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Collected for the first time are Sinclair’s poetry, reviews and writings on the musical genius of John Coltrane. A companion CD is also being issued by the publisher Trembling Press in New Orleans. [John Sinclair is] … deep inside a tradition beginning with Whitman, Williams, and Ezra Pound, and continuing through Charles Olson and Ginsberg. John Sinclair’s writing about “The Music” has always been well informed and inspiring, from his early Detroit-hip days. So it’s important to gather this writing to show where he and we have been, and the great period of American Classical Music we lived through and particularly the marvelous revelation that John Coltrane provided everybody who could hear. Poet, activist, major jazz head, John Sinclair’s SONG OF PRAISE is a wild outward/ inward ride through time like any of Trane’s great solos. It’s a surge of time travel from the ‘60s breakthroughs & breakdowns as reflected in the revolutionary free jazz awakening as well as in the political uprisings of that time that changed the world. About the CD: Finally, John Sinclair’s legendary performances and tributes to John Coltrane are available together in this collection; Sinclair has long been on the scene recording the history and extolling the beauties of these life changing moments in music. The entire suite HOMAGE TO JOHN COLTRANE was first performed by John Sinclair’s newly-formed Blues Scholars—Michael Ray, trumpet; Richard Theodore (Harry Lenz), alto sax & bass clarinet; Nick Sanzenbach, tenor sax; Phil deVille, guitar; Lucky Joe Drake, bass; Michael Voelker, drums—at Kaldi’s Coffeehouse in September 1994 in conjunction with John Coltrane’s Sept 23 birthday. The moon was full that night and the DAT recording by Keith Keller became Sinclair’s first album, FULL MOON NIGHT, on Alive/Total Energy Records in Los Angeles. The first version of “I Talk with the Spirits” is from Sinclair’s second Alive album, FULL CIRCLE, recorded in Los Angeles in 1996 with Wayne Kramer, guitar; Charles Moore, trumpet; Ralph “Buzzy” Jones, tenor & alto sax; Craig Stewart, alto sax; Paul Ill, bass; Brock Avery, drums, and the shortened suite HOMAGE TO JOHN COLTRANE—spiritual, consequences, blues to you, i talk with the spirits—is from a live broadcast on KXLU-FM in Los Angeles in August 1997 with the same band less Craig Stewart and with Michael Voelker in place of Brock Avery, issued on Sinclair’s 2000 album UNDERGROUND ISSUES. The opening reading of “spiritual” is a duet with Marion Brown, alto sax, recorded by Mark Bingham at the Louisiana Music Factory in February 1993, first issued on the 2nd number of the WWOZ ON CD series in 1994.
Author, poet and activist John Sinclair (born October 2, 1941, in Flint, Michigan) mutated from small-town rock’n’roll fanatic and teenage disc jockey to cultural revolutionary, pioneer of marijuana activism, radical leader and political prisoner by the end of the 1960s. In 1966-67 the jazz poet, downbeat correspondent, founder of the Detroit Artists Workshop and underground journalist joined the front ranks of the hippie revolution, managing the “avant-rock” MC5 and organizing countless free concerts in the parks, White Panther rallies and radical benefits. In 1969 Sinclair was railroaded off to prison on a 9½ to ten year sentence for giving away two joints to an undercover policewoman. While he was in prison, Sinclair wrote the books Guitar Army: Street Writings/Prison Writings, a collection of his writings for the underground press between 1968-71, and Music & Politics, co-written with Robert Levin. Sinclair was released from Jackson Prison when the twenty nine month campaign to gain his freedom climaxed in the mammoth “John Sinclair Freedom Rally” in Ann Arbor, Michigan on December 10, 1971, where John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Stevie Wonder, Allen Ginsberg, Phil Ochs, Bobby Seale and others performed and spoke at the eight-hour long event in front of 15,000 people. Lennon wrote and performed his song, “John Sinclair,” later released on his Some Time in New York City album. Three days after the concert, the Michigan Supreme Court released Sinclair, and later overturned his conviction. Following his release from prison, Sinclair got back into music management and promotion and hosted popular radio shows on WNRZ and WCBN, founded the People’s Ballroom, the Free Concerts in the Park program, and the Ann Arbor Tribal Council, and played a leading role in the success of the local Human Rights Party that resulted in the election of two City Council members and the institution of the legendary $5 fine for marijuana possession in Ann Arbor. For the next fifteen years he raised his family in Detroit and worked as editor of the Detroit Sun newspaper, founder and director of the Detroit Jazz Center, adjunct professor of popular music history at Wayne State University, artists manager and concert producer, WDET-FM program host, director of the City Arts Gallery for the Detroit Councilof the Arts and editor of City Arts Quarterly. |
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| Posted in: Book Signings, Music, Poetry, Politics | No Comments » |
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| Posted in: Author signings, Author/artist interviews and lectures, Book Signings, Detroit & Michigan, Economics, Food, Peace & Gaia, Politics | No Comments » |
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Let’s try and send a message about the immediate need for global climate change to leaders around the world on October 24th – action day – please visit 350.org and learn more about how to make this happen. |
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| Posted in: Film & Video, Peace & Gaia, Politics | No Comments » |
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Issues are discussed on tapes that were evidently kept as assiduously as those by their enemy, Richard Nixon. White Panthers discuss the hashish that’s making them cough, kick around the organizational need for each ‘Panther chapter to set up an LSD fund, whether or not the guitar is a gun or vice versa, macrobiotics and the possibility their people will be offed before the next issue of the Ann Arbor Sun appears if they don’t apply “theory, practice and all that shit!” Sometimes after the most ponderous stretch of broad-brush left economics, roll call of their puritarian ministries (Defense, Propaganda, Chairman), and cadrespeak, they break up in a snicker or inquiring “Dig?” The lead wordslinger on this CD is the excitable poet and former MC5 guru John Sinclair. “Rock n’ Roll music and fucking IS revolutionary violence!” he insists. He harangues his peers, is quick with his ideas but a bit hobbled by an unexamined romantic racism (his insistence that “carrying a piece” is universal in black culture) and the macho posturing that caused Adrienne Rich to skewer Sinclair in her poem to sexist male radicals “Goodbye to All That.” Nevertheless, Sinclair proved a righteous rhetoritician in his manifestos, broadsides and editorials and has written some memorable poems in a sort of lyrical early Beatnik style a la Allen Ginsberg. He commemorates the police inspector who busted him, Warner Stringfellow, in an impassioned but badly recorded tirade. Sinclair’s wife Leni (Magdalene) speaks low in a German accent like Nico as she recounts his indignities in prison, where he was allowed a record player but no records. In a prison interview, Black Panther Bobby Seale defends the White Panthers, after his initial skepticism towards their “psychedelic program,” and points to Sinclair’s imprisonment as testimony to the activist’s effectiveness. Music is taken very seriously by the Panthers and their circle. Avant jazzman Joseph Jarman rambles about spacey “great black music evading the reality of what’s going on if we’re interested in communication, creating something of value to coin a phrase from a novel written about Africa and the dude who had to deal with it there.” And Dan Carlyle and Frank Bach discuss on WABX radio whether or not mid-Michigan’s immensely successful Grand Funk Railroad are to be considered truly a part of the Detroit freak community. The disc’s producer and publisher Cary Loren is owner of the jampacked independent bookstore Book Beat in a suburb just north of the Detroit city limits. As an artist Loren explored the radical rhetoric suffusing and impacting his formative years in the 1998 video Strange Frut, where he filmed White Panther texts circa 1970 spoken by 1990s Goth teenagers. As with his Destroy All Monsters collaborators Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw, showy molotov cocktails of revolutionary verbiage were a part of the mix of remembered cultural phenomena. Like Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, goofy Detroit kiddie show and horror movie hosts, it helped shape their regionally- and generationally-distinct Pop Art sensibilities. An excerpt from a TV news broadcast about a campus banning of the White Panther paper reminds the listener that the mainstream media voice in the sixties sounded different from today’s but was just as strident and ultimately clueless…which is why smart kids, then as now, sought input and insight from the fringes. Loren has provided a sampling of the rich archival material from the era now found in the John & Leni Sinclair Library at the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan. It’s a fun listen for contemporary intellectuals and activists who may recognize themselves in the skull sessions or may not. I would like to hear some of these readings, like Bernadine Dohrn’s echoey 1970 “Weather Report,” over a dance track. Yet what shines through thirty years later is how the bunch of left hippie stoners on Music is Revolution grapple with the possibilities of making existential and cultural choices significantly political, smack dab in the heart of a working, shopping, consuming land that still wants you and its youth to have anything but that.” A limited number of copies of Music is Revolution are available from the Book Beat. Last modified 2004-08-12 04:09 PM Copyright © 2001 by Mike Mosher. All rights reserved.Note: The above text is a 2001 reprint from the website Bad Subjects -an online collective and magazine founded in 1992 at UC Berkeley. Mike Mosher is a contributing writer to Bad Subjects and a former resident of Ann Arbor, where we hung out and ran-amok back-in-the-day. Mike is an artist, designer, digital guerilla and professor at Saginaw Valley State University. We hope to reprint more of Mike’s media work in the future.
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| Posted in: Art, Book Reviews, Politics | No Comments » |
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Books have been at the center of Barack Obama’s ideas on personal growth and governance. A recent New York Times article describes some of the major novels and histories that have shaped his ideas. From Herman Melville to Toni Morrison, “Mr. Obama tends to take a magpie approach to reading — ruminating upon writers’ ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry.” We are fortunate to have a world leader that can inspire and lead through ideas, education and personal growth. “….it’s been widely reported that “Team of Rivals,†Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book about Abraham Lincoln’s decision to include former opponents in his cabinet, informed Mr. Obama’s decision to name his chief Democratic rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as Secretary of State. In other cases, books about F. D. R.’s first hundred days in office and Steve Coll’s “Ghost Wars,“ about Afghanistan and the C.I.A., have provided useful background material on some of the myriad challenges Mr. Obama will face upon taking office.” “…Lincoln, like Mr. Obama, was a lifelong lover of books, indelibly shaped by his reading — most notably, in his case, the Bible and Shakespeare — which honed his poetic sense of language and his philosophical view of the world. Both men employ a densely allusive prose, richly embedded with the fruit of their reading, and both use language as a tool by which to explore and define themselves.” Source: From “Books, A New President Found His Voice”, New York Times |
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| Posted in: Barack Obama, Politics | No Comments » |
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“I am obviously profoundly honored and thrilled,” she said. “Not only to have a chance to have some small part of this extraordinary moment in American history. . . . This incoming president of ours has shown in every act that words matter, that words carry meaning, that words carry power, that words are the medium with which we communicate across difference and that words have tremendous possibilities, and those possibilities are not empty.”full article: The Washington Post Listen to the Poetry Foundation interview with Elizabeth Alexander on how the Derek Walcott-toting, June Jordan-quoting president will affect poets and poetry – podcast at: Obamapoetics at the National Poetry Foundation. “Words matter. Language matters. We live in and express ourselves with language, and that is how we communicate and move through the world in community. President-elect Obama has shown us at all turns his respect for the power of language. The care with which he has always used language along with his evident understanding that language and words bear power and tell us who we are across differences, have been hallmarks of his political career. My joy at being selected to compose and deliver a poem on the occasion of Obama’s Presidential inaugural emanates from my deep respect for him as a person of meaningful, powerful words that move us forward. And as his campaign was a movement much larger than the man himself, I understand that as a country we stand poised to make tremendous choices about our collective future. The distillation of language in poetry, its precision, can help us see sharply in the midst of many conundrums. This is a powerful moment in our history. The joy I feel is sober and profound because so much struggle and sacrifice have brought us to this day. And there is so much work to be done ahead of us. Poetry is not meant to cheer; rather, poetry challenges, and moves us towards transformation. Language distilled and artfully arranged shifts our experience of the words – and the worldviews – we live in. This is only the fourth time in our history that a President has featured a poet at his inaugural. I hope that this portends well for the future of the arts in our everyday and civic life.†Elizabeth Alexander Past Poet’s who have Read at a Presidential Inauguration:
In addition, James Dickey read ”The Strength of Fields” at Jimmy Carter’s January 19, 1977 inaugural gala at the Kennedy Center. Source: Library of Congress, FAQ |
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| Posted in: African-American History, Author/artist interviews and lectures, Poetry, Politics | No Comments » |
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