Rabbit's Blues

The book explores the career of Johnny Hodges, at one time one of the most famous saxophone players in the world. He was closely identified with Duke Ellington’s orchestra, playing with that seminal jazz group for nearly four decades, with only a four-year break in the early 1950s, when he led a band of his own. Just a few years after his death, however, he would be largely forgotten and his style considered passé. The book details why Hodges deserves reconsideration: he helped codify the vocabulary and syntax of his instrument in a jazz context, drawing inspiration from Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong, but adding stylistic touches of his own and keeping the Ellington band anchored in the African American tradition of the blues. He recorded with the giants of his day—Billie Holiday, Lionel Hampton, Earl Hines, Teddy Wilson, and John Coltrane. With Wild Bill Davis, he invented the organ-sax combo. Hodges was one of Ellington’s leading composing lieutenants, serving as an inexhaustible source of riffs that Ellington frequently fashioned into longer works. He may even have a partial claim to the first rock ‘n’ roll song, as his group’s “Castle Rock” was recorded the same day as the earliest recording date for “Rocket 88.” Johnny Hodges’s story is an atypical jazz history; a taciturn and undemonstrative man who lived a quiet life, never succumbing to drink or drugs, he nonetheless created some of the most romantic music of the twentieth century.

Tradução de poesia e performance: “Still I Rise”, de Maya Angelou

This paper presents an evaluation of five translations into Brazilian Portuguese of the poem “Still I Rise” by African-American author Maya Angelou (1928-2014). Also, I present and discuss my own translation of the same poem, in which I aimed at creating a text to be performed, i.e. that would work orally in Portuguese. The reasons behind this choice are: 1) this is one of Angelou’s most famous poems and one which she performed on many occasions; 2) Angelou’s poetry stands out for following the African-American tradition of oral literature and so the poem acquires a new aesthetical dimension when it is performed. My criticism on the translations as well as my translation are in debt to Paulo Henriques Britto’s work towards a more objective evaluation of poetic translations (2002).

Floating Facts on a Sea of Emotion

Richard Wright’s journalism has been largely unexamined by Wright scholars. He has never been studied as a literary journalist and rarely placed in an African American tradition of journalism. William Dow’s chapter focuses on works that best reveal Wright as a heretofore unrecognized literary journalist: 12 Million Black Voices (1940) and a selection of his exile writings: Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, (1954), The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956), and Pagan Spain (1957). It demonstrates the usefulness of literary journalistic forms to Wright as an African American writer and global humanitarian. This chapter also shows how Wright, while advancing his aesthetic aims, repurposed traditional journalism in order to promote a political solidarity with oppressed people around the world.

Taboo language used as banter

Taboo is used in many cultures to cement familial and other relationships, not only by observing taboos but by selectively breaking them. Probably the most common form of societally sanctioned taboo-breaking is within what anthropologists call joking relationships—close relationships in which people are expected to show their affinity by behaving to each other in mocking or insulting ways that would be unacceptable outside the relationship. Such relationships have been found among many Native American groups and throughout Africa, typically involving people who are joined by particular kinship or ceremonial links. In the African diaspora these traditions are maintained in less formal ways, most famously in the dozens, an African American tradition of insult play that most typically involves sexualized or otherwise taboo-skirting insults directed at a companion’s or acquaintance’s mother.