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PLEASE NOTE: NEW DAY JAZZ BEGINS AT 4:OOPM DUE TO PRE-EMPTION BY KDVS SPORTS

 We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

poem, We Real Cool, by Gwendolyn Brooks, painting, Oreja Pecho, by Jean-Michel Basquiat

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"Night's Dancer: The Life of Janet Collins is an enthralling read. It reinforces Collin's struggle, personal strength and ultimate success. While following her dreams with endless energy, she leapt over boundaries."—Karen Barr, Dance International

The biography of the first African-American prima ballerina

Dancer Janet Collins, born in New Orleans in 1917 and raised in Los Angeles, soared high over the color line as the first African-American prima ballerina at the Metropolitan Opera. Night’s Dancer chronicles the life of this extraordinary and elusive woman, who became a unique concert dance soloist as well as a black trailblazer in the white world of classical ballet. During her career, Collins endured an era in which racial bias prevailed, and subsequently prevented her from appearing in the South. Nonetheless, her brilliant performances transformed the way black dancers were viewed in ballet. The book begins with an unfinished memoir written by Collins in which she gives a captivating account of her childhood and young adult years, including her rejection by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Dance scholar Yaël Tamar Lewin then picks up the thread of Collins’s story. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with Collins and her family, friends, and colleagues to explore Collins’s development as a dancer, choreographer, and painter, Lewin gives us a profoundly moving portrait of an artist of indomitable spirit.

“With Night’s Dancer, Lewin has produced a major work that continues to correct the absence of historical writing on African Americans in ballet and modern dance. The author incorporates Collins’s own writings, intimate details from the artist’s life, and rich contextual material to create a work that is emotionally touching and incredibly informative.”—John O. Perpener III, author of African-American Concert Dance: The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond

“Blessed with extraordinary gifts for dance and painting, Janet Collins broke barriers as the first African-American prima ballerina at the world-renowned Metropolitan Opera. Her life’s journey is inspirational. History should recognize her as one of its pioneers. Janet Collins was truly one of earth’s angels.”—Arthur Mitchell, co-founder of the Dance Theatre of Harlem

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Our guest this afternoon on the 5 o'clock hour, Neela Vaswani. We will be discussing her most recent work, You Have Given Me a Country, winner of the American Book Award 2011.

You Have Given Me a Country is a mixed-genre exploration of blurred borders, identity, and what it means to be bicultural. Combining memoir, history, and fiction, the book follows the paths of the author’s Irish-Catholic mother and Sindhi-Indian father on their journey towards each other and the biracial child they create. Vaswani’s second full-length work thematically echoes such books as The Color of Water, Running in the Family, or Motiba’s Tattoos, but is entirely unique in approach, voice, and story, The book reveals the self as a culmination of all that went before it, a new weave of two varied, yet ultimately universal backgrounds that spans continents, generations, languages, wars, and, at the center of it all, family.
 

-ForeWord Book of the Year.  Gold Medal.  Essay category.  2010.
-Independent Book Publisher's Award (IPPY).  Silver Medal.  Multicultural fiction.  2010.
-Honor Book.  Asian/Pacific American Literature Award.  Nonfiction category. 2010.
-Honor Book.  Association for Asian American Studies Book Award.  Prose category.  2010.

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This afternoon, Matthew Shipp returns to discuss his most recent recording, featuring Michael Bisio and Whit Dickey, Elastic Aspects (Thirsty Ear).
Later in the program, Greil Marcus, pictured at right, joins us to talk about his new book, The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years.

 "Nobody reads a song like Greil Marcus, whose prose is as passionate and omnivorous as the music he loves. Here he travels by way of Thomas Pynchon, Pop Art and Charles Manson to bring the chaotic, majestic, death-haunted Doors back to doomed and haunting life."  -- Salman Rushdie

"No one thinks or writes like Greil Marcus.  He has a genius for putting the aural dream-language of music into words, for making you 'hear' songs you thought you knew as if for the first time.  Not just hear, but, as he puts it, 'feel on your skin' well after the song is over.  Because 'the story it's telling is still going on.'" -- Mary Gaitskill

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Our guest this afternoon, on the 5 o'clock hour, Joanne Griffith, editor of Redefining Black Power, new from City Lights Books.

"Redefining Black Power is an important, historical rumination on race, class, power and politics in the Age of Obama. The conversations with such figures as Van Jones, Michelle Alexander and civil rights icon Dr. Vincent Harding are thoughtful, probing, nuanced insights into the state of African-American political power at this historic moment. The book raises challenging questions, but rather than offer definitive answers, it provokes the reader to personally define 'Black power' and inspires all of us to continue the work of 'deepening the meaning of democracy.'" – Wade Henderson, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

"I agree with economist Julianne Malveaux, who says the notion that Obama's election made America 'post racial' is utter nonsense, when you look at current rates of poverty, income and unemployment among black people. Van Jones, former Green Jobs Czar at the White House, intrigued me when he claims that the youth who believe that electing a black president changes nothing were right. Joanne Griffith, of the Pacifica Radio Archives, interviews these and other long distance runners for justice to provide a lively array of conflicting, complex and critical attitudes the first black U.S. president has evoked, to answer the question of whether it's time to redefine Black Power." -- Kathleen Cleaver

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  This afternoon, on the 5 o'clock hour, poet, playwright, essayist, and novelist, Ishmael Reed returns to New Day Jazz. His most recent novel, his first in over a decade, is Juice! A new book of essays, Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media, is the first collection of its kind by a leading African-American intellectual. Mr. Reed's online magazine, Konch, published it's latest issue this month. 

http://www.ishmaelreedpub.com/

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This afternoon, on the 5 o'clock hour, poet, playwright, novelist, Will Alexander. We will be discussing his most recent works, Diary as Sin, Inside the Earthquake Palace: 4 Plays, and Mirach Speaks to His Grammatical Transparents.

 “I am not of one persona, not of one mystery, but arrayed with intransigent neurons and timings. … I’ve splintered my own trajectory from a fissioning of threats which have issued from my great monomial leprosy. Which has created in me a raw ascensional vastitude, allowing me further millennia although the bodies about me will all have been destroyed. Because I speak out of blindness I am able to respond to spiritual extremity, which has transmuted dearth and soulless nightmare relations. Of course I am speaking from auto-causality, from an enriched alkaline insurrection, altricial, haunted, partaking cacophony from the cinders of nauseous aeronautics. Because I am Mexican and Seminole I breed schisms, I breed eloquent ransacking laws." -

Rosanna Galvez from Diary as Sin

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This week, on the 5 o'clock hour, poet, essayist, editor, Quincy Troupe. We will be discussing his most recent collection, Errancities, as well as his new recording, SOUNDART a new tongue.

Many of the poems in Errançities had their origins in my visits to the beautiful French-speaking island of Guadeloupe. “Errance” is a French word meaning to “to wander,” or a “roving, wandering life,” also, “a risky, edgy, wandering life.” The title poem, “Errançities,” exemplifies all these concepts for me, as do other poems in the collection. I first discovered the word while reading the poems of Edouard Glissant, the late, distinguished poet, philosopher, novelist, and critical thinker from Martinique. I fell in love with the word and its meaning, and it seemed to apply to my life and the poems I was writing at the time—poems about different places I was visiting in the world.

But, and although I love the word “errance” and what it means, I felt it wasn’t exactly what I needed. So I coined the neologism errançities, an expression I felt more at home with, especially in the way the new word sounded, rolled off my tongue, and because it contains the word “cities” in it. In my mind I think of the word as a noun, because it identifies people, animals, places or things, even abstract concepts.

The rhythm and tone of errançities was also closer to another neologism of mine, Trancircularities, which was the title of my seventh book of poems, published by Coffee House in 2002. Also, in my mind, errançities means plural wanderings of many lives, rather than one life. Thus, Errançities is the title of this new book of poems: I hope you enjoy some of them.

—Quincy Troupe, January 19th, 2012, New York City

photo of Quincy Troupe by Chris Felver

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Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968)

In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr. by June Jordan

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