The truth is often a bullet and few people understand such as much as than rogues in power and the corrupt. Punishment for truth-telling is thus a common tactic the powerful use to silence or pepper those without the audacity speak-up. Read More “A Bullet For A Rogue Harms Only Thieves”
“Academic jazz” is a phrase that startles me. What does it mean? Today jazz music, jazz dance and jazz poetry are mainstream academic subjects. Libraries of books on jazz theory, performance, improvisation, history, analyses, events, styles, and personalities abound. Many believe jazz, particularly in its bebop and Avant-Garde forms, are intellectual, making it suitable for academic inquiry. If public intellectual giants such as Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Cornel West, Jack Kerouac, Amiri Baraka, have been steeped in jazz and its expression, it has to be intellectual. Nevertheless, jazz music was not created in university departments or conservatories of music. It came out of Africa, a continent perceived as backward. Most of the earliest practitioners of jazz in the USA could not read nor write English or music. They learnt and played their musical crafts by ear. That said, we may be confronted with the question, does academic jazz or the jazz of academics’ matter?
If a leader or intellectual is not articulating the values and necessities of robust human pride to his people, he or she is a dangerous traitor unworthy of the position – Guynes
The ontology of the African unfortunately involves ‘senseless play’ to perpetuate it as derisory, and it is becoming more visible due to social media; it has always been that way. The upliftment of the African people is what is necessary for our ontology not play. The instrumental aspects of the social organisation of things get works done while ceremonial aspects embellish what is available. For a society to work well, the instrumental aspects should supersede the ceremonial ones. When the reverse is the case conspicuous ceremony become a prime societal goal in itself. The ceremonial can be solemn, but it is mostly dominated by play.
