IMPORTANT NEW BOOK BY LEGENDARY AND ICONIC WRITER AMIRI BARAKA: S 0 S: Poems 1961-2013, Grove Press, 2015 and Famed Theatre Producer Woodie King Seeks Public Funding to stage Baraka's last play "The Most Dangerous Man in America"

http://publishersweekly.com/978-08021-2335-0#path/978-08021-2335-0

SOS: Poems, 1961-2013 

Amiri Baraka, Author, Paul Vangelisti, Editor

Grove Press, 2015

Amiri Baraka was old for quite a long time. Amiri Baraka was young for quite a long time. Each of these statements is true, or, as is evident in this career-spanning volume, each is as contradictory as the late poet--a perennial wise man and wiseass--himself. The collection, if one skims it, yields Baraka's oft-noted inflections and influences: the reeling spontaneity of the Beats, the avant-garde scaffolding of the Black Mountain School, and, especially, the swaggering cadences of African-American vernacular. (I'd include the influence of Black Arts poetics had he not been the movement's chief chef and cultivator.) 

A closer examination reveals that Baraka was also very consistent over the collection's 52-year span—not just in his attention to black musical, cultural, and political lore but in his philosophical leanings. Religion is a recurring antagonism, and titles across the book highlight his heckling appraisals of dogma, doctrine, duplicity, and group thinkery: "Black Dada Nihilismus," "Heathens," "Why Is It Quiet in Some Churches." "We'll worship Jesus," he writes "when jesus get down/ when jesus get out his yellow Lincoln/ w/the built in cross stain glass/ window & box w/black peoples/ enemies." 

As that excerpt suggests, the book is also relentlessly irreverent. Baraka often seems akin to a voodoo doctor smiling as he needles American social order. No one is safe from his provocations, puns, and put-downs: not "Tom Ass Clarence" nor "Rush Limp Balls"; not whites, not blacks, not rich, not poor, and certainly not stupid. In "A Poem for Deep Thinkers," Baraka chastises writers petrified by craft: "the statue graveyard where Ralph/ Ellison sits biting his banjo/ strings retightening his instrument for the millionth time before/ playing the star spangled banjo." The poems live by every trickster-comedian's credo: "Say whatever you want so long as it's funny." Still, it is painful to acknowledge instances where the mockery is, as Baraka later apologetically admitted, "wrongheaded." We could add bilious, reckless, embarrassing. 

The aspersions are indefensible, but no serious reader would characterize Baraka's oeuvre as fundamentally malevolent. The early work reveals a poet exploring the psychology of being African-American, as well as of being a being being. "An Agony. As Now" begins, "I am inside someone/ who hates me. I look/ out from his eyes," and ends, "It is a human love, I live inside... It burns the thing/ inside it. And that thing/ screams." The contemplative musing of poems like "An Agony. As Now" and the wonderful "Footnote to a Pretentious Book" gives way to the public, polemical speech of cultural and political activism. The collection becomes, for better or/and worse, a signal of blunt urgency. Whether one views it as the work of a bully or prophet, Cassius or Cassandra, this is undeniably the work of the kind of poet we will not see again; Amiri Baraka was one of the last of the 20th century's literary lions. This momentous collection exhibits his abiding resistance to almost everything, but subversiveness. (Feb.) 

Terrance Hayes's newest collection, How to Be Drawn, is due out from Penguin in April.

S O S: Poems 1961-2013
by Amiri Baraka
Paul Vangelisti (Editor)

Hardcover: 560 pages
Publisher: Grove Press
Publishing date: February 24, 2015

Editorial Reviews:
Praise for S O S: Poems 1961-2013

"Amiri Baraka’s S O S sparks a living flame. Bodacious and tenacious, he remains a realist rooted sometimes in the political, sometimes in the avant-garde. His voice is made in America; his poetry is an action. Baraka’s poems live on and off the page and demand that we feel language as music and meaning. This poet and his work are always slipping the yoke, determined to be free—yes, aesthetic freedom lives within S O S. The collection wails out from recent history through a masterful signifier whose fierce certainty holds grace notes with a backbeat." —Yusef Komunyakaa

"[S O S is] a signal of blunt urgency . . . this is undeniably the work of the kind of poet we will not see again; Amiri Baraka was one of the last of the 20th century’s literary lions. This momentous collection exhibits his abiding resistance to almost everything, but subversiveness." —Terrance Hayes, Publishers Weekly (boxed review)

"One of those rarest of things: poetry that combines a rigorous intellect, high-voltage aesthetics, and a revolutionary’s need to confront his subject. . . . Those who believe, as Baraka did, that art could surpass simple beauty and act as a force for social change will cherish this remarkable volume. . . . Highly recommended." —Library Journal (starred review)

"These poems cover the ebbs and flows of the modern African-American struggle for freedom and identity . . . There may be no better time than now to experience the lyrical, funny, dynamic, and provocative poetry of Amiri Baraka . . . S O S is the perfect place to hear the voice that influenced, if not defined, decades of black political struggle when few were listening—and even fewer were doing anything. Baraka did something. Man, he did plenty." —Shelf Awareness

"Throughout his writing life, [Baraka] crafted some of the most potent, thoughtful, and even sublime lines of any poet of his generation and beyond." —Gawker

Praise for Amiri Baraka

"Baraka stands with Wheatley, Douglass, Dunbar, Hughes, Hurston, Wright and Ellison as one of the eight figures . . . who have significantly affected the course of African-American literary culture." —Arnold Rampersad

"His work works—in terms of efficiency, in terms of amazing manipulation of fire and music." —Gwendolyn Brooks

"Baraka was the people’s poet." —Maya Angelou

"Always a nuance ahead of everybody else . . . [he was] our most original writer. Nobody else comes close." —Ishmael Reed

"Baraka was foundational for a generation of writers who emerged in his wake, a singular figure whose work laid down the terms of engagement for many, if not most, of us who came to the craft after him. . . . [He] achieved an absolute democracy of language—a poetry forged in the crucible of a collective experience, a musical fusion of history, irony, and art." —Jelani Cobb, New Yorker

"He was a powerful voice on the printed page, a riveting orator in person and an enduring presence on the international literary scene." —Margalit Fox, New York Times

"Baraka’s writings are charged with a literary electricity that enlightens and energizes our minds, bodies, and souls." —M. K. Asante Jr.

"No American poet since Pound has come closer to making poetry and politics reciprocal forms of action." —M.L. Rosenthal

"[Baraka’s] are the agonized poems of a man writing to save his skin, or at least to settle in it, and so urgent is their purpose." —Richard Howard

About the Author
 
Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) was an author of poetry, plays, essays, fiction, and music criticism, as well as a groundbreaking political activist who lectured in the United States, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. He served as Poet Laureate of New Jersey from 2002-2003, and his numerous accolades include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Langston Hughes Medal from the City College of New York, the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, a PEN Open Book Award, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Before Columbus Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.
 
Fusing the personal and the political in high-voltage verse, Amiri Baraka—"whose long illumination of the black experience in America was called incandescent in some quarters and incendiary in others" (New York Times)—was one of the preeminent literary innovators of the past century. This volume comprises the fullest spectrum of his rousing, revolutionary poems, from his first collection to previously unpublished pieces composed during his final years.

Throughout Baraka’s career as a prolific writer (also published as LeRoi Jones), he was vehemently outspoken against oppression of African American citizens, and he radically altered the discourse surrounding racial inequality. The environments and social values that inspired his poetics changed during the course of his life, a trajectory that can be traced in this retrospective spanning more than five decades of profoundly evolving subjects and techniques. Praised for its lyricism and introspection, his early poetry emerged from the Beat generation, while his later writing is marked by intensely rebellious fervor and subversive ideology. All along, his primary focus was on how to live and love in the present moment despite the enduring difficulties of human history. Selected and prefaced by Paul Vangelisti, S O S is the essential edition of Baraka's poetic work.

http://review.gawker.com/the-peoples-poet-amiri-barakas-life-in-words-1677141138 

The People's Poet: Amiri Baraka's Life in Words
by D. Scot Miller
Filed to: AMIRI BARAKA     

A decade ago I met with Amiri Baraka at San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore for a reading of his short story collection, Tales of the Out and Gone. He said that he'd written nearly twenty books and nearly all of them were out of print. As a writer who had hoarded his work from my excavations of used bookstores and library sales, it hurt to hear this.

An artist as prolific as he was, it seemed criminal that most of his work was virtually inaccessible to the masses to whom he wrote; because that's who Amiri Baraka was first and foremost: a writer for the masses, a people's poet.

As a poet, Obie-winning playwright, essayist, and novelist, Baraka has few peers, black or white. And SOS: Poems, 1961-2013, a new collection of Baraka's poetry from Grove Press, gives only a glimpse into the ever-expanding universe which was his vision. A lifelong native of Newark, New Jersey, he understood the power of the word to affect change, and until his death—a year ago this week—he stayed working, writing, and publishing with small independent publishers in spite of the utter abandonment he experienced from the literary establishment. SOS attempts to chronicle that struggle.

SOS, however, is difficult navigate. Edited by poet and anthologist Paul Vangelisti, there is a pronounced reverence and respect for Baraka's work. His preface, though meandering in places, enlightened me to Baraka's understanding of why his books were all but erased from public memory. Vangelisti points to a conversation Baraka had twenty years ago. "In the poet's own words from an interview in 1996: 'When I was saying, White people go to hell, I never had trouble finding a publisher. But when I say Black and white unite and fight, destroy capitalism, then you suddenly become unreasonable.'"

He later expands on Baraka's calling, writing: "After breaking with cultural nationalism, Baraka soon emerged as an artist in the tradition of Cesar Vallejo, Luis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Aimé Césaire, and Rene Desparte... Moreover, as an African American poet, Baraka's career embodied a commitment, along with poets like Cesaire and Desparte, to develop a space of negritude within this internationalism. For him, negritude played at the heart of 20th century poetics, animating and transforming what remained innovative in the socialist literary project."

The preface serves as a sound launching pad as one delves into the collection, a signpost to guide the reader through what is, almost too often, a morass.

Because Amiri Baraka used controversy as a medium within itself—he never hesitated to use inflammatory language for both affect and attention—what can be easily overlooked was his rigorous practice as a poet. Throughout his writing life, he crafted some of the most potent, thoughtful, and even sublime lines of any poet of his generation and beyond.

Witnessing the young beat poet Leroi Jones in "Hymn For Lanie Poo" from his first collection, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note:

All afternoon
We sit around
Near the edge of the city

Hacking open
Crocodile skulls
Sharpening our teeth

To the fire-spitting founder of the Black Arts Movement in "Black Art" from his 1969 collection, Black Magic:

We want "poems that kill."
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
Guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
And take their weapons leaving them dead
With tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland.

And onward to the elder statesmen in "What's That Who Is This In Them Old Nazi Clothes? Nazi's Dead," from his previously uncollected works:

This new anti fascist war we must fight, against the rule of
The corpses. The corporate dictatorship forming in front of
Our eyes. It can no longer surprise. Get your pitch forks ready.
Strike Hard and True. You get them or they get you.

What we see in Baraka's insistent chronicling of his evolution, is a man committed to an Afrosurreal engagement with the word as a tool and weapon toward the socialist literary project. Beginning with his work from the emerging Beat Movement—of which he, Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman were initial members—his lines show that his surrealism was more than a way to write a poem, but as a means towards a growing declaration for a way of life that not only demanded, in Ted Joans' words, "complete freedom of the imagination and radical social change, but also a far-reaching moral revolution."

When Baraka coined the term Afrosurreal in 1974 in an introduction to Henry Dumas's book Ark Of Bones, he described Dumas's "skill at creating an entirely different world organically connected to this one… the Black aesthetic in its actual contemporary and lived life." Baraka's engagement with the word, much like Dumas, reveals a powerful mind and spirit transforming "the struggle that has to be" through the prism of Afrosurrealism.

"Henry Dumas's work dealt with these changing dimensions and people who do strange things in realistic situations," Baraka said in a 2009 interview, "it was Surrealism that changed the relationship of things."

Baraka, too, was renowned as the founder of the Black Arts Movement in Harlem during the 1960s. Though short-lived, the movement became the virtual blueprint for a new American theater aesthetic. The movement and his published work—such as 1963's signature study on black music, Blues People, as well as his searing play Dutchman— practically seeded "the cultural corollary to black nationalism" of that revolutionary American milieu. And yet, he was more than this still: a beat poet, a cultural nationalist, and a mercurial, but mighty force in the world of arts and letters.

What is lacking in SOS, is the ability to reign in all of these different manifestations of Baraka to give a gestalt view of the complex, and intentionally complicated, artist. Altogether, the collection is edited and selected well. Vangelisti does the maestro proud, and it is a hope that SOS inspires more publishers to resurrect Baraka's works with the same reverence and meticulous respect that genius deserves.

[Image via Getty] 

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/producer-legendary-playright-play-article-1.2086158 

Producer wants last play of playright Amiri Baraka to run through online help

Former WABC reporter to play W.E.B. DuBois in Amiri Baraka's final play of "Most Dangerous Man in America." Play needs at least $40,000 to run in May.

BY Keldy Ortiz

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Tuesday, January 20, 2015,

     

Amiri Baraka, New Jersey's poet laureate, at the Bowery Poets Club Photo:  Thomas Monaster  

Woodie King Jr. has gone online looking for help producing the final work of legendary poet and playright Amiri Baraka, who died last January.

Baraka’s 2011 play, “Most Dangerous Man in America,” retraces the steps of sociologist W.E.B. DuBois, a seminal figure of the early 20th century civil rights movement. It is slated to be unveiled in May at Castillo Theater in Manhattan, with former WABC reporter Art McFarland in the lead role.

King has turned to crowdfunding site Kickstarter to raise at least $40,000 he says he’ll need to bring off the production.
“I can’t tell you the impact Amiri Baraka had in American culture,” said King, who has been producing Baraka’s plays since 1968.

Those who pledge as little as $25 will receive an invite to a preview perfomance, but bigger donors can get their hands on original posters and prints, historic first-edition copies of books by Baraka, DuBois and others, and even a co-producer credit in the play.

The giveaways were donated by Hatch-Billops Collections and the Amiri Baraka estate, among others.

The decorated writer, a pioneer of the Black Arts movement who was known earlier in life as LeRoi Jones, wrote political works, including the 1964 masterpiece “Dutchman,” that were tinged with criticism of America’s treatment of blacks.

“He thought that art provided the opportunity to reflect,” actor Danny Glover said of Baraka, whom he met as a student at San Francisco State University, in 1967. “One of the reasons I embraced black art was because of Amiri Baraka.”

 

Howard Simmons/New York Daily News Woodie King Jr, Director/Producer of upcoming play.

 

Howard Simmons/New York Daily News Former ABC News reporter Art McFarland will play the role of WEB Dubois in the play. Shown here in front of photo of Amiri Baraka.

 

Howard Simmons/New York Daily News Actor Danny Glover speaks about his friend Amiri Baraka and the upcoming play.

 

Howard Simmons/New York Daily News Memoribilia to be included in the Kickstarter fundraiser.

 

Howard Simmons/New York Daily News Former ABC News reporter Art McFarland will play the role of WEB Dubois in the play. Shown here with Petronia Paley who will play the wife of DuBois, Woody King Jr Director/Producer and Herb Boyd, writer/journalist.

 

Howard Simmons/New York Daily News Memoribilia to be included in the Kickstarter fundraiser.

 

Howard Simmons/New York Daily News Memoribilia to be included in the Kickstarter fundraiser.

 

Howard Simmons/New York Daily News Exterior of the Schomberg Center.

New Federal Theatre Dedicates 46th Season to Amiri Baraka

January 13, 2015

Woodie King Jr's New Federal Theatre kicks off its 46th season with "The Amira Baraka Project" - featuring a revival of his early acclaimed play Dutchman from 1964 and the world premiere of his final play, Most Dangerous Man In America (W. E. B. Du Bois), written fifty years later. Dutchman, directed by Woodie King Jr., will begin performances February 5th, with opening night set for February 20th at the Castillo Theater (543 West 42nd Street). This limited Off-Broadway engagement will continue through March 8th only. Most Dangerous Man In America (W. E. B. Du Bois) follows in May.
Woodie King Jr. explains the impact Amiri Baraka had on him: "Amiri Baraka and I shared a 50 year friendship. Shortly after I arrived in New York City, he came to see the play I was directing at St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery. We had in common a close friendship with Langston Hughes and we both loved shoes and hats. Baraka was already a nationally recognized poet and respected editor of literary journals (where he published unknown writers alongside such comrades as Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti, Rivers, Rexroth and Kerouac). The success of Dutchman (produced by Edward Albee) marked him as a major playwright, Baraka moved uptown to Harlem to set up the Black Arts Repertory Theater. In the '60s, American cities were in turmoil; Baraka's poetry and essays defined that unrest. Baraka's image blazed on front pages of newspapers across America and his poetry and plays fired up African Americans everywhere. In 1968, I began producing his plays: Great Goodness of Life (a Coon Show), Slaveship, The Toilet, A Recent Killing, Sidnee Poet Heroical, and Boy and Tarzan Meet Again in a Clearing (and produced It's Nation Time - for the Motown label, Black Forum Records). He participated in my documentary Black Theater in America and co-edited anthologies with me. Baraka's life and literary achievement as playwright should give us inspiration and courage, especially to African-American artists. He had incredible vigor and forcefulness. If one followed Baraka's evolution from the Village in the mid -'50s, through jazz joints and cafes, to Harlem, where he denounced all the whites he had associated with up to that time (including his wife Hettie Jones), and embraced Black Nationalism. He moved to Newark where he founded the nationalist organization, Committee for a Unified Newark, and then into the 1970s, after absorbing W.E.B. Du Bois he announced he was adopting a Marxist philosophy."

Starring Ryan Jillian Kilpatrick and Michael Alcide, Dutchman will have scenic design by Chris Cumberbatch, costume design by Carolyn Adams and Ryan Jillian Kilpatrick, lighting design by Antoinette Tynes and sound & projection design by Bill Toles. Both actors appeared in the acclaimed Atlanta Black Theater Festival production.
The title DUTCHMAN is an allusion to The Dutch East India Company, the most renowned slave ship company of the 17th century, whose flagship for the voyages between West Africa and America, tradition says, was named Flying Dutchman. The literary legend is The Flying Dutchman in which the central character is ever in pursuit of prey that can never be caught. This production will include the music of Wagner's The Flying Dutchman. Experimental, allegorical and angry, Dutchman is set on a New York City subway train, where Lula, a young white woman, strikes up a conversation with Clay, a young middle-class black man. As the play unspools, she goads him, with liberal righteousness, into releasing the anger that, as a black man, he must surely be harboring.

Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in 1934 in Newark, NJ. After leaving Howard University and the Air Force, he moved to the Lower East Side in 1957 and co-edited the avant-garde literary magazine Yugen and founded Totem Press, which first published works by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others. He published his first volume of poetry, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, in 1961 His Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963) is still regarded as the seminal work on Afro-American music and culture. His reputation as a playwright was established with the production of Dutchman at Cherry Lane Theatre in March 1964. The controversial play won an Obie Award for Best Play and subsequently was made into a film. The play was revived by Cherry Lane Theatre in 2007 and has been produced around the world. In 1965, Jones moved to Harlem where he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. BARTS lasted only one year but had a lasting influence on the direction of Afro American Arts. BARTS sent five trucks (for art, poetry, music drama) a day into the Harlem community, where performances would be given in vacant lots, playgrounds, and housing projects. In 1966, when BARTS was dissolved, Baraka returned to Newark, his hometown, and set up with his wife, Amina Baraka (who was a founder of Newark's "Loft" a local venue of contemporary) The Spirit House and The Spirit House Movers, that brought drama, music and poetry from across the country. During this period, the Barakas founded The Committee for Unified Newark (CFUN) and The Congress of Afrikan People. Both CFUN and The Congress of Afrikan People led the election of Kenneth A. Gibson as the first Black Mayor of a major northeastern city. In 1968, Baraka co-edited Black Fire: Anthology of Afro-American Writing. Amiri and Amina Baraka edited The Music: Meditations of Jazz & Blues (Morrow) and Confirmation: An Anthology of African-American Women, which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka was published in 1984. His subsequent publications include Y's/Why's/Wise (3rd World 1992), Funk Lore (Littoral 1993), Eulogies (Marsilio, 1994), Transbluesency (Marsilio 1996), and Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems (Nehesi 2002). Amiri and Amina Baraka founded Kimako's Blues People, a multimedia arts space, from a small theater in their Newark home. Amiri founded the jazz/poetry ensemble Blue Ark which has played at the Berlin Festival, and throughout the US. His jazz opera Money, with Swiss composer George Gruntz, was performed in part at George Wein's New York Jazz Festival in the early '90s. Primitive World, with music by David Murray, was performed at Sweet Basil, the Nuyorican Café and the Black Drama Festival in Winston Salem, NC. His Bumpy: A Bopera with music by Max Roach was performed in 1991 at Newark Symphony Hall and at San Diego Repertory. Amiri founded the New Arkestra, a big band working to produce a living archive of this music. In the fall of 2002, Baraka, who had been named New Jersey Poet Laureate by then Governor James McGreevey, coming under fire from the Anti-Defamation League, the New Jersey Assembly and others after a reading of his controversial poem "Somebody Blew Up America" about the 9/11 attacks. After reading the poem at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation's annual poetry festival in Stanhope, NJ, Baraka's $10,000 stipend was rescinded and the Poet Laureate position eliminated in 2003 by Gov. McGreevey. In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Baraka's case in which he asserted that his First Amendment rights were violated. Baraka bounced back from the melee and remained a figure in demand at international festivals, book fairs and on university campuses. Baraka was the Poet Laureate of the Newark Public Schools appointed by former Superintendent Marion Bolden. Amiri Baraka's numerous literary honors included fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, the Langston Hughes Award from City College of New York, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Letters in 1995. In 2002 he was named Poet Laureate of New Jersey and Newark Public Schools. His book of short stories, Tales of the Out and the Gone (Akashic Books) was published in late 2007. Home, his book of social essays, was re-released by Akashic Books in 2009. Digging: The Afro American Soul of American Classical Music (Univ. of California) was also released in 2009; the Before Columbus Foundation selected Digging as winner of their annual American Book Awards. His last book RAZOR: Revolutionary Art for Cultural Revolution was published in 2012. He died January 9th 2014.

Most Dangerous Man In America (W. E. B. Du Bois), Baraka's final play, is a dramatic reflection of one of the most traumatic events in the terrible period of McCarthyism. W.E.B. DuBois, a co- founder of the NAACP and a scholar and political activist known and recognized throughout the world was indicted in 1951, by the US Federal Government as at the age of 82 as "an agent of a foreign power." Throughout the play, the focus moves back and forth between the Harlem community and their opinions and the witnesses' testimony and the courtroom battles. In this way we get a more balanced view of the interior narrative. Video stock footage of significant historical events and speeches will be part of the production design. Tickets will go on sale in April.

Woodie King Jr. is the Founder and Producing Director of New Federal Theatre. Woodie King Jr.'s New Federal Theatre has presented over 250 productions in its 42-year history. Mr. King has produced and directed on Broadway, Off-Broadway, in regional theatres, and in universities across the United States. He is the original producer of the ground breaking "choreopoem" For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, (The play was then co-produced by NFT with Joseph Papp's Public Theatre). He also produced What the Wine Sellers Buy, Reggae and The Taking of Miss Janie (Drama Critics Circle Award). His directional credits are extensive and include work in film as well as theater. Mr. King was recently inducted into The Theater Hall of Fame for outstanding contribution to the American Theater.

For tickets, visit www.castillo.org or call toll-free 866-811-4111. For more information, visit www.newfederaltheatre.com.

Amiri Baraka "The Way of Things (In Town)”
 


"The Way of Things (In Town)" by Amiri Baraka with Rob Brown-saxophone, recorded live on February 21, 2009 at The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy NY.

The poet, icon, and political activist Amiri Baraka performs with Rob Brown, an eloquent and versatile saxophonist with a deep knowledge of jazz, in a reading from his book "Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems."
 
This production is part of "Free Jazz at the Sanctuary," a 13-part series of performance videos featuring some of the world's most talented improvisers. Each hour-long show is available on DVD directly from Downtown Music Gallery (www.downtownmusicgallery.com). For more information on this series, visit www.JazzSanctuary.org

Video Mix - Amiri Baraka "The Way of Things (In Town)" 


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKcPlbVHdy0&list=RDpKcPlbVHdy0#t=235