Eastside Arts Alliance presents

BLACK MUSIC

Reflections on Jazz Today

Saturday, July 28, 2012 • 8:00 pm - $15

Jazz/ Poetry with AMIRI BARAKA & REGGIE WORKMAN

(Accompanied by Muziki Roberson, piano)

Sunday, July 29 • 6:00 pm - free

A Community Conversation with AMIRI BARAKA & REGGIE WORKMAN on

The State of Black Jazz Today

 (Dinner plates will be available for sale)

At The EastSide Cultural Center

2277 International Blvd., Oakland, CA  94606

510-533-6629   eastsideculturalcenter@gmail.com

www.eastsideartsalliance.org

Also check out– ESAA presents Final Friday Film Screening – Friday, June 27

Triumph of the Underdog – classic film on Charles Mingus – FREE – 7:00pm

Oakland, CA - Eastside Arts Alliance (ESAA) presents a landmark event bringing together two iconic artists - AMIRI BARAKA, the venerable poet and longtime jazz critic, is widely considered the Father of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, author of the classic book on Black music – Blues People, and is on the Advisory Board of ESAA and REGGIE WORKMAN, master bassist and music professor, is often associated with John Coltrane, playing on his most celebrated live sessions. He was a founder of the Collective of Black Artists (CBA), organizing Black musicians in the 60s & 70s.

This event is a part of an ongoing project of EastSide Arts Alliance exploring the history and future of jazz. We are focusing here on past organizing efforts of both Baraka and Workman – their work leading the Black Arts Movement and the Collective of Black Artists.  Using this history as a foundation for exploring where the future of jazz is now – especially for Black folks participation in it. (See more below on this work.)

On SATURDAY, JULY 28 we will present a concert featuring poetry by Amiri Baraka and Reggie Workman on bass with accompaniment by Oakland’s own Muziki Roberson on keys. The following evening, SUNDAY, JULY 29 we invite the Bay Area jazz community to join Baraka and Workman in a conversation on the state of Black jazz today.  Our hope is to be able to draw out and support the seeds of a movement of artists and community organizers committed to ensuring that the Black history of jazz is passed on to the next generation and that most importantly that next generation of Black artists and audience members continue play a lead role in the development of the music.

About Eastside Arts Alliance and The Black Jazz Project:

Jazz is American classical music and perhaps America’s greatest contribution to contemporary world culture, but may be on the verge of extinction from its very source, the African American community. While now widely regarded as a universal art form with international contributions and interpretations, it is a product of the African American experience and cultural history. The steady erosion of Black jazz musicians, Black audiences, venues, circuits, depositories, students and schools signals a significant generational change in the nation’s culture and threatens to erase the memory and consciousness of our very history.  We are currently engaged in a critically important and timely project that serves to address the implications of this change by organizing a national gathering of conscious musicians, educators, jazz critics, journalists and various presenters and cultural organizations who are committed to sustain or revive the Afro American roots of the music. We are initiating and sustaining a dialogue that begins in Oakland but expands nationally that ultimately becomes an organized pro-active network and circuit to advocate for the expansion and development of jazz, particularly in urban African American communities, but also reviving a semi-rural route throughout the Black Belt South.

EastSide Arts Alliance (ESAA) is a collective of artists and community organizers of color who live and work in the San Antonio district of East Oakland.  Founded in 1999, our mission is to unite art with activism to work for community empowerment and cultural development, and to build bridges between the disenfranchised, racially and ethnically divided communities that reside in our immediate neighborhood and in the broader East Bay. The founding members of EastSide Arts Alliance have been working in the San Antonio /Fruitvale neighborhoods for over 20 years.

In 2006 ESAA closed escrow on our new and permanent home – The EastSide Cultural Center, located on International Blvd at 23^rd Avenue in the heart of the San Antonio district. The center includes a 150-seat multi-use theater space, sound and visual arts studios, 16 units of affordable rental housing and storefront spaces for community-based non-profits.

Eastside Arts Alliance programs include free after-school arts workshops for youth ages 14-22 (music, dance, theater, visual arts and leadership development), public arts projects, performances, festivals, town hall forums and exhibitions. Our success has been in our longevity and our continued growth in this diverse working-class community.

Elena Serrano

EastSide Cultural Center

2277 International Blvd.

Oakland, CA  94606

510-533-6629

www.eastsideartsalliance.org

mailing address:

PO Box 17008

Oakland, CA  9460

Obama Drama Coming to Oakland, Vote for me, I'll Set You Free

Marvin,

The President will be visiting Oakland on July 23.  I am inviting you to attend either one of two events that are presently scheduled.  This will be an opportunity for you, family and friends to see and hear the President as he enters the final stages of the campaign.  As you know the President is in a tough fight and he needs all the support that can get both financially as well as campaign workers.  I am encouraging you to contribute at a level that is most comfortable.    Northern California campaign workers made a strong request for the President to come to Oakland/East Bay for the people in this area have been amongst his strongest supporters.  However, given the tightness of the campaign, he needs your support more than ever.  Hopefully you can attend and encourage others to do as well.  Here is the link to make your donation.

The Piedmont link is for a small dinner event at the home of Wayne Jordan and Quinn Delaney.  This event is  limited to a maximum of 45  guests.  Of course, photos with the President will be available.  The Oakland event will be held at the Fox Theatre and it  has different price points.  Photographs will cost $7,500 for one and  $10,000 for more than one person, Premier seats will be $1000 , General Admission  will be $250. If you are interested in either event you should commit sooner than later.  If you don’t want to sign up on line, I will get you a contribution form as soon as they become available. 

Dinner: https://my.barackobama.com/July23Piedmont?custom1=321212

Reception: https://my.barackobama.com/July23OaklandReception?custom1=321212

For any questions please do not hesitate to contact me either by my email or cell (510 928 5392).

John Burris

OVT NorCal  Regional Co -Chair

Malik Sulaiman on Mali Dialogue, toward Ma'at

This discussion between these Brothers is saddening, yet, it is a discussion

that we should have, without personal attacks on each other. The issue here 

is not only the destruction of Afrikan Islamic Heritage in Mali, but the attack

on this Heritage from White Arabs and Black Afrikans. There is a extreme 

Fundamentalist school of Islam called Wahhabi/ Salafi that has roots in Arabia, 

and attack Afrikan Culture as "Un-Islamic." 

There is an extreme Afrikan School 

of thought that sees Islamic Culture as 
Un-Afrikan. Then there is a another school of thought called Sufi that embraces 
Islamic and Afrikan Culture, and it is this School that built Sankore University,
and Malian Civilization.The Wahhabi/Salafi promote Arab Imperialism, not Islam! 
The extreme Afrikan school promotes a "more Black/Afrikan than thou" Pan 
Afrikanism that is more exclusive than inclusive of our people, think about 
the millions of our people who accept Islam, Hebrew, or Christianity, 
which all have Afrikan Roots. 


May we achieve Balance!

Rudolph Lewis on Malian Dialogue

Dear Friends, I'm as dumb as a door knob when it comes to knowledge whether freedom  is expanding or contracting. Our present comfort and technology are as addictive as a drug that makes the good seems and evil and an evil a good. They tell me I was birthed in a culture that had destroyed all that identified my African ancestors and made them what they were, except for a few artifacts. Others tell me that they (in spirit) live in our drums, dances, and songs, and that all of that has become part of our DNA just as much as the space that they brought with them from the East.
 
We know much more about destruction of the body, than we do about the spirit. Of course, we know both more intimately with the entry in the 1990s of crack cocaine and HIV/AIDS. Whether we did it to ourselves or others did it to us, the blame game does not resolve the dilemma. Certainly, it leaves work for all of us to resolve and bring to an end. What I have on my mind is the continued discussion of the occupation of northern Mali and the ongoing destruction of the artifacts of African Sufi Islam by a few hundred fundamentalist Muslims, armed to the teeth, and beyond the control of the Malian government.
 
Marvin X has posted a discussion among Mustafa Ansari, Runoko Rashidi, and Chinweizu, three black intellectuals, that I have followed on the Blacklist. In response, here is what I wrote:
 
I do not care for the anti-Arab stance of Chinweizu or Runoko. Nor do I care for the Islamic defensive stance of Mustafa Ansari. Chinweizu and Runoko say that Arabs and Arabia have done Africa a wrong. Ansari says that Africa, including the Yoruba and Igbo of Nigeria, has done itself a wrong. Well, both are historic truths, outside of a racial context. Chenweizu and Runoko press the racial button to exaggeration. Ansari press the religion button to an exaggeration. Religious fanaticism is indeed involved in the politics of Mali and the destruction of African Islam (Sufi) artifacts, doubtless. No matter what the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) says, Arab states like Qatar and Saudi Arabia are involved in funding "Arab Terrorists." Second, there are Africans in Africa who identify more with Arabia than Africa, as we have seen in Darfur and in north Sudan. Here in America we have African Americans who identify more with Arabia and Arabs than they do the blues and African America culture. There are Africans black as night who think more in an Arabian and Pan Arabia frame than they think Africa and Pan-Africa. These latter nuts are involved in the destruction of Malian culture. And there are persons like Ansari who are throwing up a smokescreen for the involvement of Islamic fundamentalist elites. Now that's the truth of the matter.  http://blackbirdpressnews.blogspot.com/2012/07/dialogue-on-destruction-in-mali.html?spref=fb
 
But my theme is about the death of the body and the death of the spirit, the killing of the body and the killing of the spirit. There's always a small elite involved in this enterprise, as it was with Washington, Madison, and Jefferson, the fathers of our nation. It continues with persons like Mitt Romney and the Koch Brothers and the Republican Tea Party. We see what they try to do with their denying of health and education and work to the poor, the blacks, and the Hispanics. They want our consent for our own genocide, for our own death iof our body and spirit. Righteously, we booed Romney at the NAACP convention. Too respectfully, we did not run him out of town on a rail, tarred and feathered. We have too many Robert Smalls, great hearts and great nobility, among us.
 
Of course, like Obama, we can all walk and chew gum too. We can be concerned about our own welfare here in the States as well as be concerned about the legacy of our African ancestors left behind in Mali. We do not have to be like George Bush: give $32 billion to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa but ignore its ravaging impact in the 8th Ward of the District of Columbia, a couple miles from the White House. In these matters my views are constantly in flux. It was a good thing that George Bush did for African nations on the AIDS tip. Maybe Satan can have moments of clarity and charity as well, that does humanity a good. And yet remains a liar and a deceiver.
 
Below is another report from Mali, a link to the story.  "After Tombs, Arabs Now Destroying Timbuktu ’s Manuscripts"

http://www.africanglobe.net/africa/tombs-arabs-destroying-timbuktus-manuscripts/

 

I lived through the Rwandan genocide, which Bill Clinton ignored. (See poem below.) Many of us blame Clinton for his inaction. Hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved with a different U.S. policy. Today, many of us Pan-Africanists, like Molefi Asante, say that we should not appeal to Obama to send the Marines to Mali, for the War on Terror is just a ruse to steal the oil of non-European nations. Here we have another valid interest just as we had in Rwanda, Congo, Sierra Leone, and Darfur. If Africans will not act to stop the bloodshed  and impoverishment of African peasants, who will? They say they do not have the military resources to go to these spots of crises. If Africans as in the African Union do not have the military constitution to help the Mali government, nor do American Pan-Africanists, who does?

 

Are African artifacts, museums, and mausoleums worth the lives of American marines? That seems to be a politic that we must query in our soul of souls. I know that political correctness is not always the route we need to travel in crisis.

 
Loving you madly, Rudy
 
Rudolph Lewis, Editor
ChickenBones: A Journal

www.nathanielturner.com 

 
 
 

Keeper of the Bones

                            —for Rwanda

                          By Rudolph Lewis

Spring has come, the tree flowers

in my backyard. I’m off to church

where no compromise, no forgiveness,

no mercy is the order of the day.

 In this museum, mausoleum

I am the overseer of the remains—

skulls stacked neatly like books,

brittle bones of family, of neighbors.

 It’s not the work I dreamed

when I was a child, filled with hope.

But families have been slaughtered—

night is filled with nightmarish images.

Death memories crowd out dreams—

in gardens, bedrooms, on highways

machetes shatter bone, shear muscle,

children brains thrash on holy walls.

 “Sin is real. It is bitter. It's a fire,”

an archbishop speaks of  Satan’s work.

It expands like space with dark matter,

in proportions of oceans & seas.

Nothing’s left on which dogs feast

or flies blow and maggots nest.

Yet hell lives on in hearts—the world

outside forgets the skeletal dead.

Brutal inquisition, subtle torture, ice

picks in the eyes of despised humanity,

clubs, knuckle dusters, guillotines live.

The self disappears in stages like flesh.

 An old man with only a few years,

I’ll too join the ancestors to find out

whether the dead will rise like Christ

to lead us heaven bound for eternity.

Until I sprout wings in another dream

I remain vigilant as keeper of the bones.

7 April 2004