ARCHIVING THE CITY

for the city yet to come

Posts tagged “black America

harry whitaker, 1942-2010

Posted on January 25, 2011

Last night I went to a memorial service for Harry Whitaker, jazz and soul pianist, teacher, and all around New York music legend. Roberta Flack sang a song for him, remembering their days playing the world together. In her clear voice, she described how, as her musical director for fabulous records like Killing Me Softly, he transformed a song Stevie Wonder had written for her into something like “an Egyptian chant,” free and open, meditative and forward-thinking, like Harry himself. “Harry was the scene,” said Eric McPherson who, along with saxophonist, Abraham Burton, also played for him last night. I remember Harry where I met him, in his berth behind the piano at Arturo’s, the pizzeria-restaurant-bar, on Houston Street. A non-musician, I can only…

hold on, hold on

Posted on January 17, 2011

In every generation, we must get free. Let everyone of us work, let none of us shirk our duty. I do not think that there is anything that is functionally–by its very nature–absolutely liberating. Liberty is a practice… The liberty of men is never assured by the institutions and laws that are intended to guarantee them… I think that it can never be inherent in the structure of things to guarantee the exercise of freedom. The guarantee of freedom is freedom. –Michel Foucault.  

the DJ still runs this house

Posted on June 24, 2010

For a long time the word “house” referred not to a particular style of music so much as to an attitude. If a song was “house” it was music from a cool club, it was underground, it was something you’d never hear on the radio. In Chicago the right club would be “house,” and if you went there, you’d be house and so would your friends. Walking down Michigan Avenue, you would be able to tell who was house and who wasn’t by what they were wearing. If their tape player was rocking The Gap Band, they were definitely not house, but if it was playing Loleatta Holloway or (surprisingly enough) the Eurythmics, they were and you would probably go over and talk to…

Adrian Piper’s funk lessons

Posted on June 11, 2010

Consider the history and style of funk dancing, as a form of expression in urban black America, and then as a popular American dance form. Consider how this form has disappeared, in a sense, from our everyday physical vernacular. How are popular dances, ways of moving and self expression, archival practices? Notes on Funk I (excerpt) by Adrian Piper 1985 From 1982 to 1984, I staged collaborative performances with large or small groups of people, entitled Funk Lessons. The first word in the title refers to a certain branch of black popular music and dance known as “funk” (in contrast, for example, to “punk,” “rap,” or “rock”). Its recent ancestor is called “rhythm and blues” or “soul,” and it has been developing as a…

  

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