Cecil Taylor, pianist, poet, theorist, teacher is one of the great innovators of Black music in general and jazz in particular. His attacking style transformed piano into a drumkit, producing African rhythms that are at the root of blues and gospel. Classical trained, Taylor was an advocate and proponet of “free jazz” or avant garde music as early as the 1950s. He worked with greats such as John Coltrane, Mary Lou Williams Jimmy Lyons and Max Roach. Taylor was the center piece of the avant group super group AIR that featured Sunny Murray, Archie Shepp, Dennis Charles and Buell Neidlinger.

The above clip is from the classic documentary Imagine the Sound, which also features the music of Bill Dixon.

As a descendant of Gullah/Geechee people, rice is a big part of my cultural make up. As a kid, I was raised on red rice, rice and chicken liver, “dirty rice” mingled with spices. My father, the main chef of the house, would always sing as he cooked “Just a little pork and beans and fatback.” I would squeal at his baritone voice, as he unknowingly provided me with an alternative vision of masculinity, a Black man who cooked and cleaned for his family.

Even now, when I cook rice I feel a strange sensation, an immediate cultural connection to my roots. Only later did I find out that rice made up a larger part of Black people’s historical experience in the Americas and Caribbean.

Black people were brought here in chains. Stolen from our land and cut off from our language, culture and religion, enslaved Africans were portrayed as talking tools without a past. However, Black people not only maintained there cultural continuity from Africa, but they were stolen precisely for having skills needed in the Caribbean and Americas. Carpentry, blacksmithing, and farming were some of the many skills that Africans brought to the new world. Indeed, to paraphrase Malcolm X, the smartest thing the white man did was to steal us.

Our influence on the cultural landscape is evident in food: yams, okra, and collard greens all have their roots on the African continent. Black folks on plantations maintained culinary autonomy through the planting of community gardens and sharing Sunday meals. However, rice cultivation in the Americas reveals the deep legacy of Black autonomy and resistance.

Rice production largely stems from the Senegambia region of West Africa. Africans have cultivated rice for only 3,500 and developed advanced irrigation systems. Europeans attempted to grow rice in the States largely failed until Africans were imported. Mainly settled in the swamps of the Sea Islands, Black people aided in the success of rice growth through the construction of irrigation canals. Rice production was largely women’s work

Since whites could not stand malaria and the physical demands of rice growing, these areas were largely self contained communities, with Black drivers or overseers. In certain Sea Island communities Blacks outnumbered whites 2 to 1.

Some of these rice growing communities became “maroons” area where runaway slaves or slave rebellions where launched. In 1739, the Stono River Rebellion(25 miles from Charleston, SC) began when the slave leader Jeme lead 80 troops seeking to break the slave system. They built alliances with Seminole Indians and sought to expand the battle to parts of Florida The rebellion was put down, but the effects where felt immediately as South Carolina stopped the importation of slaves for ten years.

To this day, rice still forms a cultural connector in South Carolina’s Gullah communities and a glue to our past.

Suggested Readings: Judith Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Production in America

Peter Wood Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina

As a kid I hated to come see my father’s folk in the country. I would be bored with the long rides, endless house visits and strangers passing themselves as my cousins. Now as an adult, I crave the deep quiet and solititude. It is night now in the land of indigo. I imagine the spirits that inhabit the forest as palm trees sing in the wind. Cats leap before me and disappear.

It’s magic here.

Soft, ancient voices remind me this is home. I can walk 20 miles in either direction and find friends. Dal’s sweet shops, rog trucks, john’s fish and chips are windows I peer into my past. I feel safe here.

My dad sits in an easy chair spinning yarns weaving together our history like a double helix. In the bright red,purple and yellow ribbons I can see my name now. Legba remixes history and turns into itself with bright orange orbs illuminating the crossroads while yemaya dances water bound.

It took an island to realize that I was stranded most days. Now I move about in wind chimes, part mud, part fire, all memories.

Kuwasi Balagoon was a fierce warrior, poet, writer, freedom fighter. A member of the Black Liberation Army and the Black Panther Party, he became an anarchist after being imprisoned for the infamous Brinks robbery.
“Anarchy Can’t Alone” is an impassioned call for organizing in tough times. I re-read it, thinking about the means in which we can find the means of self-organizing and creating a base of revolutionary society. I’m particularly thinking about it in terms of how the revolutionary left can respond to the economic crisis beyond simply a call for jobs. Reading this essay has me realizing that we are living in revolutionary times and the possibility of liberatory society is there if we fight for it.

Kuwasi Balagoon’s writings can be found in Kuwasi Balagoon Soldier’s Story:Writings by a New Afrikan Anarchist, published by kersplebedeb

“Anarchy Can’t Fight Alone”
By Kuwasi Balagoon
Of all ideologies, anarchy is the one that addresses liberty and equalitarian relations in a realistic and ultimate fashion. It is consistent with each individual having an opportunity to live a complete and total 1ife, With anarchy, the society as a whole not only maintains itself at an equal expense to all, but progresses in a creative process unhindered by any class, caste or party. This is because the goals of anarchy don’t include replacing one ruling class with another, neither in the guise of a fairer boss or as a party. This is key because this is what separates anarchist revolutionaries from Maoist, socialist and nationalist revolutionaries who from the onset do not embrace complete revolution. They cannot envision a truly free and equalitarian society and must to some extent embrace the socialization process that makes exploitation and oppression possible and prevalent in the first place.

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s always been parallels between anarchism and jazz. Both require flexibility, thinking on one’s feet and an appreciation of both the soloist and the ability to work in an ensemble. Many jazz musicians also exhibited the anarchy in their lives, the demands of personal freedom against the backdrop of police violence(Think Billie Holliday and Charlie Parker’s struggle with the NYPD in the 1950s) and the demand for self-determination for the art form (Charles Mingus, Bill Dixon and Max Roach who created various independent record labels)
In this tradition, I would include Rashaan Roland Kirk. Kirk, alongside John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Archie Shepp and Jean Carn represented a turn towards a “freer” direction in music while an attuned attention to Black Consciousness. “Volunteer Slavery” is Kirk’s signature composition, illustrating his ability as a mulit-instrumentalist (literally playing two and three instruments at a time) but also a multi-dimestional artist as well drawing upon the traditions of swing, blues, funk and gospel.
I look at Kirk as an example of the possibility of unfettered humanity and in activist practice, never afraid of breaking boundaries

Peace, activist and spoken word MC Spirit Child will be performing tonight at the historic Blue Note Club, part of their Late Night Groove series.
I wrote the review below for Left Turn on his tribute to Nina Simone. Check him out at here

It’s unfortunate that it is only in death that pioneering jazz vocalist Nina Simone has gotten props stateside. Talib Kweli did Simone justice on his Quality with a rendition of “Four Women.” Still, the New York based artist Spirit Child has set the benchmark for MCs looking to delve into Simone’s catalog. A Tribute to Nina Simone doesn’t simply cover Simone’s work, but masters it.
As a movement artist, Spirit Child could have focused on Simone’s more daring political songs such as “Mississippi Goddamn” or “The King of Love is Dead.” Instead, he performs spoken word over remixes of her love songs. Someone once said that revolutionaries are inspired by great feelings of love; still that person forgot to add that this love is often unrequited. And it is this bitterness that serves as the fuel for revolutionaries. The line “I love you/Fuck you” Spirit Child spits on “Love Me or Leave Me” could refer to a lover, or the frustration movement activists feel with each other.
Spirit Child is a member of Movement in Motion, a collective of politically charged writers, visual artists and musicians. A pianist and poet, Spirit Child is what Simone meant by “young, gifted and Black.”

In the thread of Vijay Prashad’s Karma of Brown Folk and People’s History of the Third World, I’ve been thinking about the intersections of Miles Davis’ fusion period with the rising Third World consciousness of Black folks in the States.

I’ve always been challenging myself to go beyond the orthodox-Black nationalist/Marxist reading of Davis’ electric period as simply a “sell-out” and/or Davis as purely an apolitical musician. Granted, Davis’ overall rejection of the “free jazz” revolutions of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, his own individualism against Black collective action (read: Max Roach’s protest of the famed Carnegie Hall concert) and blatant sexism makes him into a inky anti-hero. But the Miles of the electric period was also turned on by shifting axis of the world. In this sense, Miles plug in with Marshall amps, fender rhodes, etc and tuned into a rising forces of African liberation and the competing funk of James Brown and Jimi Hendrix (re: Filles De Kilimanjaro produced in 1968, considered by many the transition album before Davis went full rock in Bitches Brew.)

But Davis, being a contrary/ironic brother always mixed up appearance with intent. That’s to say, while Davis’ horn became the focal point of interrogating Black popular music Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin onwards, he did so with a pasthiche of multicultural musicians. Even in the cultural production of an album Bitches Brew, the gender fuck narrative-Wohabe people illustrations by Palestinian Jew Mati Klarwein(for more on the queer dimension of Davis’ music check out Hazel Carby’s essay in Race Men.)

This is in stark contrast to uber-nationalism that dominate the Black Arts music scene. Though in fairness, we can include horn men Gary Bartz and Joe McPhee as innovators of fusion elements in jazz, much of the Black Arts aesthetic seemed fixed on maintaining the purity of acoustic sounds. One could just check out The Cricket’s (edited by Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka) wholesale blasting of Albert Ayler’s rock piece New Grass (As memory serves correctly the writer starts the review with “This side sucks.”)In a sense, to borrow from Luce Iriguay’s fine text The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger,the wholesale division between between electronics on one hand and acoucstics on the other can be read in the division of Black consciousness movements from the soil (free the land, community control, 40 acres and a mule) to the “air” of globalization.

Indeed, many of the strawmen arguments (i.e.-Miles Davis vs. John Coltrane) obsess on this point. Sill, its important to note that, at least early on both Miles and Coltrane shared a commonality with the modality of Indian classic music. The bunches of notes, produced in the words of composer Lamont Young, “a psychological reaction” Coltrane’s intent certainly had utopian impulses, pushed forward by a hybrid of Eastern philosophy and the passive resistance of Martin Luther King. Davis, on the other hand, presents himself as the fallen angel. Like Lucifer, he was a musical genius who create landscapes out of sound. The early fusion record In a Silent Way, in a sense acts as a space of refuge, in that album Miles is literally creating another world through trance drums and his trumpet. But by the time of Live Evil, the center could not hold. The polymodality of Miles’ music even overpowered the master, he lost control. This occurs right around the time of the defeat of the Black Panther Party and the global retreat of the left.

Indeed, the album that the listener first encounters Miles ‘in India” is On the Corner. The percussionist Mtune describes Davis taking him to an Indian restaurant in Harlem and having listen to the tablas “Yeah” Miles said, “This is the direction we are going into.” The direction not only included Badal Roy on tablas, but the introduction of the breakbeat. Miles embrace of the corner, the honks, whistles, cat calls, stomps and subways brought to the studio a dystopia that mirrored the return of Empire upon the global stage.

This long entry was inspired in most part, by a youtube clip I found of Miles From India. Based on the titular CD, the performance is a meeting of Miles Davis’ sidemen (Roy, Pete Cosey, et al) with Indian musicians. Wallace Roney plays a fine role of holding it down for Miles. Pure Pleasure.

Behind the simple design and endless economic graphs, the folks at Monthly Review Press have always been rebels. Founded as a “independent” Marxist journal, MR has always positioned itself against the logic of capitalist domination and against the reductionism of Soviet style Marxism.
Continuing in that fine tradition is the recent release of the MR Classic Press series with over a dozen titles titles ranging from Unity and Struggle by Amilcar Cabral to Evolution and Revolution in the 20th Century by James and Grace Lee Boggs(which features a new introduction by Grace Lee Boggs.),
Not a fan of nostalgia, these texts come at a time when activists are seeking new answers to old problems. How do we reconcile the tension between anarchism and Marxism, how do we speak of a Marxist method that goes beyond simple economic determinism?
What breaks the writers in the MR Classic Series out of the pack is their deep commitment to the notion that the people make history. The writers in this series understand that means going beyond the lazy bravado of most left thinkers and actually grappling with questions with a combination of flexibility and rigor. The authors here are artists, rebel Marxists who truly did it their way

This is why they want to kill Mumia. The voice of the voiceless from Pennsylvania death-row breaks down the case of Oury Jallory, a West African immigrant that was burned to death while in police custody.

As the birth rates of Europeans slow down and more labor is needed from immigrant communities, Europe has tightened the grip around immigrant communities, from racial profiling to the entire movement in Denmark to defame Islam.

As usual, Mumia’s eloquence arises from the fray and aims the target at the true enemies.