Africa The Beautiful: Scenes of the Motherland

Jazz Ain't Nothin' But Soul by Norman Mapp

Jazz is makin' do with taters and grits Standing up each time you get hit Jazz ain't nothin' but soul From 1968 to 1970, I visited every jazz room in New York City. I went from Slug's in the Far East on 2nd Street between Avenues A and B all the way uptown to Club Baron and Small's Paradise. In the Village, I was at the Blue Note, Village Vanguard and Village Gate. Every Jazzmobile was on my list of things to do, whether it was in Queens, The Bronx, Manhattan or Brooklyn. The memory that has stayed with me throughout my Jazz Excursion is the song given to me on a lead sheet by the composer Norman Mapp who also wrote "Mr. Ugly" and "I Worry 'Bout You". This was in 1983, at Freddy's on the lower east side, when I was petitioning the manager for a night to bring my band there. Norman handed me the song, after we had a long discussion at the bar about my two mentors Betty "Bebop" Carter and Joe Lee Wilson . Both of them recorded an...

Culture Whirls Around Us Every Day

In the world, a collective of sensory experience shared offers to many an agreed upon experience with the effect of presenting a consummate sense of human community in time and space. In conventional time (the multi-dimensional world existing in a non-unific sense of time and space) the notion of singularity is at best a notion on a shelf. The unifying thought then is one of multi-dimensionality, having the nature of being more than one place at one time. It also defies the parochial sense of limitation because humans are often bound by their five-sense appreciation of the world. We never stop to consider that of those five senses, vision is the only thing that happens outside of 200 meters around you and, if we are to understand the universe, we would first consider that the world is much broader than what our five senses can tell. Multi-dimensionality offers color where, before, there was only black and white. It offers depth where, before, there was only length and width. It offer...

Cultural Whirl

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