The night Moses died (Parts one and two)
The night Moses died (Part one) by Nicole Turner The night Moses died I was high on the smell of Jo’burg and the way the air, even when it was blasting through the flared nostrils of the Audi, was warm and sticky. Cruising through streets that might be at home in Falluja, skirting potholes under menacing […]
Unchain the art
Gwen Ansell maps the distance between words and music, fiction and autobiography, subversion and submersion through an epistolary review or two books that operate at the limits of language and song. “According to my records there was something/More…mind bringing African control on the corny times/of the tunes he would play. There was Space/And the […]
Kin La Belle
Yvonne Owuor takes a pilgrimage to Kin La Belle and finds a language born out of music and spoken in microtones, so that the entire gamut of human emotion is given a voice and words to speak. Mbote! Mbote! In the course of being summoned by the ghosts of World Cups present, past and […]
To Be or Not To Bop
To Be or Not To Bop by Amiri Baraka I was into the Orioles, Ruth Brown, Larry Darnell, Louis Jordan, The Ravens – ya know, the late ’40s, just going into high school – when my 1st cousin George let me have his older brother Sonny’s BeBop collection! I got those old Guilds, Manors, […]
Reading Fred Ho
A jazz suite in the key of red Gwen Ansell and Salim Washington celebrate the revolutionary life, language and hard-ass leadership of an unconventional saxophonist, composer and generous collaborator. Reading the text Prelude: Home is where the violence is “Everything I create starts with the music … [and music]… like any conscious human activity, can […]