Issue 4 will be published in September 2012 and will be concentrating on sonnets - modern variations and traditional forms. We will also publish the usual range of excellent poetry of all types.
Please note that we only consider 4 poems at a time.
SUBMISSIONS
We are happy to read up to four poems that have not been published elsewhere (online workshopping is fine, but not publication in a magazine or blog).
We don't mind simultaneous submissions but would be grateful if you would let us know if your work is accepted elsewhere before we have got back to you. We aim to contact you before the next issue due to be published, so response times vary from a few days to at maximum three months. If we'd like to retain work for consideration for a later issue we will let you know.
We're happy to consider all types of poetry but are looking for work that is carefully crafted, with attention paid to sound, rhythm and image. We're friendly towards metrical and non-metrical work.
We hope in future to produce a physical copy of the magazine, either as a pdf or some sort of print on demand format.
We're afraid that we're running on a budget of pretty much no money at all and can't offer you payment for your work, just the satisfaction of seeing it snuggling up to equally exciting poems and reaching a wide audience of discerning readers.
Please submit through the Submishmash link (now called Submittable) below. This is an on-line submission manager - you need to create an account (just a username and password) - and can then upload a document. We can't accept poems sent by email unless you are having a real problem with Submittable.
Please upload all your poems in one document. This is important!
Please include a short biography (no more than 150 words).
Please read our earlier issues before submitting to get a feel for what we are publishing - we'd love to hear your opinions. We don't really need statements of writing intent, photos of you, or explanations of your poems.
The Yale Drama Series Prize for Emerging Playwrights
The Yale Drama Series is an annual international competition which is open to emerging playwrights who are invited to submit original, unpublished and unproduced full-length English language plays for consideration. The winner receives the David Charles Horn prize of $10,000, publication of his/her manuscript by Yale University Press and a staged reading at Lincoln Center Theater in New York City.
Award winning playwright John Guare succeeds Edward Albee and David Hare as judge for the Series and will serve through 2013. In accepting the position, John Guare said: "In a few short years, the Yale Drama Series has asserted itself as the preeminent playwriting contest in the English speaking world. This annual event has become a playwright's dream."
Francine Horn said, "What an honour for the Foundation and the Series that John Guare is our judge. The job is mammoth and I am delighted that he embraces it with joy and enthusiasm. We are excited to continue our work with such a special writer and human being."
Submissions for the 2013 Competition must be postmarked no earlier than June 1, 2012 and no later than August 15, 2012. See Competition Rules for precise information regarding your entry.
Kimiko Hahn will judge the USPiM 2013 Mérida Fellowship Award.
Currently, this award is only open to American poets. Each year we accept Mexican poets through our Mexico Awards program (see menu). You need not be American to participate in our conference. Most workshops are conducted in English, except for the translation workshop which is conducted in English and Spanish. Evening readings are in English, Spanish and indigenous languages.
The Mérida Fellowship Award covers Conference fee ($600) and 7 nights lodging at Hotel Caribe in Merida for the week (total value approx. $1,020). Please submit 4 poems no more than 6 pages, 12pt Times New Roman type (do not put your name on poem pages), along with the entry Application and the $25 entry fee by check payable to U.S. Poets in Mexico,. Mail to USPiM, P.O .Box 4150, Grand Central Station, New York, NY 10163. Entries must be received by August 31st, 2012. The recipient will be announced September 30, 2012. The Fellowship recipient will give a featured half-hour reading. Application click HERE
Kimiko Hahn is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Toxic Flora (W.W. Norton, 2010), The Narrow Road to the Interior (2006); The Artist's Daughter(2002); Mosquito and Ant (1999); Volatile(Hanging Loose Press, 1998); and The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1995), which received an American Book Award. Other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award; also, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award, the Shelley Memorial Prize. In October 2011, she received the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry for her poetry collection Toxic Flora, the highest literary honor for writers of Asian American descent. Hahn received a bachelor’s degree in English and East Asian studies with a certificate in creative writing from the University of Iowa, and a master's degree in Japanese literature from Columbia University. She is a Distinguished Professor of English in the MFA Creative Writing and Literary Translation program at CUNY's Queens College, NY. A podcast of Philip Levine in conversation with Kimiko Hahn can be found at the Pen American Center here
Contrary to their name, Arrested Development advanced Hip-Hop by giant leaps. With Gangsta Rap all the rage, they released engaging songs in a melodic rap style that produced 3 Top-10 hits from their first album. Speech is their primary songwriter and lead vocalist. "Tennessee" is his masterpiece.
Carl Wiser (Songfacts): The song I'm hoping to dig into is "Tennessee."
Speech: Okay. "Tennessee" is a very important song to me. There's a few reasons why. One is it was our first single ever for Arrested Development. And I wrote it because my older brother, his name is Terry Thomas, he and I met up in Tennessee for my grandmother – my favorite grandmother of all time – for her funeral. And that same week my brother left and went back to college, and I went back to college. And my brother died that same week. And that song was probably the first step of me recovering from the loss of two people that are just extremely close and dear to me. The chorus is "take me another place, take me to another land, make me forget all that hurts me and help me understand your plan." It's like a prayer to God. And just talking about sort of my journey in life, and that the last place I saw these important people in my life was in Tennessee.
SF: Can you tell me how you create a song?
Speech: Definitely. Like, for "Tennessee" for instance, after the death of my loved ones and stuff, I really felt just a deep importance to write about it and to express what I felt, what was going on. First I started to create music in general for it, and I knew I wanted it to be called "Tennessee." I sampled from Prince, from "Alphabet Street." Then I started to make beats, just the beat for the song in general, on my sampler. And then Aerle Taree, one of the members of the group, came by. At this point in my life, my studio was in my bedroom. Basically it just poured out of me lyrically, all the ideas and sort of vocal things that I wrote came right out of me very easily. Her parts were based on what she heard me do. She talked about playing a game of horseshoes, and she sang this section on the chorus with echoed "take me home." Some songs flow out of you, and other songs are more strategically made. That was one song that just literally flowed. It was very easy to make, in a sense. Once I had done the lyrics, once the beat was in general finished, once Aerle Taree laid down her part, I did want to enhance the song and in a sense polish it, although it doesn't sound polished at all. So at that point, I did some more programming, some more song arrangements. And that's when the last part of the song came about, when I ended up asking Dionne Farris, who's a fantastic singer I knew – to sing on it. And that section of the song, the ending of the song, to me is sort of like the clincher. If you didn't like the song at first, you should like it by that time. And she did an excellent job. By the time she came in and recorded the song, we were already signed to a label, and she was in a professional studio; when me and Aerle Taree started to write it we were just in my bedroom. But by the time Dionne got involved we were in a professional studio and I was able to ask her to spill her heart. I told her a few words that I would love for her to say, and she could say 'em any way she wanted and sing 'em any way she wanted, and we did about 10 takes. The first take was most of that solo that she did at the end. That was her first take. She ended it pretty early, so I asked her to sing some more, and she did. That was the second take - she heard it and didn't like the vocal. So we did about nine other takes. But I knew in my heart that the first take was the one, and she felt that it wasn't performed perfectly, but I knew that it was absolutely perfect. Even with flaws, it was a very emotional take, just a great recording. I'm very proud of that song, and I'm equally as proud of the video that we shot for that song.
SF: Tell me about the video.
Speech: The video was actually shot in Georgia, ironically. But we found a man's home that we just felt was absolutely reminiscent of my experience with my grandmother's house, and what her house looked like. And it was a perfect setting for this video. We went out on a very, very cold, I think it was a January morning, and shot basically all day. A lot of my friends from college and a lot of the group members' friends came on down, and we all sort of convoyed down to the video shoot. A lot of the extras that were in the video were people that were in the neighborhood that were curious that we asked to be involved. And it was absolutely awesome. We had slave shackles in the video that were already at that person's house from literal history. There was a back house for the slaves that used to live there in years passed that was still there. And things that just were really perfect for the type of message that the song was about, the song takes you through a spiritual journey and a life journey through history in a sense, and at the same time it talks about my family, and then it sort of leads to anyone's family roots, and the direction that people go in life. And it was just a great deal to be able to have these washboards, and this old dilapidated wood porch and these old screen doors. A lot of people thought that we had built the set in order to make it look like the past, but it was just one of the really beautiful parts of living in the rural South. And it was very recent. That was 1991, I think, when we shot that, and that house, we didn't have to touch it or do anything to it, it was the way it was. And a lot of the props that we use in the video were also there, that were just there at the time. So it was just great. We were really proud of that video. We're proud as well of Milcho Manchevski, a relatively famous independent director now, shot that video, and we really wanted to go for a really clean black-and-white look and a very documentary style of shooting. I just felt like it really captured well. And it's still one of my favorite videos in hip-hop in general, in my opinion.
SF: It's one that's definitely memorable. Was that the only song that Dionne Farris recorded with you guys?
Speech: No, she actually did three songs with us. She did a fantastic job on "Fishing For Religion" on our first album – an incredible solo on that, probably her best solo that she's ever done with us, in my opinion. And she also sang on a song on our first album called "Give A Man A Fish," and she did an excellent job on that, as well. What I love about Dionne is she's such a small girl, but her voice has a big, black woman voice to it. I just love it. It's just a very strong presence in her voice.
SF: 1991 sounds like a very interesting time to be sampling records. You said you sampled Prince. Now, the actual "Tennessee" vocal came from Alphabet Street?
Speech: That's right. Yeah, it did.
SF: How did you clear that sample? Or did you even have to back in 1991?
Speech: You know, I didn't know to in 1991, the sample laws weren't very clearly set out back then. It was our first record, we definitely weren't vets in the industry, we didn't understand all the game play and the rules. So we didn't ask for permission. I learned as a producer pretty quickly the laws of sampling: it's the wild, wild West out there. So what happened was the record obviously was getting some pretty good heat. MTV had a show called "Buzz Clips," and they added it to "Buzz Clips," and it just became this huge phenomenon. And as the song moved up the chart the album got to #3 on the pop charts. And once it went down, the very week it went to #4, we got a call from Prince's representation. They waited for that song to sell as many possible copies as they could wait for. As soon as it started to go down the charts we got a call, and the Reaper became the reaped. So we got charged for that sample pretty heavily. I paid $100,000 for that word.
SF: The $100,000, was that negotiated?
Speech: It was not. In fact, because we didn't ask for permission ahead of time, they didn't need to negotiate with us. It was either do it, or we pull the record.
SF: So they held all the cards here.
Speech: They did totally hold all the cards.
SF: The song "Mr. Wendal," can you tell me if that is based on a real person?
Speech: Sure. I wrote the song. The song is not based on a person named Mr. Wendal at all, but it is based on some experiences that I have had in Atlanta, which is where I live, and sung to the homeless people that I had become friends with here, and just their way of looking at it. Some of them were more like hobos where they purposely were wanting to be homeless, they didn't want to play to the way society was going, and they just decided to go off another beaten path. Others were hungry, had a run of bad luck, and just couldn't survive with the competition of the real world. So they were out there. One of the people that I look to the most as the real Mr. Wendal, to me, died the year that that song came out. So he never got to hear the song and the tribute to him. We gave half of the proceeds of that song to the National Coalition For the Homeless in the United States, because of how closely all of us felt to the cause of the homeless, and the fact that everybody, whether they're homeless or not, there's some times in all of our lives when we need some help, we need a boost.
SF: You were talking about how you start with the beat, you get the samples, is that how you do most of your songs?
Speech: It is. Most of the songs I do, I actually start with the melody, meaning the musical melody, first. Then I put a beat to the melody. I tend to do a lot of technology type things to create music and bring live musicians in later. So what I mean is maybe I'll sequence the music on my sequencer, and then get a drum machine and put beats behind that music, and then ask some live musicians to come in and I'll replay some of the things that I've written. Because I don't play an instrument, per se. I don't know how to play any instruments. But of course I write songs.
SF: At what point do the lyrics come in?
Speech: To me, it's usually after everything else is completed. So I will have the general idea of the song musically first. Because to me the music to a song speaks to you. It tells you what the song should be about. There's certain chords that feel either refreshing, or they feel depressing, or certain ways that the music moves that sort of determines the subject matter. And at least that's how I work. And it's proven to be pretty successful for me, so I like it.
SF: Did somebody teach you how to do this? Or did you just figure it out on your own?
Speech: I've been a fan of music ever since I was a little kid. And so the answer really is yes and no. Yes, I figured it out on my own. But yes, many people taught me how to do it through listening to their music. So there's songs that inspired me, and I would listen to music so much that I started to analyze: why do I like this song so much? I would notice that usually songs would have an 8-bar intro, and then the first verse. And I started to notice that, wow, after the first verse sometimes there would be a bridge, and then the chorus, and then after the chorus would be the second verse, and then the bridge, and then a second chorus. And then after the second chorus that might repeat. And then they might have a vamp at the end of the song. And there were certain structures that I started to notice were similar in almost every song. So in that way, yes, those songs taught me what it was about. But no one literally was in a classroom that taught me. But I was able to listen to other people's music. And to this day that still is the case. I listen to records that I like, and I listen to some of the structures of their songs, or some of the textures that they will use musically and what that texture evokes in me emotionally. And I want to recreate that in my own music in some way or another. So it's always a lesson of learning in my opinion when you're a songwriter. Because if you don't consistently learn different ways to express a song, in my opinion at least, your songwriting becomes stagnant.
Speech: "People Everyday" initially was again a musical track that I had done first. And then it was another easy song to write the lyrics to. The first version I did of "People Everyday", which is the version that's actually on our album 3 Years, 5 Months, 2 Days in the Life, the first version I did of that was not the most popular version that would end up becoming a hit for us, but it had the same lyrics and it had the same structure. I would later do a remix of the song once we decided to release it as a single. I felt a little insecure about putting out a single without me rhyming in a sing-song style, because certain people liked this sort of new way I was rapping which had more melody as opposed to just rapping without using melody. So I was really afraid, I wanted to try my hand at making "People Everyday" a more melodic type of delivery instead of the regular delivery. And so I did a remix and sampled a Bob James record for the general groove, added some beats to it, and that that was the version of that song that everybody knows about. It was actually a remix.
SF: The lyrical content of that song, can you tell me where that came from?
Speech: It came from real life experiences. At that time I lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which is where I was born. And Milwaukee, back in those days, was a very conservative town. And a lot of the black people there really were not into cultural black… they understood they were black, but for them black was jheri-curls, it was pimping, and that's what they thought black culture was mainly about. For me having experienced more in Atlanta and having traveled a little bit more, I'd come to understand that black culture had a lot more to do with Africa, and it was different hairstyles that we could express ourselves with, like dreadlocks and braids. So I would dress like that, and a lot of the people around me in Milwaukee would sort of mock it. And so the song was really just talking about this tension between one concept of culture and another concept of culture.
SF: I notice that you guys have what's described as a spiritual guru that's a member of Arrested Development. Can you tell me about that?
Speech: Yeah. His name is Baba Oje. Baba means "father" in Swahili, and Oje is his name. And he's 75 years old. When I met him he was 57, and he went to my college, which was UWM, which is University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. He was a student, and I was a student. I traveled a lot, and Jamaican culture, when I went there I'd noticed that a lot of the youths and the elders would hang together. I didn't notice that as much in America. So I was inspired by that concept, which is having older people with younger people, and not such a huge generation gap. And this whole concept that the youth have energy and the elders have wisdom was something that I'd learned about and was really intrigued by. So I wanted to have an elder in the group. It was a very radical concept at the time because I didn't know any groups that had ever done that. So I just asked him to be in a hip-hop group. And he was at first not really interested. It turned out that he knew my mom and dad and that he was a best man in their wedding. And I had no clue, I'd never met him before, I wasn't born yet. So it turned out that he really was a close member of our family and that's the reason he ended up saying yes to me, and he realized that I was a Thomas – that's my last name – and that he knew my mom and dad.
SF: Wow. You mentioned how this is related to other cultures, in Jamaica they do this. I've always been surprised that songs that seem to be very American play so well overseas. Do you have any idea why you guys are so incredibly popular in, like, Japan?
Speech: I have a feeling that there's two reasons. I think one is that the music evokes a more positive side of things, so the more gangsta hip-hop is prevalent, the more they're talking about pimps and ho's and all of that, the more we're appreciated as a group. And for Japan, they still don't necessarily get into the gangsta stuff as much as we do in the United States. So they really appreciate a more motivational, inspirational style of music.
SF: You did the song that ended up on the 1 Giant Leap project. Can you tell me about "Braided Hair"?
Speech: "Braided Hair" was, musically, a 1 Giant Leap creation. And they reached out to me. The concept of that group is pretty cool. Those guys basically travel around the world, and they reach out to artists, philosophers, spiritualists, you name it - different tribal leaders - and they just talk to them about certain issues. Well, they had reached out to me and asked if I could be involved in a project. And when I saw the scope of the project and the boldness of how big this project was, like what they were trying to accomplish, I did really think it's one giant leap. I thought it was incredible, and I was honored to do it. It wasn't for pay. I mean, I've gotten paid from it now, but when we first started it had nothing to do with money, it was just a passion, something for the passion of music and the opportunity to do something creative. So they came to Atlanta and they had the track of "Braided Hair." They asked me to pick from a few different tracks what I thought I'd be inspired to write to, and that was the one I liked. That song was very easy to write. They literally came over to my house that same night, I wrote the entire song, they filmed the video for the song that same night. And then they recorded all the guests that were on the song, like Neneh Cherry. Ulali is a group from India who sang on the song. And all of them I'd never met at the time. I've met Neneh Cherry, but at the time they weren't there, and sort of like you do cartoon animated movies, we just all did our parts in our separate places.
SF: Did they give you direction on what to write?
Speech: The lyrics "We Might survive as brothers," that was written by Jamie, who was one of the members of One Giant Leap. And I just sang that part. The rest of it – or at least all my parts that I sang – was just what I came up with at the time. It was really one of those clear cut inspiration moments, because they loved everything that I wrote. They thought, as England people say, I was brilliant. They're from the UK, and it just worked out right. I have now since done their second album, and it wasn't easy. They came back to me and was like, "Hey, we need you to write a great hit." I never do good when people tell me that, because I never really write songs to think of them as hits, although I've written some hits. It was like forcing teeth out of my mouth to try to get a great song. I think we did do a great job, though, we did some good stuff. But that "Braided Hair" song was like butter, smooth, nice and easy.
SF: Besides the tracks that we've talked about, what is your favorite Arrested Development track? Speech: It's hard for me to say, of course I'm very close to all my stuff. I think some of my highlight moments were obviously on the first record. There's another record we did called Among The Trees, I think there's a song called "Wag Your Tail" that I think is a very highlight in my writing ability. It's really hard for me to say. I've done a lot of material. We now have five albums. So I think for me some of the things that stand out shouldn't change over the years. I would easily say "Tennessee" is still a landmark moment for me. Maybe because of the songwriting, but also because of how much it resonated and how famous the song became, it will always have a special place in my heart, of course, what the song was about.
MARK ANTHONY NEAL SAYS THAT ICE CUBE'S 43RD BIRTHDAY---AND TWO DECADE CAREER---ARE A CAUSE FOR CELEBRATION
By Mark Anthony Neal
There’s a poignant moment at the end of Boyz in the Hood, where Trey (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) and Doughboy (O’Shea Jackson aka Ice Cube) share a moment of reflection in response to the violence that took the life of Trey’s best friend and Doughboy’s brother. The scene lingers, if only because audiences were sure—even before the film’s closing credits confirm it—that this would be the last time the two characters would have such a moment; Trey is headed to Morehouse for college and Doughboy will inevitably be killed by the gun violence that was destroying their neighborhood.
The power of director John Singleton’s debut came from its realism—a realism that many in America viewed as wholly linked to the “noise” that echoed from urban America via the sounds of hip-hop or what some called “Gangsta Rap.” For far too many and for far too long, there was no distinction to be made between Ice Cube, the politically conscious lyrical genius and budding entrepreneur, and Doughboy, “the n*gger you love to hate”; In those early days, O’Shea Jackson, in fact, encouraged that little distinction be made between the two as a measure of the lack of representational diversity for Black men.
By all accounts Ice Cube should be dead, both literally and figuratively. Yet as the rapper, turned Hollywood maverick, and mainstream pitchman turned 43, his longevity and adaptability stands as testament to both his vision as an artist and business person and the ability of hip-hop culture, as Gaye Theresa Johnson recently argued, to celebrate Black humanity.
As the primary lyricist for NWA, with tracks like “Express Yourself” and “F**k the Police” and his own solo recordings Amerikka’s Most Wanted (1990), Death Certificate (1991), The Predator (1992) and Lethal Injection (1993), Ice Cube established himself as one of America’s most truthful wordsmiths. Yet, Cube always seemed conscious that there were other possibilities for his career. His decision, at age 19, not to sign a contract with Jerry Heller, instigating the initial break with NWA, was emblematic of a figure who always saw the big picture, even if some of his music (“No Vaseline”) remained wedded to the kinds of misogyny, sexism and homophobia that too often gets excused as young male exuberance.
Cube was not alone; Ice-T (Tracy Marrow), LL Cool J (James Todd Smith), Queen Latifah (Dana Owens) and most famously the Fresh Prince (Will Smith) were all artists, arguably at the peak of their recording careers in the early 1990s, who seamlessly transitioned into television and film careers that continue to thrive two decades later, to the extent that there are a generation on consumer who are largely oblivious to their “former” careers at rappers.
There is no small irony that Cube and Smith represented a classic “Good Black/Bad Black” dichotomy—Smith was the mischievous ghetto kid now attending the all-White prep school and Cube was the angry, gangbanger behind the “LA Riots”—yet Smith has made largely made his career as a violent action hero, often working at the behest of The State (the Bad Boy and Men in Black franchises, as well as films like Enemy of the State and IndependenceDay), while Ice Cube’s most visible successes have been in PG-13 urban comedies like the Barbershop franchises and family friendly fare like The Longshots (2008) and the Are We There Yet? franchise, which produced two films and a television series. Cube’s long forgotten beef with Common (over the legacy of West Coast rap, later squashed by Minister Louis Farrakhan) is an example of an Ice Cube that should be in our cultural rearview.
Yet in the popular imagination, Ice Cube remains wedded to the period of racial unrest and anxieties about urban violence that framed the end of the end of the 20th century. Such was the case when NPR’s Terry Gross (whose job is to ask celebrities the kinds of questions that folk in rural Kansas might ask) interviewed Ice Cube for her show Fresh Air, and spent a significant time discussing Cube famous scowl. To his credit—again emblematic of his vision—Cube has monetized that scowl into series of commercials for Coors Light (a far cry from his St. Ides malt liquor commercials from the mid-1990s).
In another example of Cube’s previous personas limiting his mainstream visibility, when Oprah Winfrey booked actors from film Barbershop, which he starred in and executive produced, she famously didn’t invite Cube, who understandably took offense chirping, “"She's had damn rapists, child molesters and lying authors on her show. And if I'm not a rags-to-riches story for her, who is?" Hip-hop’s role as a cultural force even forced Oprah to rethink his relationship to the culture as she’s found time to break-bread, figuratively speaking, with figures like Jay-Z and most recently 50 Cent. That shift is in no small part due to Ice Cube’s own role in helping Hip-Hop grow up in the public eye, as he has also grown up before our eyes.
A relatively obscure moment stands-out, in terms of the complexity of Ice Cube’s identity and his professional choices. While many remember his star turn in Boyz in the Hood, relatively few remember or even saw his role in Charles Burnett’s TheGlass Shield (1995) which depicted Cube in the role of Teddy Woods, a victim of corruption in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. Ice Cube’s choice to work with Burnett, a member of the LA Rebellion, the cohort of Black filmmakers like Halie Gerima and Julie Dash who emerged in the 1970s, and whose films Killer of Sheep (1977) and To Sleep with Anger (1990) are generally regarding as some of the greatest achievement in Black filmmaking, was perhaps the best evidence of Cube’s desire to take his acting and filmmaking craft seriously.
Ice Cube was part of generation of young Black men, who were conscious that they might not see the age of 25; this, of course, has not changed, though today’s young Black males have little expectation that they will reach that age—Trayvon Martin was reminder that even the so-called “good” kids are under assault. For that reason alone we should celebrate Ice Cube’s 43rd birthday—and his ability to sustain a career that has consistently challenged our perception of who Black men can be.
" RE-EMERGING: The Jews of Nigeria" is a journey into the heart of Igboland and into the lives and culture of the Igbo people. The film introduces the world to the many synagogues that dot the land, and a handful of passionate, committed, and diverse characters -- each striving to fulfill their historical legacy with few resources and unbeknownst to most of the world. Individual stories are woven together with key facets of history, tracing the Igbo from Biblical times up to the brutal 1960s Biafran War, which killed over 1 million Igbo. A wide range of American academics help detail this history, including shedding new light on the Igbo origins of thousands of slaves captured during the Atlantic Slave Trade and brought to American shores. The film delves into this history and travels to the southeast coast of Georgia, where locals still speak of the Igbo spirit alive and well at a riverbed called Ibo Landing.
The new book Pictures and Progress, co-edited by Duke Professor Maurice Wallace, looks at how the invention of photography was used for and against political gain for African Americans.
By Maureen McGavin and Elaine Justice | June 1, 2012
These images are part of a collection of more than 10,000 photographs of African American life acquired by Emory University from photo collector Robert Langmuir of Philadelphia.
Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, 1895.
Harlequin actor by W. Wright Photography, London, 1895.
Evangelist, unidentified, date unknown
Mary McLeod Bethune, date unknown.
Mamie Smith & Her Jazz Hounds, New York, 1920.
Sheet music cover with Mamie Smith & Her Jazz Hounds, New York, 1920.
Musician Leadbelly with prison officials, Texas, 1915.
A rare collection of more than 10,000 photographs depicting African American life from the late 19th and early 20th centuries has been acquired by Emory University's Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library (MARBL) from photo collector Robert Langmuir of Philadelphia.
The images range from the 1840s – the beginning of photography – to the 1970s, with most of the photos falling in the post-Civil War to pre-World War II era. They include nearly every format, from daguerreotypes to snapshots, and cover a wide range of subject matter. A number of the photos were taken by African American photographers, a topic in itself.
"This collection sparkles with intelligent insights into the lives and cultures of the African American experience over many decades," says Emory University Provost Earl Lewis, also a professor of history and African American studies. "Its breadth is incredible, its depth is considerable, and its sheer beauty is breathtaking."
"Scholars from many disciplines will find this collection to be a treasure trove for peering behind the veil and seeing the inner worlds of life in America," says Lewis. "I am proud that we can add this collection to our library."
Randall K. Burkett, curator of MARBL's African American Collections says the collection "complements virtually every other collection we have, whether it's in music, art, literature, dance, business, civil rights – any aspect of late 19th and 20th century American culture. This is going to be a signature collection for us, and I know it will attract other collections."
Civil Rights, Religious Leaders Included
The photos are of both ordinary people and well-known names of the times, such as newspaper editor and early civil rights activist William Monroe Trotter, black nationalist Marcus Garvey, sculptor Selma Burke, blues musicians Howlin' Wolf and Lightnin' Hopkins, Pearl Harbor hero Dorie Miller, and religious leaders Noble Drew Ali, Father Divine and Bishop Elmira Jeffries, among many others.
Kevin Young, MARBL curator of literary collections and of its Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, traveled with Burkett to Philadelphia to help pack the collection and calls it one of the most remarkable he's ever seen.
"The archive reveals the richness of African American daily life," says Young, "from pictures taken by house photographers at nightclubs, to cabinet cards and calling cards of black disc jockeys, to photographs of preachers, blues singers, saints and sinners. No doubt this collection will change the field of African American and American studies."
Young included several photos from Langmuir's collection in his recently published book"The Grey Album."
Collector Robert Langmuir
Growing up in Philadelphia in an African American neighborhood, Langmuir has been interested in black history for most of his life. A rare-book seller for 35 years, he's collected photos and family albums through antique book shows or ephemera fairs, auctions and networking.
Of the more than 10,000 photos in the collection, Langmuir says: "Not every photo is a stellar, poignant image. A lot of them are family archives, or from family albums, people doing things, just living their everyday lives. That's what I was interested in–looking at black culture through black people's eyes."
Please consider supporting Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, a PBS documentary that explores how African Americans have used photography as a tool for social change. Since the birth of photography in 1840s, African Americans rejected what they saw about themselves in the dominant culture and took ownership of their own cultural image. Empowered through photography, Black people began to record and embrace their own truths and forge their own identities.
Through A Lens Darkly illuminates the hidden, little known and underappreciated stories of African Americans transforming themselves and the nation through the power of the camera lens. The film also explores how contemporary photographers and artists like Deborah Willis, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Anthony Barboza, Lyle Ashton Harris, Hank Willis Thomas, Glenn Ligon, Coco Fusco and Clarissa Sligh, have built upon the legacy of early Black photographers while trying to reconcile a past that our forebears would rather forget.
Please help us complete this important project by making a tax-deductible donation that will be used for the final editing, sound mix, and archival licensing of the Through A Lens Darkly project.
We have been working on this film and multimedia project for the past 8-years and we could not have made it this far without the support of our friends, colleagues, partners and funders. We welcome you to join our completion campaign.
In many ways, I was destined to make this film because of grandfather, Albert Sidney Johnson, Jr.. For him, photography was a means of unifying our extended family, knitting together the disparate branches and providing a means to connect one generation with the next. Grandpa’s stories describing his great grandparents making their way out of slavery and building their lives into something despite the crippling racial barriers they faced, were brought to life by the photographic images that boldly showed us who we really were. My family archive compelled me to create a collective archive of who we are as African Americans, as Americans, as humans.
JOIN US!!! Through A Lens Darkly is a collaborative project. We appreciate your support of our journey to create and share images of ourselves with honor, respect and dignity.
Blind Tom was one of the nineteenth century’s most extraordinary performers. An autistic savant with an encyclopedic memory, all-consuming passion for the piano and mind-boggling capacity to replicate – musically and vocally – any sound he heard, his name was a byword for eccentricity and oddball genius.
Early Life
Blind Tom was born into slavery in Columbus, Georgia in 1848. His master, Wiley Jones, unwilling to clothe and feed a disabled ‘runt’, wanted him dead and, if not for vigilance of his mother, Charity, Tom would not have survived his infancy. But when Tom was nine months old, Wiley Jones put the baby, his two older sisters and parents up for auction, intending to sell the family off individually and not as a unit. The chances of anyone buying blind infant were remote - his death was as good as certain.
Tom’s life was again spared, thanks to the tenacity of his mother. A few weeks before the auction, Charity approached a neighbor, General James Bethune, and begged him to save them from the auction block. At first he refused her, but on the day of the sale, the lawyer and newspaperman turned up at the slave mart and purchased the family.
Apart from his blindness, Tom was ‘just like any other baby’ at first, but a few months after arriving at the Bethune Farm, things began to change and the toddler began to echo the sounds around him. If a rooster crowed, he made the same noise. If a bird sang, he would pursue it or attack his younger siblings just to hear them scream. If left alone in the cabin, he would drag chairs across the floor or bang pans and pots together – anything to make a noise.
By the age of four, Tom could repeat conversations ten minutes in length, but expressed his own needs in whines and tugs. Unless constantly watched, he would escape: to the chicken coop, woods and finally to the piano in his master’s house, the sound of each note causing his young body to tremble in ecstasy. After a string of unwelcome visits, General Bethune finally recognized the stirrings of a musical prodigy in the raggedy slave child and installed him in the Big House where he underwent extensive tuition.
Child Prodigy
By six, Tom was performing to sell out houses throughout Georgia. His early managers promoted him as an ‘untutored’, ‘natural’ musician - fully formed from the moment he first touched the piano - who could repeat any composition, no matter how difficult, after a single hearing.
The reality, of course, failed to match the showman’s spiel. Certainly Blind Tom had a flawless memory and was extraordinarily adept at imitating but even at the high point of his career, he was unable to reproduce complex polymorphic concertos after a single hearing. (He needed an entire afternoon to accomplish that). But if the piece had a recognizable harmony – a polka, waltz, slave song or minstrel hit - Tom could just about play it as an eight-year-old and easily nail it as a sixteen-year-old.
At the age of eight, Tom was licensed out to a travelling showman named Perry Oliver who promoted him as a Barnum-styled freak: ‘a gorgon with angel’s wings’. The more animalistic Tom was perceived to be – and newspapers routinely compared him to a baboon, trusty mastiff or hulking bear - the more astonishing the transformation that took place when he began to play. Before the audience’s very eyes, the incessant rocking and blank open-mouthed expression vanished and Tom would strike the keys with the precision and ease of a master. ‘I am astounded. I cannot account for it, no one can, no one understands it,’ wrote one baffled member of the public.
The mystery of Tom’s transformation has been solved, at least in part, as our understanding of autism has deepened. People on the autistic spectrum struggle to assimilate the sensory information bombarding them and many engage in repetitive behavior to deflect the overload. Music seems to have offered Tom this type of escape. Behind the piano, the splintering effects of autism – the sensory overload and fragmented perception – disappeared and Tom was able to experience a sense of integration: moments he clearly savored and his inspired outpourings of joy impressed many who witnessed him.
Cipher of the Times
Hard on the heels of Abraham Lincoln’s presidential nomination in 1860, Perry Oliver brought Blind Tom to Washington DC, sensing that something was about to erupt. But the issues that so obsessed his manager - slavery, abolition and secession - meant little to Tom although, ironically, he became a cipher of these times. He was taken to the deeply divided House of Congress to soak up the political vitriol and over the following weeks, served it up on stage to audiences chortling with laughter.
Later in the election campaign, Tom was taken to hear the Democrat’s presidential candidate, Senator Stephen Douglas and for years afterwards, performed the rally speech on stage. Tom perfectly captured the Douglas’s distinctive boom and somehow, inexplicably, his physical mannerisms and posture as well. Even more bizarre, was Tom’s inclusion of the crowd’s heckles and cheers. “Startling” was how one of Douglas’s supporters described it, despite at least one less-than-accurate slip: “The franatics of the North and the franatics of the South….”
Tom’s extraordinary powers of imitation, music and memory also earned him an invitation to the White House where he performed before President James Buchanan. While the exquisite quality of the executive mansion’s Chickering piano delighted him the most, one salient point eluded both him and the clique of Washington socialites before him: Blind Tom was the first African-American musician to officially perform in the White House.
CivilWar
With the outbreak of war, Tom enlisted his heart to Confederate cause – or so claimed his manager who staged a series of benefit concerts in aid of the Rebel war effort. In fact, Tom was as oblivious to sectional politics as he was to the secretive game slaves played with their masters; the lip service they paid to their Master’s authority before slipping into the woods to pray for their deliverance. Tom heard not these silent prayers but the crunch of marching feet, rat-a-tat-tat of the drum and fife, boom of musketry and cannon and mayhem of battle.
These sounds he absorbed, channelling them into his most famous composition, The Battle of Manassas, when just a lad of fifteen. The sum total of his perfect pitch, hypersensitive clarity, elastic vocal chords, lack of inhibition and total immersion in the world of sound enabled him to re-create a ‘harum-scarum’ battlefield like no other.
White southerners heralded The Battle of Manassas as a work of genius though black audiences were less effusive – not surprising, as Perry Oliver would introduce the piece as Tom’s spontaneous expression of loyalty to the Confederacy.
However this Oliver’s version does not tally with the facts. For a start, nine months passed before The Battle of Manassas was first heard in public – hardly making it a spur-of-the-moment tribute. The wily showman seems to have used Tom as a propaganda tool to serve his own political agenda.
The Wonder of the World
In the decades following the Civil War, Blind Tom became a household name, celebrated by luminaries like Mark Twain and mid-Western novelist, Willa Cather. He played virtuoso pieces to sell out crowds across Europe and America (his tour schedule was relentless), following them up with unashamedly populist novelties: imitations of trains, banjos and music boxes, playing one piece with his left hand, another with his right while singing a third, then repeating the feat with his back to piano.
At every concert, audience members put his musical memory to the test and by the time he hit his full virtuosic stride, Tom was virtually unbeatable. As the crowds wildly applauded, he would bound across the stage in a series of spectacular one-footed leaps, howling along with them. The American stage had never seen anything like him.
But Tom’s enormous fame was sullied by the deep-rooted racism of the period. His so-called ‘idiocy’ was continuously confused with the widespread belief that Africans were closer to the animal kingdom than Europeans. But his savant powers also made a nonsense of these race theories. How could a man with gifts like his be an example of ‘the lowest rung of humanity’, ‘a mind dredged of all intelligence and purity’? A century and a half ago, there were few earthly explanations, although several unearthly ones were floating about.
Séances, ouija boards and spectral materializations were all the rage in the late nineteenth century and many saw Tom as a medium, an empty vessel, channeling the genius of the great masters. Years earlier, in his hometown of Columbus, his fellow slaves had reached a similar conclusion: Tom was blessed with the gift of ‘second sight’, and could communicate with spirits from other worlds.
Tom was undoubtedly in communication with something. Many of his compositions were the fruit of a deep and profound dialogue with the natural and mechanical world. He would pass hours rapturously absorbed in a thunderstorm then sit down at the piano and play “something that the wind and rain said to me.”
Tom’s savant powers enabled him to revel in a sonic world alive with vibration and detail. Powered by an almost superhuman capacity to concentrate on details most people would find inconsequential, he could tune into a fantastically intricate world of differentiated repetition: the crank of the butter churn, the drip-drip-drip of water down a drainpipe, the clickety clack of a train or warble of a bird.
The bliss he experienced as he drank in these sounds, erroneously gave rise to the perception that he was perpetually happy, but after years of social and physical isolation – locked up alone in a hotel room day after day - Tom became morose and suspicious of ‘strangers’.
The Last American Slave
Tom had no concept of money and, not surprisingly, was exploited, deceived, manipulated and robbed blind by his white masters and guardians. Emancipation failed to deliver him from the shackles of slavery, his master’s son – John Bethune - merely morphing into the role of guardian and manager. In 1872, Tom was adjudged insane and the vast sums of money he earned (the equivalent of $5 million dollars today) was squandered on Bethune’s extravagant lifestyle. Then in 1884, Bethune was killed in a railroad accident.
At the time of his death John Bethune was embroiled in a bitter divorce. When his estranged wife, Eliza Bethune, discovered she was cut out of the will, she tracked down Tom’s impoverished mother and persuaded her to move to New York to mount a legal challenge. It took three years of legal wrangling, but in 1887, victory was theirs and ‘The Last American Slave’ – as the press dubbed Tom – was set free.
But Tom’s so-called ‘emancipation’ was little more than a sham. Once Charity naively handed Tom’s guardianship over to the Bethune’s widow, she was unceremoniously dumped and sent back to Georgia, never to see her son again.
FinalYears
Blind Tom’s final years were shrouded in secrecy and paranoia. It was widely believed he died in The Johnstown Flood of 1889, America’s biggest man-made disaster to date. In fact, he was in one of three places: touring the backwaters of North America (his glory days long behind him), holed up in a New York apartment on the lower east side or listening to the ocean’s roar at Eliza Bethune’s country hideaway in wilds of New Jersey (purchased at his expense). In 1903 he made a brief comeback on the vaudeville stage.
He died of a stroke in 1908 at the age of sixty and was buried in an unmarked grave at Brooklyn’s Evergreen Cemetery. Twenty years later, the daughter of his former master – Fanny Bethune – began efforts to disinter his body into the Bethune family plot in Georgia. A Columbus resident insists he carried out her request as best he could, Jim Crow laws forcing him to re-bury Tom at a nearby plantation. The Evergreen Cemetery, however, insists that the body was never removed. Today, two plaques – one in Columbus Georgia, the other in Brooklyn - mark his burial place: a fitting end to the enigma of Blind Tom.
Baltimore and Washington's Afro American remembers how Blind Tom was the first African American artist to officially perform in the White House.
Blind Tom & The Battle of Manassas
Readabout the controversy surrounding Blind Tom's composition of his famous Civil War battle piece.
From the Archive
In 1898, Ladies Home Journal visited Blind Tom at the remote New Jersey home of his guardian, Eliza Lerche. Little had been heard from the blind performer for over a decade and it was widely believed he had perished in the Johnstown Flood of 1889
From the Archive III
Six weeks after the end of the Civil War, a black showman namedTabbs Gross made a bid to secure custody of Blind Tom. The New York Times were unimpressed by the judge's ruling.
Theodore Walter Rollins was born on September 7, 1930 in New York City. He grew up in Harlem not far from the Savoy Ballroom, the Apollo Theatre, and the doorstep of his idol, Coleman Hawkins. After early discovery of Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong, he started out on alto saxophone, inspired by Louis Jordan. At the age of sixteen, he switched to tenor, trying to emulate Hawkins. He also fell under the spell of the musical revolution that surrounded him, Bebop.
He began to follow Charlie Parker, and soon came under the wing of Thelonious Monk, who became his musical mentor and guru. Living in Sugar Hill, his neighborhood musical peers included Jackie McLean, Kenny Drew and Art Taylor, but it was young Sonny who was first out of the pack, working and recording with Babs Gonzales, J.J. Johnson, Bud Powell and Miles Davis before he turned twenty.
"Of course, these people are there to be called on because I think I represent them in a way," Rollins said recently of his peers and mentors. "They're not here now so I feel like I'm sort of representing all of them, all of the guys. Remember, I'm one of the last guys left, as I'm constantly being told, so I feel a holy obligation sometimes to evoke these people."
In the early fifties, he established a reputation first among musicians, then the public, as the most brash and creative young tenor on the scene, through his work with Miles, Monk, and the MJQ.
Miles Davis was an early Sonny Rollins fan and in his autobiography wrote that he "began to hang out with Sonny Rollins and his Sugar Hill Harlem crowd...anyway, Sonny had a big reputation among a lot of the younger musicians in Harlem. People loved Sonny Rollins up in Harlem and everywhere else. He was a legend, almost a god to a lot of the younger musicians. Some thought he was playing the saxophone on the level of Bird. I know one thing--he was close. He was an aggressive, innovative player who always had fresh musical ideas. I loved him back then as a player and he could also write his ass off..."
With Clifford Brown and Max Roach, 1956
Sonny moved to Chicago for a few years to remove himself from the surrounding elements of negativity around the Jazz scene. He reemerged at the end of 1955 as a member of the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet, with an even more authoritative presence. His trademarks became a caustic, often humorous style of melodic invention, a command of everything from the most arcane ballads to calypsos, and an overriding logic in his playing that found him hailed for models of thematic improvisation.
It was during this time that Sonny acquired a nickname,"Newk." As Miles Davis explains in his autobiography: "Sonny had just got back from playing a gig out in Chicago. He knew Bird, and Bird really liked Sonny, or "Newk" as we called him, because he looked like the Brooklyn Dodgers' pitcher Don Newcombe. One day, me and Sonny were in a cab...when the white cabdriver turned around and looked at Sonny and said, `Damn, you're Don Newcombe!'' Man, the guy was totally excited. I was amazed, because I hadn't thought about it before. We just put that cabdriver on something terrible. Sonny started talking about what kind of pitches he was going to throw Stan Musial, the great hitter for the St. Louis Cardinals, that evening..."
In 1956, Sonny began recording the first of a series of landmark recordings issued under his own name: Valse Hot introduced the practice, now common, of playing bop in 3/4 meter; St. Thomasinitiated his explorations of calypso patterns; and Blue 7 was hailed by Gunther Schuller as demonstrating a new manner of "thematic improvisation," in which the soloist develops motifs extracted from his theme. Way Out West (1957), Rollins's first album using a trio of saxophone, double bass, and drums, offered a solution to his longstanding difficulties with incompatible pianists, and exemplified his witty ability to improvise on hackneyed material (Wagon Wheels, I'm an Old Cowhand). It Could Happen to You (also 1957) was the first in a long series of unaccompanied solo recordings, and The Freedom Suite (1958) foreshadowed the political stances taken in jazz in the 1960s. During the years 1956 to 1958 Rollins was widely regarded as the most talented and innovative tenor saxophonist in jazz.
Rollins's first examples of the unaccompanied solo playing that would become a specialty also appeared in this period; yet the perpetually dissatisfied saxophonist questioned the acclaim his music was attracting, and between 1959 and late `61 withdrew from public performance.
Sonny remembers that he took his leave of absence from the scene because "I was getting very famous at the time and I felt I needed to brush up on various aspects of my craft. I felt I was getting too much, too soon, so I said, wait a minute, I'm going to do it my way. I wasn't going to let people push me out there, so I could fall down. I wanted to get myself together, on my own. I used to practice on the Bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge because I was living on the Lower East Side at the time."
When he returned to action in early `62, his first recording was appropriately titled The Bridge. By the mid 60's, his live sets became grand, marathon stream-of-consciousness solos where he would call forth melodies from his encyclopedic knowledge of popular songs, including startling segues and sometimes barely visiting one theme before surging into dazzling variations upon the next. Rollins was brilliant, yet restless. The period between 1962 and `66 saw him returning to action and striking productive relationships with Jim Hall, Don Cherry, Paul Bley, and his idol Hawkins, yet he grew dissatisfied with the music business once again and started yet another sabbatical in `66. "I was getting into eastern religions," he remembers. "I've always been my own man. I've always done, tried to do, what I wanted to do for myself. So these are things I wanted to do. I wanted to go on the Bridge. I wanted to get into religion. But also, the Jazz music business is always bad. It's never good. So that led me to stop playing in public for a while, again. During the second sabbatical, I worked in Japan a little bit, and went to India after that and spent a lot of time in a monastery. I resurfaced in the early 70s, and made my first record in `72. I took some time off to get myself together and I think it's a good thing for anybody to do."
Lucille and Sonny
In 1972, with the encouragement and support of his wife Lucille, who had become his business manager, Rollins returned to performing and recording, signing with Milestone and releasing Next Album. (Working at first with Orrin Keepnews, Sonny was by the early ’80s producing his own Milestone sessions with Lucille.) His lengthy association with the Berkeley-based label produced two dozen albums in various settings – from his working groups to all-star ensembles (Tommy Flanagan, Jack DeJohnette, Stanley Clarke, Tony Williams); from a solo recital to tour recordings with the Milestone Jazzstars (Ron Carter, McCoy Tyner); in the studio and on the concert stage (Montreux, San Francisco, New York, Boston). Sonny was also the subject of a mid-’80s documentary by Robert Mugge entitledSaxophone Colossus; part of its soundtrack is available as G-Man.
He won his first performance Grammy for This Is What I Do (2000), and his second for 2004’s Without a Song (The 9/11 Concert), in the Best Jazz Instrumental Solo category (for “Why Was I Born”). In addition, Sonny received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in 2004.
In June 2006 Rollins was inducted into the Academy of Achievement – and gave a solo performance – at the International Achievement Summit in Los Angeles. The event was hosted by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and attended by world leaders as well as distinguished figures in the arts and sciences.
Rollins was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art, First Class, in November 2009. The award is one of Austria’s highest honors, given to leading international figures for distinguished achievements. The only other American artists who have received this recognition are Frank Sinatra and Jessye Norman.
In 2010 on the eve of his 80th birthday, Sonny Rollins is one of 229 leaders in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, arts, business, and public affairs who have been elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A center for independent policy research, the Academy is among the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies and celebrates the 230th anniversary of its founding this year.
In August 2010, Rollins was named the Edward MacDowell Medalist, the first jazz composer to be so honored. The Medal has been awarded annually since 1960 to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to his or her field.
Photo: Ruth David
Yet another major award was bestowed on Rollins on March 2, 2011, when he received the Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in a White House ceremony. Rollins accepted the award, the nation’s highest honor for artistic excellence, “on behalf of the gods of our music.”
Since 2006, Rollins has been releasing his music on his own label, Doxy Records (with distribution from the Decca Label Group). The first Doxy album wasSonny, Please, Rollins’s first studio recording since This Is What I Do. That was followed by the acclaimed Road Shows, vol. 1 (2008), the first in a planned series of recordings from Rollins’s audio archives.
Mr. Rollins released Road Shows, vol. 2 in the fall of 2011. In addition to material recorded in Sapporo and Tokyo, Japan during an October 2010 tour, the recording contains several tracks from Sonny’s September 2010 80th birthday concert in New York—including the historic and electrifying encounter with Ornette Coleman.
Sonny Rollins was a recipient of the prestigious Polar Music Prize in May, 2007
Theodore Walter Rollins was born on September 7, 1930 in New York City. He grew up in Harlem not far from the Savoy Ballroom, the Apollo Theatre, and the doorstep of his idol, Coleman Hawkins. After early discovery of Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong, he started out on alto saxophone, inspired by Louis Jordan. At the age of sixteen, he switched to tenor, trying to emulate Hawkins. He also fell under the spell of the musical revolution that surrounded him, Bebop.
He began to follow Charlie Parker, and soon came under the wing of Thelonious Monk, who became his musical mentor and guru. Living in Sugar Hill, his neighborhood musical peers included Jackie McLean, Kenny Drew and Art Taylor, but it was young Sonny who was first out of the pack, working and recording with Babs Gonzales, J.J. Johnson, Bud Powell and Miles Davis before he turned twenty.
"Of course, these people are there to be called on because I think I represent them in a way," Rollins said recently of his peers and mentors. "They're not here now so I feel like I'm sort of representing all of them, all of the guys. Remember, I'm one of the last guys left, as I'm constantly being told, so I feel a holy obligation sometimes to evoke these people."
In the early fifties, he established a reputation first among musicians, then the public, as the most brash and creative young tenor on the scene, through his work with Miles, Monk, and the MJQ.
Miles Davis was an early Sonny Rollins fan and in his autobiography wrote that he "began to hang out with Sonny Rollins and his Sugar Hill Harlem crowd...anyway, Sonny had a big reputation among a lot of the younger musicians in Harlem. People loved Sonny Rollins up in Harlem and everywhere else. He was a legend, almost a god to a lot of the younger musicians. Some thought he was playing the saxophone on the level of Bird. I know one thing--he was close. He was an aggressive, innovative player who always had fresh musical ideas. I loved him back then as a player and he could also write his ass off..."
With Clifford Brown and Max Roach, 1956
Sonny moved to Chicago for a few years to remove himself from the surrounding elements of negativity around the Jazz scene. He reemerged at the end of 1955 as a member of the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet, with an even more authoritative presence. His trademarks became a caustic, often humorous style of melodic invention, a command of everything from the most arcane ballads to calypsos, and an overriding logic in his playing that found him hailed for models of thematic improvisation.
It was during this time that Sonny acquired a nickname,"Newk." As Miles Davis explains in his autobiography: "Sonny had just got back from playing a gig out in Chicago. He knew Bird, and Bird really liked Sonny, or "Newk" as we called him, because he looked like the Brooklyn Dodgers' pitcher Don Newcombe. One day, me and Sonny were in a cab...when the white cabdriver turned around and looked at Sonny and said, `Damn, you're Don Newcombe!'' Man, the guy was totally excited. I was amazed, because I hadn't thought about it before. We just put that cabdriver on something terrible. Sonny started talking about what kind of pitches he was going to throw Stan Musial, the great hitter for the St. Louis Cardinals, that evening..."
In 1956, Sonny began recording the first of a series of landmark recordings issued under his own name: Valse Hot introduced the practice, now common, of playing bop in 3/4 meter; St. Thomasinitiated his explorations of calypso patterns; and Blue 7 was hailed by Gunther Schuller as demonstrating a new manner of "thematic improvisation," in which the soloist develops motifs extracted from his theme. Way Out West (1957), Rollins's first album using a trio of saxophone, double bass, and drums, offered a solution to his longstanding difficulties with incompatible pianists, and exemplified his witty ability to improvise on hackneyed material (Wagon Wheels, I'm an Old Cowhand). It Could Happen to You (also 1957) was the first in a long series of unaccompanied solo recordings, and The Freedom Suite (1958) foreshadowed the political stances taken in jazz in the 1960s. During the years 1956 to 1958 Rollins was widely regarded as the most talented and innovative tenor saxophonist in jazz.
Rollins's first examples of the unaccompanied solo playing that would become a specialty also appeared in this period; yet the perpetually dissatisfied saxophonist questioned the acclaim his music was attracting, and between 1959 and late `61 withdrew from public performance.
Sonny remembers that he took his leave of absence from the scene because "I was getting very famous at the time and I felt I needed to brush up on various aspects of my craft. I felt I was getting too much, too soon, so I said, wait a minute, I'm going to do it my way. I wasn't going to let people push me out there, so I could fall down. I wanted to get myself together, on my own. I used to practice on the Bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge because I was living on the Lower East Side at the time."
When he returned to action in early `62, his first recording was appropriately titled The Bridge. By the mid 60's, his live sets became grand, marathon stream-of-consciousness solos where he would call forth melodies from his encyclopedic knowledge of popular songs, including startling segues and sometimes barely visiting one theme before surging into dazzling variations upon the next. Rollins was brilliant, yet restless. The period between 1962 and `66 saw him returning to action and striking productive relationships with Jim Hall, Don Cherry, Paul Bley, and his idol Hawkins, yet he grew dissatisfied with the music business once again and started yet another sabbatical in `66. "I was getting into eastern religions," he remembers. "I've always been my own man. I've always done, tried to do, what I wanted to do for myself. So these are things I wanted to do. I wanted to go on the Bridge. I wanted to get into religion. But also, the Jazz music business is always bad. It's never good. So that led me to stop playing in public for a while, again. During the second sabbatical, I worked in Japan a little bit, and went to India after that and spent a lot of time in a monastery. I resurfaced in the early 70s, and made my first record in `72. I took some time off to get myself together and I think it's a good thing for anybody to do."
Lucille and Sonny
In 1972, with the encouragement and support of his wife Lucille, who had become his business manager, Rollins returned to performing and recording, signing with Milestone and releasing Next Album. (Working at first with Orrin Keepnews, Sonny was by the early ’80s producing his own Milestone sessions with Lucille.) His lengthy association with the Berkeley-based label produced two dozen albums in various settings – from his working groups to all-star ensembles (Tommy Flanagan, Jack DeJohnette, Stanley Clarke, Tony Williams); from a solo recital to tour recordings with the Milestone Jazzstars (Ron Carter, McCoy Tyner); in the studio and on the concert stage (Montreux, San Francisco, New York, Boston). Sonny was also the subject of a mid-’80s documentary by Robert Mugge entitledSaxophone Colossus; part of its soundtrack is available as G-Man.
He won his first performance Grammy for This Is What I Do (2000), and his second for 2004’s Without a Song (The 9/11 Concert), in the Best Jazz Instrumental Solo category (for “Why Was I Born”). In addition, Sonny received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in 2004.
In June 2006 Rollins was inducted into the Academy of Achievement – and gave a solo performance – at the International Achievement Summit in Los Angeles. The event was hosted by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and attended by world leaders as well as distinguished figures in the arts and sciences.
Rollins was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art, First Class, in November 2009. The award is one of Austria’s highest honors, given to leading international figures for distinguished achievements. The only other American artists who have received this recognition are Frank Sinatra and Jessye Norman.
In 2010 on the eve of his 80th birthday, Sonny Rollins is one of 229 leaders in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, arts, business, and public affairs who have been elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A center for independent policy research, the Academy is among the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies and celebrates the 230th anniversary of its founding this year.
In August 2010, Rollins was named the Edward MacDowell Medalist, the first jazz composer to be so honored. The Medal has been awarded annually since 1960 to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to his or her field.
Photo: Ruth David
Yet another major award was bestowed on Rollins on March 2, 2011, when he received the Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in a White House ceremony. Rollins accepted the award, the nation’s highest honor for artistic excellence, “on behalf of the gods of our music.”
Since 2006, Rollins has been releasing his music on his own label, Doxy Records (with distribution from the Decca Label Group). The first Doxy album wasSonny, Please, Rollins’s first studio recording since This Is What I Do. That was followed by the acclaimed Road Shows, vol. 1 (2008), the first in a planned series of recordings from Rollins’s audio archives.
Mr. Rollins released Road Shows, vol. 2 in the fall of 2011. In addition to material recorded in Sapporo and Tokyo, Japan during an October 2010 tour, the recording contains several tracks from Sonny’s September 2010 80th birthday concert in New York—including the historic and electrifying encounter with Ornette Coleman.
Sonny Rollins was a recipient of the prestigious Polar Music Prize in May, 2007
