Coltrane House

Call for Entries:
A Love Supreme: 2nd Annual Contemporary Photography Competition and Exhibition


Juror: Peter Barberie, Curator of Photographs, Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Philadelphia Photo Arts Center is excited to announce A Love Supreme, 2nd Annual Contemporary Photography Competition and Exhibition. This year's title refers to the dramatic transformation in John Coltrane's creative process and sound in his legendary recording. Moving away from jazz standards to a spiritual and instinctual way of making music, Coltrane forever changed his medium. In this spirit, today's photographers are creating new visual languages, pushing the medium in unprecedented and unpredictable ways, forever changing how we define photography.

Winning entries will be exhibited at PPAC from June 9 - August 27, 2011 and will be included in the exhibition catalog. First, second, and third prize winners will receive $500, $200, and $100 in cash prizes plus a $50 gift certificate for PPAC's digital services. The competition is open to all subject matter and photographic processes. Work must have been created in the last 3 years. The entry fee is $40 for a maximum of 5 images. Enhanced lab members of PPAC do not need to send entry fee. Entry fees are non refundable. All entries must be delivered or postmarked by Tuesday, May 10th, 2011. Entries can also be submitted online, for instructions go to
philaphotoarts.slideroom.com

For more information please email: info@philaphotoarts.org

Philadelphia Photo Arts Center

I heard this Jazz/Rap piece today called Where Y'all At ? by Wynton Marsalis, and while the musical style is all Marsalis, the lyrics take me back to Gil Scott Heron's spoken word style of the 1970's. Gil would be calling everyone out regardless of which side of the street they lived on.


You got to speak the language the people
Are speakin'

Specially when you see the havoc it's wreakin'
Even the rap game started out critiquin'
Now it's all about killing and freakin'

All you '60s radicals and world beaters
Righteous revolutionaries and Camus readers
Liberal students and equal rights pleaders
What's goin' on now that y'all are the leaders

Where y'all at? (That's what I'm talkin' about)
Where y'all at? (Where y'all at?)
Where y'all at?
Where y'all at? (Lord have mercy)

Don't turn up your nose
It's us that's stinkin'
And it all can't be blamed on the party
Of Lincoln
The left and the right got the country sinkin'
Knocked the scales from Justice hand and
Set her eyes a-blinkin'

All you patriots, compatriots, and true
Blue believers
Brilliant thinkers and overachievers
All you "when I was young
We were so naïve'ers
Y'all started like Eldridge and now
You're like Beaver

Where y'all at?
Where y'all at?
Where y'all at?
Where y'all at?

We supposed to symbolize freedom and pride
But we got scared after King and the
Kennedys died
We take corruption and graft in stride
Sittin' around like owls talkin' 'bout "WHO?
Who lied?"

All you po' folks victims of rich folks game
All you rich folks gettin' ripped off in the
Same name
All you gossips cacklin' "It's a dirty shame"
And whistle blowers cryin' 'bout who's to blame

Where y'all at?
Where y'all at?
Where y'all at?
Where y'all at?

Well, it ain't about black and it ain't about
The white
They'll get together to make your pocket light.
When you just keep on payin' do your jaws
Get tight?
Taxes, that's your real inalienable right

All you afro-wearers and barbershop experts
Cultists, sectarians, political disconcerts
Big baggy pants wearers with the long
White T-shirts
The good man that counter what the
Bad man asserts

Where y'all at?
Where y'all at?
Where y'all at?
Where y'all at?

After 9/11 the whole world
Was ready to love us
Now everybody can't wait to rub us
We runnin' all over the world with a blunderbuss
And the Constitution all but forgot in the fuss

All you feminists and mothers, fathers
And brothers
I guess you'd pimp your daughters if you
Had your druthers
All you "It's not me" it's always others
You watch the crimes, you close your shutters

Folks watchin' Fox and CNN News
Seekin' a cure for the Red, White, and Blues
Well, it won't matter which side you choose
If we end up payin' international dues

All you "In my day it used to be" frauds
All you "So what"s and "Leave it to the Lawd"s
All you "I'll just deal with whatever cards"
All you extend adolescent American Bards

Where y'all at?
Where y'all at?
Where y'all at?
Where y'all at?


Where Y'all At?
Wynton Marsalis

Monk. photo by W. Eugene Smith

Jazz and Photography are inseparable for me. Jazz music has influenced my own artistic style for longer than I have consciously realized. Black & White photographs and Jazz were made for each other. Smokey, sultry, grainy images. If I close my eyes and imagine being in the darkroom, I will hear the barely audible sounds of Coltrane or Miles playing on the radio in the background. Temple University's WRTI hosted by Bob Perkins... "BP with The GM"... Bob Perkins with the Good Music. Goes back so many years it becomes part of my soul. I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately.Last month I saw Gil Scott-Heron perform at B B King's Blues club. Thirty years after seeing him perform for the first time in North Philly back in the late 70's. His music and lyrics have inspired me immensely all those years, and I have embraced them again as fully relevant to these hard times. Pieces of a Man. We Almost Lost Detroit. Winter in America. etc. etc.

Gil Scott-Heron. by C. H. Paquette (2009)



Two highly recommended items for Jazz and Photography/Film lovers...

The Jazz Loft Project

Thelonious Monk & Band. by W. Eugene Smith

In the late '50s and early '60s, photographer W. Eugene Smith made approximately 4,000 hours of reel-to-reel tape recordings, and took nearly 40,000 photos, in his lower Manhattan loft apartment. His was a building where the era's top jazz musicians stopped by for jam sessions at all hours of the night. In a series of four reports on NPR's Weekend Edition, culled from a 10-part series on WNYC, Sara Fishko explores the stories of The Jazz Loft. This is an incredible look into not only the world of the highpoint of the New York Jazz scene, but the fascinating voyeurism and obsessive nature of W. Eugene Smith.


The Jazz Baroness

Nica & Monk. unknown photographer


She was a beautiful British-born heiress from a powerful Jewish dynasty. He was a quirky African-American musical genius who helped pioneer the jazz revolution known as bebop. They met in Paris in the 1950s and were inseparable for the next 28 years, as she became a loyal friend and fiercely protective patron of some of the era's greatest musicians. THE JAZZ BARONESS chronicles this unlikely, controversial relationship. This very interesting documentary has been showing on HBO in recent weeks.The film weaves together archival footage and interviews with family members, friends, jazz historians and luminaries, among them Sonny Rollins, Quincy Jones, Thelonious Monk, Jr., Roy Haynes, Curtis Fuller, The Duchess of Devonshire and Clint Eastwood. THE JAZZ BARONESS also features footage of the groundbreaking Thelonious Monk Quartet playing such classics as "Straight, No Chaser," "The Bolivar Blues" and "Nutty," including a 1965 BBC appearance, when Monk finally began to get the recognition, if not the financial rewards, he had worked for. Historical documentary about a unique love story.

Jazz Baroness Website

Pieces of a Man

by Gil Scott-Heron


Jagged jigsaw pieces
Tossed about the room
I saw my grandma sweeping
With her old straw broom
But she didn't know what she was doing
She could hardly understand
That she was really sweeping up..
Pieces of a man

I saw my daddy greet the mailman
And I heard the mailman say
"Now don't you take this letter to heart now Jimmy
Cause they've laid off nine others today"
But he didn't know what he was saying
He could hardly understand
That he was only talking to
Pieces of a man

I saw the thunder and heard the lightning!
And felt the burden of his shame
And for some unknown reason
He never turned my way

Pieces of that letter
Were tossed about that room
And now I hear the sound of sirens
Come knifing through the gloom

But they don't know what they are doing
They could hardly understand
That they're only arresting
Pieces of a man

I saw him go to pieces
I saw him go to pieces
He was always such a good man
He was always such a strong man
Yeah, I saw him go to pieces
I saw him go to pieces

Sun Ra

From the ICA web site...

"Jazz pioneer, bandleader, mystic, philosopher, and consummate Afro-Futurist, Sun Ra, (born Herman Poole Blount 1914, Birmingham, Alabama, died 1993) and his personal mythology have grown increasingly relevant to a broad range of artists and communities. "Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago's Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-1968" presents a collection of paintings, drawings, prints, manuscripts, ephemera, and video produced by and about Ra and his associates—much of it previously unseen. This exhibition examines how Ra and his dynamic, continually-evolving ensemble, the Philadelphia-based Arkestra, crafted both their otherworldly image and fiercely independent approach to self-production.

Highlights of the exhibition include original drawings for their 1960's albums Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow and Other Planes of There, and five newly discovered typed and annotated broadsheets. Until recently, only one such broadsheet was known to exist—the one that Ra gave saxophonist John Coltrane in 1956. The show will also include the unpublished manuscript, The Magic Lie, a book of Ra's poetry, which has become influential in the nascent Black Islamic movement. In addition to these documents, the film Spaceways, by Edward English, will be on view. The film documents Ra and his Arkestra (a deliberate re-spelling of "orchestra"), in 1968, as they prepare to perform at Carnegie Hall.

Early in his career, Sun Ra spent virtually all of his time and energy on Chicago's south side, identifying with broader struggles for black power and identity, and saw his music as a key element in that struggle. As well as Sun Ra's connection to the incipient grass-roots Afro-Futurist movement in Chicago, he also has a connection to Philadelphia. In 1968, Sun Ra brought the Arkestra to Philadelphia, where his band mate Marshall Allen inherited a house on Morton Street in Germantown. The house served as band headquarters until Sun Ra's death in 1993. The Arkestra continues to perform under the leadership of Marshall Allen, who still resides at the Germantown house."




ICA: Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago's Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-1968

Dr. Harrison Ridley, Jr.

Thank you for so many years of great jazz history...



From the website All About Jazz...


Dr. Harrison Ridley, Jr. passed on February 19th 2009

Dr. Harrison Ridley Jr. is one Philadelphia's best known jazz specialists, although he himself does not use the term "jazz," opting instead for a phrases such as "this music referred to as jazz," or simply, "the positive music." In this respect he shares a similarity with many other jazz artists and historians (Duke Ellington being the most prominent example) to resist using "jazz" as a descriptive label.

A professor of music history at Temple University and Villanova University, he is the host of a Sunday night radio show on WRTI (90.1FM) entitled, "The Historical Approach to the Positive Music." The "historical approach" Ridley takes is to focus in particular on one artist, and he'll use his entire four-hour (8pm-12am) program to give the listener a sense of that artist's contribution to the tradition. Often he'll focus on a specific period in an artist's career, such as early (1920s-1940s) Duke Ellington or Miles Davis recordings from the 1960s. The show has been running for more than thirty years and is quite popular in the Philadelphia area. Ridley will often reference the fact that his phone lines in the studio are full of calls--local jazz celebrities have been known to call in during a show as well.

Ridley is also a record collector and archivist. In the course of fifty years of collecting, he has has amassed over 8,500 LPs, 3,000 78s, 200 45s, 300 CDs, and 6,000 books on African American history and music. He specializes in Duke Ellington albums (of which he has more than 600), and is also an expert on Benny Carter (he has 200 Benny Carter albums).[1]

Ridley has received more than 80 awards, including recognition from the Philadelphia City Hall and the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, and an honorary Doctorate in Music from Villanova University (conferred in May, 2008). Dr. Ridley also works as a consultant for the Library of Congress. Dubbed a "walking encyclopedia of jazz," Dr. Ridley is in great demand on radio and television shows. He is also an archivist for the Philadelphia Clef Club of Jazz and Performing Arts, an important institution in the Philly jazz scene.