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TODAY'S ARTISTS


Winard Harper


Winard Harper

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Drummer Winard Harper is passionate about jazz. "This music is powerful," he says. "It can do a lot of good for people. If they'd spend some time each day listening to it, we would see many changes in the world."



Come Into the Light

Come Into the Light





The EDGE


In Memory Of

Lena Horne,

1917 - 2010

Stormy Weather



Hank Jones,

1918 - 2010

Willow Weep For Me, a 1994 Carnegie Hall performance



Benjamin Hooks,

1925 - 2010



Gene Lees,

1928 - 2010



Dorothy Height,

1912 - 2010



_________

Think About It


"To some will come a time when change itself is beauty, if not heaven."

- Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1869 - 1935



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Today's Gift Idea

Lithographs and Giclees by Barbara Freeman

Chet Baker

 


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Recently Published


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James Gavin, author of Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne

Lena Horne

Stormy Weather, by Lena Horne


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Larry Tye, author of Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend


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David Robertson, author of W.C. Handy: The Life and Times of the Man Who Made the Blues

W.C. Handy

St. Louis Blues, by W.C. Handy's Memphis Blues Band


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If you could have dinner with three people, who would they be?

Among those participating in the twelfth edition of Reminiscing in Tempo: Memories and Opinion are Gary Bartz, John Scofield, Billy Cobham and Esperanza Spalding

Gary Bartz


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Graham Lock and David Murray, co-editors of Thriving on a Riff: Jazz and Blues Influences in African American Literature and Film and The Hearing Eye: Jazz and Blues Influences in African American Visual Art

The Death of Bessie Smith, by Rose Piper


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In the twenty-seventh edition of Great Encounters, David Robertson, author of W.C. Handy: The Life and Times of the Man Who Made the Blues, tells the story of Handy's first recording session, and his meeting with James Reese Europe

W.C. Handy
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Marybeth Hamilton, author of In Search of the Blues

Leadbelly


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Trudy Carpenter is the winner of the Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction contest. Her story is called "Bumps Out Then Bumps Back "


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Jazz: Through the Life and Lens of Milt Hinton: An online photo exhibit



Milt Hinton

Laughing At Life, by Milt Hinton


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Ben Ratliff, author of Coltrane: The Story of a Sound

John Coltrane

Giant Steps


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Ralph Ellison biographer Arnold Rampersad, on the complex life of the author of Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison


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In cooperation with The Jazz Image author Lee Tanner, Jerry Jazz Musician presents "Masters of Jazz Photography," this month featuring the work of Jerry Stoll

photo of Pee Wee Russell and Gerry Mulligan by Jerry Stoll


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Up From New Orleans: Life Before, During and After Katrina -- A conversation with transplanted New Orleans musicians Devin Phillips and Mark DiFlorio

Devin Phillips


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An Online Story of Jazz in New Orleans, with an introduction by Nat Hentoff

Jelly Roll Morton

New Orleans was a free and easy place, comments by Jelly Roll Morton


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Now in the Art Gallery

The Art of James Allen



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Test your wits! Subscribe to Quiz Show, which is delivered to your desktop every other Friday .



Play Quiz Show

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Heroes...We all had them. For years, we have been asking the guests we interview to talk about theirs. You can read them at our Heroes page. Now, we invite you to write about the person you recall being your own childhood hero. All submissions are published...



Willie Mays

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Coming Soon

Interviews with Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne author James Gavin, and Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Genius



...ensure you won't miss any of this (and much more in the works) by subscribing to our newsletter.

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"The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet."

- Mark Twain
JJM

 



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Judgement

by the Pete Zimmer Quintet

Down or Up




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Jerry Jazz Musician Home Page
Ethel Barrymore Theatre, NYC, March 11, 1959
Ethel Barrymore Theatre, NYC, March 11, 1959





cool jazz pic

"Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago as the daughter of a prominent real-estate broker and the niece of a Harvard University professor of African history. Her parents were intellectuals and activists. Her father won an antisegregation case before the Illinois Supreme Court, upon which the events in A Raisin in the Sun was loosely based. When she was eight, her parents bought a house in a white neighborhood and their experience of discrimination there led to a civil rights case, which they won. Hansberry's parents sent her to public schools rather than private ones as a protest against the segregation laws. She studied art at the University of Wisconsin and in Mexico. In 1950 she moved to New York, where she started her career as a writer. She wrote for an African-American newspaper called Freedom, and met among others the famous writer Langston Hughes".... a Lorraine Hansberry biography from Petri Liukkonen



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 		Chronology of 20th-Century History: Arts & Culture
 by Frank McGill
"Particularly during the Black Arts movement of the 1960s, many African-American artists objected to the realist form of Hansberry's play, which they saw as artistically conservative. They also saw success on Broadway as a political compromise. Some thought Hansberry sacrificed her integrity to make her message palatable to a white audience. Similarly, many critics have argued over the play's meaning and whether or not the play is assimilationist." (ed. by Frank Magill, 1998)


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 		A Raisin In The Sun (1st Printing HB/DJ)
 by Lorraine Hansberry
First printing hardback of A RAISIN IN THE SUN by Lorraine Hansberry. A Random House play published in 1959. The book is in good condition with many pencilled notations and shelfwear. The dust jacket is in fair to good condition with rubbing, edgewear, and several tears. Dust jacket is not price clipped (2.95). Guaranteed to be as described.

Produced New York, Ethel Barrymore Theatre, March 11, 1959. It ran 530 performances. - The play is a "living-room" drama, set in southside Chicago. Walter Lee, a black chauffeur, dreams of a better life. He hopes to use his father's life insurance money, $10,000 to open a liquor store. Beneatha, his sister, wants to go to medical school. Their mother, Lena Younger, rejects the liquor business, uses some of the money to secure a proper house for the family. Rest of the money she gives to Walter, entrusting him to deposit half of it in the bank for Beneatha's education and his business. Walter sinks rest of the money into his business scheme, only to have it stolen by a con artist. Mr. Lindner, a representative of the all-white neighborhood, tries to buy them out. In despair Walter contacts Lindner, and almost begs to buy them out, but with the help of his wife, Walter asserts his dignity and decides that the family will take the house after all.


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 		The Devil Finds Work
 by James Baldwin
"The filmed play, which is all, alas, that Raisin is on film, simply stayed up there, on that screen. The unimaginative rigidity of the film locked the audience out of it. Furthermore, the people in Raisin are not the people one goes to the movies to see."

"... in order for a person to bear his life, he needs a valid re-creation of that life, which is why, as Ray Charles might put it, blacks chose to sing the blues. This is why Raisin in the Sun meant so much to black people - on the stage: the film is another matter. In the theater, a current flowed back and forth between the audience and the actors, flesh and blood corroborating flesh and blood - as we say, testifying... The root argument of the play is really far more subtle than either its detractors or the bulk of its admirers were able to see." (James Baldwin in The Devil Finds Work, 1976)


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 		The Measure Of A Man
 by Sidney Poitier
Sidney Poitier has told in his autobiography that he had much troubles with the author in the 1959 production. Poitier criticized Hansberry's idea that the play should evolve from the mother's point of view, and wanted that his character were stronger.


cool jazz pic

"Langston Hughes, the African-American poet, novelist, and playwright, who became one of the foremost interpreters of racial relationships in the United States. Influenced by the Bible, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Walt Whitman, Hughes depicted realistically the ordinary lives of black people. Many of his poems, written in rhythmical language, have been set to music. Hughes's poems were meant 'to be read aloud, crooned, shouted and sung'......Hughes was considered one of the leading voices in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s His first novel, NOT WITHOUT LAUGHTER, appeared in 1930.....Hughes published more than 35 books. Although the Harlem Renaissance faded away during the Great Depression, its influence is seen in the writings of later authors, such as James Baldwin, who, however, criticized Hughes's poetic achievement. From the late 1940's through the 1950's Hughes revised under pressure his poems- may of them became less tough." Read the entire Lanston Hughes biography by Petri Liukkonen



Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 1959
 by Jerry Jazz Musician
An opening night always catalyzed Jerry Jazz Musician's curiosity. He had caught Hitchcock’s Rear Window at the Waverly Theatre in 1954, as well as Monk's initial stint at the Five Spot in 1957. It was little wonder then that he found himself intrigued in 1959, when Raisin in the Sun, the first drama by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, was unveiled at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre....
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Raisin
 by Judd Woldin

Lorraine Hansberry's famous play was adapted as a musical in 1973 and won a Tony Award. A 1981 revival included Claudia McNeil who had also played Lena in the original 1959 production.

Listen to the Original Broadway Cast singing Booze
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 		To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words
 by Lorraine Hansberry
Assembled from Hansberry's plays, essays, letters, drawings, and photographs, To Be Young, Gifted and Black records a life of passionate engagement and spectacular accomplishment. It follows the author from her childhood in Chicago (where her family encountered vicious resistance when it moved into a white neighborhood), through her arrival in New York, where the triumph of Raisin made her famous virtually overnight, to her death at the tragically early age of thirty-four. Above all, Hansberry's autobiography rings with the voice of its creator: a black woman who could be angry, loving, bitter, touchingly funny, and defiantly proud." (back cover)


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 		A Raisin In The Sun
    by Daniel Petrie
Lorraine Hansberry's play became a popular 1961 film, receiving a special award at the Cannes festival...Sidney Poitier recreates his broadway performance.....a thought provoking story...watch the movie trailer



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