Copyright © 2010 by Peter S. Beagle

___________________________________________

Jack Foley

Poet-critic-playwright Jack Foley to receive the Berkeley Poetry Festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award June 5, 2010

Photo: Lucha Corpi

DJANGO

Django Reinhardt – J’attendrai Swing 1939

Imagine a mind as fine and all-encompassing as, say, the mind of Albert Einstein. (At the end of July 1939, Django, Naguine, and the Quintette set off again for England on their third visit in two years. Yet this tour—and Europe in general—was doomed.) And then imagine that there is no place for that mind to discharge itself fully except for one: a guitar. But the guitar is the great instrument of the Gypsies, and this particular Gypsy, whose name—like the Buddha’s—meant “I awake,” knew in his hands that the depths of every note were history, went way back into all the sounds that Gypsies had made throughout their magnificent, tragic, triumphant, banal, thieving, unwritten lives. Music was life—and battle. (“Django’s playing is so beautiful that I almost forget to play, just listening to him.” “I was unaware of his virtuosity and quick ear. To my astonishment, he proceeded not only to play the blues but to embellish them with an evocative gypsy quality.”) Watch him, expressionless, with that elegant, trim, manouche mustache, his eyes cast down, a modest man, unassertive, except with his fingers, and those damaged. There is no emotion he is not capable of with that stringed box in his hands. The fascination is in part because he is a great virtuoso—but there are other virtuosi. The fascination is because no one knows what Django Reinhardt might do at any given moment out of the vast emotional repertoire that his extraordinary intelligence has placed at his disposal—out of those myriad things that have made him the sensitive, sounding instrument that he is. He is limited (“Django spoke little English, if any…”) but his guitar is infinite. “My brother,” he said of Louis Armstrong, whose genius was the same as his. The illiterate (the illiterate) professor (professor) speaks with his guitar (speaks with his guitar) he is a dark gypsy (he is a dark gypsy) with mustache and sly smile (with mustache and sly smile) he is speaking farrrrum farrrrum (he is speaking farrrrum farrrrum) on a subject of the most (on a subject of the most) immense, immediate, life-changing (immense, immediate, life-changing) interest (interest) and his chords tell us (and his chords tell us) what we can do (what we can do) what we can do (what we can do) Improv / improves sings the guitar (Improv / improves sings the guitar) to a classroom masquerading (to a classroom masquerading) as a night club (as a night club) or a concert hall (or a concert hall) the professor (the professor) rat a tats & riddles (rat a tats & riddles) roars & rambles (roars & rambles) tells us with superb intelligence (tells us with superb intelligence) of Charlie Parker (of Charlie Parker) and of wild (and of dark)

gypsy (gypsy)

ways (ways)

© 2010 Jack Foley

___________________________________________

Listen

Courtesy photo

Django Reinhardt and Duke Ellington, 1946

Paul Vernon Chester ~ DJANGO ‘N DUKE: The American Dream Denied

Django: One Hundred Years of Hot Jazz | Tom Cole | NPR | 23 January 2010

___________________________________________

Read the back-story on Django’s two-fingered soloing technique at ClassicJazzGuitar.com

___________________________________________

page under construction