Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 497

Using Black Celebrities To Push Pop, Pudding And Politics

'In the 1960s, Tom Burrell helped change advertising by convincing agencies to tailor their pitches to Black consumers, but he also saw his marketing work as part of a larger social project.' -- The Code Switch Podcast

When is speech no longer just speech? After Charlottesville, the Limits of Free Speech

'When is speech no longer just speech? David Remnick looks at how leftist protests at Berkeley, right-wing violence in Charlottesville, and open-carry laws around the country are testing the traditional liberal consensus on freedom of expression. He speaks with Mark Bray, the author of a new and sympathetic book about Antifa; Melissa Murray, a law-school professor at U.C. Berkeley; and Dahlia Lithwick, a legal analyst for Slate.' -- The New Yorker Radio Hour

         
        

Rebecca Carrol on The Next Coming of Kara Walker

'Kara Walker doesn’t simply make provocative art; she creates living, breathing visual narratives about race in America that are often ferociously violent and irrefutably poignant. For her new exhibit — "Sikkema Jenkins and Co. is Compelled to Present The Most Astounding and Important Painting Show of the Fall Art Show Viewing Season!" — Walker released an artist statement as a kind of disclaimer in which she said she was “tired of standing up” and of being the black woman artist du jour with all the answers to racism in America.' -- Rebeccaa Carroll--WNYC News
         
        

WATCH: A Primer -- How the School-to-Prison Pipeline Functions

'Suspensions, expulsions, and in-school policing are harming black students by taking them out of school and funneling them into prisons.' -- The Root

Trailer: ‘Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary’

'Set against the social, political and cultural landscape of the times, CHASING TRANE brings John Coltrane to life as a fully dimensional being, inviting the audience to engage with Coltrane the man, Coltrane the artist. Written and directed by critically-acclaimed documentary filmmaker John Scheinfeld, the film is produced with the full participation of the Coltrane family and the support of the record labels that collectively own the Coltrane catalog.'

Sound Opinions: Judging Art & Holding Artists Accountable for Moral and Criminal Lapses

'Oscar Wilde once wrote, “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.”That is, should we judge an artist's output by their personal morals? Can you enjoy a song, when you know the person performing it has done some despicable things? This question is not new to music criticism. It applies to artists like Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Miles Davis and more contemporary artists like Pwr Bttm and R. Kelly. Jim and Greg are joined by journalist Britt Julious (who has written for the Chicago Tribune, Esquire, Elle, and others) and Mark Anthony Neal (cultural critic and professor of African and African American Studies at Duke) for a discussion about whether we can, and should, hold a musician's artistic output to a moral standard.' -- WBEZ -- SoundOpinions
 

"We find value in this Art" -- A Conversation with Pierre Bennu

'Artist Pierre Bennu of Exittheapple talks about growing up in New York, being inspired by graffiti and hip hop in the modern age.' -- Stay Up

Tiny Desk Concert: DJ Premier & The Badder Band

''Three-time Grammy winner DJ Premier, one of the definitive architects of New York hip-hop, brought a new type of life to NPR's Tiny Desk: our first concert helmed by a DJ.' -- Tiny Desk

Vijay Iyer On Jazz's 'History Of Defiance,' His Influences And Playing In A Sextet

'Vijay Iyer, the acclaimed jazz pianist and Harvard music professor talks with NPR's Scott Simon about the Vijay Iyer Sextet's new album, Far From Over, and the politics that inspired it.' -- Weekend Edition Saturday

What the World Needs Now … is Dwight Trible -- Review by Mark Anthony Neal

What the World Needs Now … is Dwight Tribleby Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
There’s an urgency to “What the World Needs Now is Love”, the opening track of Dwight Trible’s latest release Inspirations, that suggests that it could have been recorded only days after Charlottesville.  “Kumbaya” be damned, the pop standard, first recorded by Dionne Warwick in the 1960s when she was working with Hal David and Burt Bacharach, has never seemed so insistent, but that is the case with virtually everything that Trible gives voice to.  Inspirations, released on the independent Manchester, UK based Gondwana Records, is Trible’s first solo effort since 2011’s Cosmic.
Dwight Trible is no Gregory Porter;  that’s not a knock on Porter, who represents the tradition of Black male Jazz singers in the mainstream, as well as anyone since the the late Johnny Hartman was in his prime.  Yet even as Hartman was trading bars with Coltrane on their lovely duet album from 1963, there were a generation of Jazz vocalists who pushed on the edges, saw the ledge and hopped across; it is in that tradition that Trible resides, alongside the late Leon Thomas, who like Trible was a formidable foil for saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, or Andy Bey, whose own “Celestial Blues” was the  bar for Trible to match, as he did on The Living Water (2006).
Inspirations feels like a throwback, to a time when Jazz still resonated on them streets, and that’s not discount the way that the genre continues to inform the aesthetics of resistance and revival, for folk both on the front line and ravaged by the bottom line. Yet, ask some of them youngsters to name a Jazz artist who didn’t die in the last century -- or is living in this one; it’s why Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly was so significant, with the space he created for musicians like Terrace Martin, Thundercat and Kamasi Washington -- and yeah, that was Trible, along with Patrice Quinn providing vocals throughout Washington’s The Epic, including the stellar “Malcolm’s Theme,” a vocalization of the Terence Blanchard composition.
Inspirations is produced by Matthew Halsall, who also joins Trible on trumpet.  Trible and Halsall draw on an archive of mid-20th century compositions that, not surprisingly, speak to the complexity of folk standing ground on the margins or choosing to flee those margins on their own accord. In the aforementioned Warwick, Donny Hathaway, Nina Simone -- who gets a double citation -- frequent muse John Coltrane, and harpist Dorothy Ashby, Trible captures a gamut of Black modalities, and thus is perfectly pitched for a moment for which trauma and crisis -- and joy and transcendence -- is at every turn.
Trible mostly plays it straight on Hathaway’s “Tryin’ Times,” one of the anchors of Hathaway’s debut Everything is Everything (1969), hanging just behind the beat throughout, as if showing some deference to the legendary, genre-bending, stylist. In the spirit of previous Coltrane interpretations -- “Africa” from The Living Water, “A Love Supreme” from his Life Force Trio collaboration in 2005 -- Trible is dutifully respectful to Coltrane’s legacy, this the 50th anniversary of his death. Trible provides his own lyrics to the Coltrane ballad “Dear Lord” capturing a surprising buoyancy in Coltrane’s music from the mid-1960s.
Simone’s “Black is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair” has a bluesier feel than expected -- Halsall standouts out here -- while Trible pushes the upper registers of his voice, providing supple interiority for the listener that contrasts how we’ve come to hear signature Simone tunes. Trible is also in his upper register on Cole Porter’s “I Love Paris,” heightening the sense of longing that echoes the cosmopolitan practices that have sustained and replenished Black American culture.
Dorothy Ashby -- a largely obscure Black harpist, at least in this generation -- is lovingly recovered via “Heaven and Hell,” which originally appeared on her opus The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby (1970).  Ashby was the product of Detroit’s rich musical culture of hardbop and Motown; that is Ashby playing harp opposite Stevie Wonder on “If It’s Magic” (Songs in the Key of Life), and on Bill Withers +Justments (1974) and Minnie Riperton’s Adventures in Paradise (1975). Trible’s choice to cover Ashby, in the spirit of what historian Treva Lindsey calls “critical generosity” is emblematic of a citation practice that disrupts male-centered recollections of Black artistic contributions.
The highlight of Inspirations is Trible’s soaring rendition of Simone’s “Feeling Good.”  Propelled by the hard-driving piano of Taz Modi, Trible is given a broad template to capture the contradictions of the hard-earned reality of “feeling good” in the midst of terror and tyranny; you will lose your breathe with this thunderclap of an interpretation of one of Simone’s signature songs.
Inspirations closes with the spiritual “Deep River,” perhaps an apt metaphor from the very well that Dwight Trible so deftly draws from with such brilliance and passion.