Dr. Thomas Stanley joined us to discuss his new book The Execution of Sun Ra and Dr. Anyabwile Love was with us to discuss his doctoral research on John Coltrane.  Among other things we discussed the fraudulence of the genre “jazz,” the depth and breadth of African music and cultural expression, intergalactic thought and spirituality, as well as, the continuities between “jazz” (or what Tom Porter more accurately refers to as “African American Classical Music“) and hip-hop.  All this and much more on this week’s iMiXWHATiLiKE!*

 

*Music played by Sun Ra and John Coltrane during the show is not included in this archive.  The imperial design of copyright law prevented that.

6 Replies

  1. Excellent conversation; two of my best – loved artist are Sun Ra and John Coltrane: however, not to dispute Tom Porter’s definition of jazz as “African American Classical” music but also weigh our ancestor, Amiri Baraka’s perspective: “We know [ except for the lame and the insane ] that jazz [ from the Bantu, jism- seminal fluid ] is Afro American. And to show how much work we got to do, many of our most famous jazz musicians resent the name because they think it got to do with somebody else naming it. Not understanding that the explosive spirituality of the music was called such because it was creativity that life itself depended upon to continue.
    But that’s the way it is when you’re in captivity. As the great Guinean revolutionary Amilcar Cabral said, only liberation can restore the oppressed back to their history”.—- “Digging”; Amiri Baraka.

  2. No one is free till the blood a run. Sad songs, preachers with bad perms and paid extermination compensation on the horizon.

  3. The 3 most prescient comments: How the word ‘jazz’ was originally a French slang word w a negative sexual connotation [whites often had a perverse schizophrenic fascination w Black sexuality]. Thought the word ‘jazz’ has become part of the popular lexicon- the more appropriate phrase & description is indeed Black classical music.

    2rd} How our ancestors humanity during chattel slavery were debased into a form of currency. Actually paper money as we now know it is closely linked to the rise of the current global capitalist system, along w slavery, colonialism in Africa & the so-called 3rd World. This popularization of paper money was spear headed by folks like the original bankster family the Rothschilds. Paper money was basically an alien concept in Africa & most of the non-European World prior to circa 1492.

    3rd} Many/Most of the World’s current national borders are Euro-American geopolitical [imaginary] constructs. Most of these borders are closely linked to the Euro-American conquest, subjugation, enslavement & even extermination of non-European peoples across the Globe. [Note the use of the term ‘Middle-East’ as if it has a long historical tradition- when in fact its a very indefinite term, first coined by the British East-Africa Co circa 1860 & then popularized by an Anglo-American naval strategist circa 1900 thus has only been commonly used in just the last 100yrs]. It was at the Berlin ‘Con’-‘Fab’ of 1885 where the {ex?}European colonial powers carved-up Africa for themselves by establishing imaginary geopolitical borders that still ‘define’ Africa today. And of-course the entire SW quadrant of the US was gangstered away from Mexico between 1837 – 1847- which is why all the SW states have Spanish names [that’s the reason it’s called ‘New Mexico’].

  4. Interesting show. I live in California and had the opportunity to see Sun Ra at the now defunct Berkeley Jazz Festival. His performance was the most amazing thing I had ever seen and to this day I had never thought about the impact he had on Parliament Funkadelic,, George Clinton and P-Funk, Coltrane et al.
    Keep on dong what you are doing.
    Peace

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