Jordan Smith: Parts of the Same Project,
Awake to a language he didn’t know,
A woman by a window, her silhouette
Between light crossing a meadow
Adam Patric Miller: Two Poems
there’s a train approaching
always a train approaching
lights burning blue and red in the dark
Michael Simms: Strange Meadowlark
years later jazz, a free communal experience
embodying love, saved me just as poetry saved me
Tracy Fessenden: Decades after Billie Holiday’s death, ‘Strange Fruit’ is still a searing testament to injustice – and of faithful solidarity with suffering
Sixty-five years ago, on July 17, 1959, Billie Holiday died at Metropolitan Hospital in New York.
Audio: Chet Baker | Leaving
Chet Baker was an American jazz trumpeter and vocalist. He is known for major innovations in cool jazz that led him to be nicknamed the “Prince of Cool”.
Richard Hoffman: Autumn Leaves | An Improvisation after Ahmad Jamal
I know you know
as you have always known
Barbara Hamby: Thus Spake the Mockingbird
The mockingbird says, hallelujah, coreopsis, I make the day
bright, I wake the night-blooming jasmine. I am
the duodecimo of desperate love
Kristofer Collins: Jack Teagarden Buries Louis Armstrong’s Oriental Strut, Mesa, NM, ca.1926
lifting the tarnished curve of his horn to papery lips, Jack
Teagarden somewhere in 1947, his heart piled up with booze
and debt, but still a suppleness to his mouth, a flash
of something dangerous in the hard set of his jaw
Video: Truth | Kamasi Washington
Directed by AG Rojas, the music video features a series of scenes that appear to have one foot rooted in everyday life, and another reaching for something beyond it.
Vimeo: Viktor on the Moon
Viktor Leth, who has never been on a date, accidentally sits down at the wrong table with the slightly older and married Rebekka. This is the start of a weird and wild night for the two of them in which Viktor learns more about life and love than most people do in a lifetime
Audio: Gil Scott-Heron | Pieces of a Man
I saw my daddy greet the mailman
And I heard the mailman say
“now don’t you take this letter to heart now Jimmy
Cause they’ve laid off nine others today”
Majid Naficy: Billie Holiday
I walk gently on the skin of the sea.
A wandering wind wraps around our bodies
And an albatross opens its wings on our shoulders.
Neil Shepard: That Sad Clapping
applause that crushes the way the singer comes back
into the song
