Interview with Alvyn Haywood, host of "Jazz School" WWFM

My visit to Mercer County Community College last month included an at length & many faceted conversation with Professor Alvyn Haywood, host of 'Jazz School' on WWFM [ Jazz On 2 89.1 FM, Trenton's Jazz HD Channel ] . We touched on topics ranging from the importance of Jazz in the context of contemporary culture, specific inspiration for me during the writing of JOE SENT ME, the background of my connection and collaboration with Academic Theatre Program Instructor Alex DeFazio which led to JOE SENT MDE, future plans, and more.

Professor Haywood & those at WWFM are shaping an immensely innovative and important program, one that reaches out to Trenton & beyond in a broad-minded and all-inclusive way, a model for radio stations everywhere that seek to educate, influence & inspire their audience as well as entertain.

Stream it here!

Anji Bee: Chillcast #161: Sexy New Tunes

Chillcast #161 with luscious voiced Anji Bee of Lovespirals...







Playlist:

1. "Black & White" Vanessa Daou Joe Sent Me (2009) Free Download | Buy on iTunes
2. "Viens" Sr Mandril Terragroove (2009) Free Download | Buy on iTunes
3. "Destiny Complete (Bittersweet Version - DJ Drez Remix) The Angel feat. Mystic Supa Crucial Downtempo Remixes & Rarities (2009) Free Download | Buy on iTunes
4. "If I Could Tell You" Blu Mar Ten Close EP (2009) Buy on iTunes | Buy the Vinyl
5. "On the Bridge" Monodeluxe and Paola The Lounge Suite Vol. 1 (2009) Free Download | Buy on iTunes
6. "Bred an Budda (The Particle Mix - ft Becks, Shaggy & Anji Bee)" Loveshadow ccMixter (2008) Free CC Download
7. "Heaven" WK-Collective Heaven (2009) Free Download | Buy on iTunes
8. "Wonder (Live)" Karmacoda Ultraviolet Live (2009) Buy on iTunes | Buy at CDBaby

'Heart of Wax': Conquering Venus Book Trailer

I'm deeply honored that Collin Kelley has chosen 'Heart of Wax', from my new album 'Joe Sent Me', to be the soundtrack to the trailer for his forthcoming novel Conquering Venus. About the novel, Gary Zebrun writes: "From Memphis to London and to Paris, Martin Paige seeks redemption after a terrible and violent loss. The wonder is that he still believes in love, even when it appears like an apparition in an elusive and conflicted young man. Collin Kelley takes you on a sometimes frolicsome, sometimes tragic tour of the heart in this engaging first novel."

Thank you, Collin, for the spark that you ignite with your words and the smoldering fire that continues its slow burn in our hearts.

Collin Kelley & the Charge of Poetry

"I want to drive away into the morning light,
headed for Spain, hurting like hell,
but with my head up
and the taste of him on my lips."
Collin Kelley, from 'Why I want to be Pam Grier'

We feel it as a jolt, a surge, as though we've received some invisible electrical charge: then, a window opens up, there's a flash of recognition, a recollection, a memory that had been dimmed, dulled or denied, then, a slow opening of the mind - a thought, emotion, sentiment, perception - our finger is on the pulse of something, an inkling, that we were, previously, unable to identify.

Whether spontaneous, structured, confessional, or historical, Poetry condenses meaning into tight, terse, tensile language: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways"; one phrase engenders an endless stream of impressions, iterations, and interpretations. Poets might be whimsical, reclusive, oblique, or explicit, remembered as defiant or ignominious... Whatever the destiny or description, all Poets use words as they choose them: as tools, as weapons, seeking to exact revenge, some positing a particular vision of the world, others, a plea for redemption.

David Herrle writes: "Collin Kelley's social/political poems are never mixed to go down smoothly like, say, a Sea Breeze. They're Tanqueray served neat." Kelley achieves the sweepingness of love's paradoxical emotion in one phrase:

"I want to drive away into the morning light,
headed for Spain, hurting like hell"

and exquisite nuance in the next:

"but with my head up
and the taste of him on my lips."

The charge, the surge: Poetry.

Forbidden images: the charge of art, music & poetry...

the forbidden, desire, gestures as messages, Salome, dance as expression of rebellion, exaltation, freedom, redemption...

Julie London: 'Cry Me A River' from 1955

Julie London, one of my all-time favorites & earliest influences...

'Joe Sent Me' Digital info: iTunes, Rhapsody...

IODA Distribution featured release
Vanessa Daou Bio
Joe Sent Me info

Vanessa Daou

"Black & White" (mp3)
from "Joe Sent Me" (Daou Records)
Buy at iTunes Music Store
Buy at Rhapsody
Stream from Rhapsody
More On This Album

Coolness: Christine Swint on 'Joe Sent Me'

"Vanessa Daou's new album, Joe Sent Me, is exactly what I want to listen to now. I’ve been keeping the CD in my car while I drive around town, and I even played it for my yoga class the other day. They melted.

Daou's vocals are pure silk, and the jazz riffs underneath are the wind that rustles the lyrics. It's heaven. Her work shows the heights that can be reached when the artist takes risks – it's contemporary, fresh, original. Go listen. And go read too. Collin Kelley's interview with Vanessa Daou is on page 28 of the current issue of ouroboros review. A huge thank you to both artists for being a part of our fledgling magazine."

Words by poet & writer Christine Swint @ Balanced on the Edge

radio's new paradigm_jonny mugwump & the exotic pylon

"I think that it's time for a new adult art."
Donal Kuspit

Neoteric realms of philosophy & sound, sonic streams-of-subsciousness, future-past sound wave vestiges, music's sublime resonances... Jonny Mugwump and The Exotic Pylon is equal parts accident and alchemy, a weekly "palette cleanser", War-on-Terror's sonic aftershock: a reflection, a recitation, a sonic projection on the scrim of our collective imagination.

"All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born." With these words, Yeats, in 'Easter, 1916', brings to life and reifies our awful suspicion that sometimes what is terrible lives alongside what is beautiful. Violence, terror, tragedy, catastrophe, have left past poets intrepid but disconsolate. Post-modernists have taken refuge in frivolity as a way of escaping hopelessness, but we are seeing the burgeoning of a new era of artists, museum goers and radio listeners have begun to reject Mass Media's rapacious maw for feel-good art and music.

"Categorization is not to be taken lightly."
George Lakoff, 'Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things'

A byproduct of the commodification of music has been its categorization. The silent edict is: if it doesn't fit, it doesn't fit in. This has led to a whittling down of choices for the consumer, a kind of creative censorship. What's left is the lowest common denominator, a homogeneity of sound which for the artist, hungry for newness and nuance, is at once fettering and freeing.

Since the forbidden cannot be suppressed - lessons learned from Storyville, Prohibition, the Recording Ban of the 1940s, and History's banned books - these constraints have historically been not a bane, but a boon for artists who are armed with the knowledge that what is hidden is, like all mysterious things, the most seductive, and inso being, the most desired.

"A number of artists to-day set out to create no more artworks. Instead they want to get out of the museum, and provoke modifications of the space of everyday life, giving rise to new forms of relations."
Jacques Ranciere, ' Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art'

"It's a question of the authority of things," says Anne Veronica Janssens. 'The Exotic Pylon' questions this authority, and takes refuge in the hybridity of contemporary experience, foraging Art, Philosophy & Radio history for context while forging a new sonic language. Beyond playing music, Jonny Mugwump is proposing a new perspective on the world, one that denies the doctrine of categorization. One listen to his show and you'll be jarred into the recollection that music is an Art that has the capacity to be sublime as well as subversive, and enlighten as well as entertain.

Like love and desire, the term 'sublime' refers to a feeling which by its nature cannot be defined; it is felt in the half-light, in the moonlight, both fearful and beautiful, it moves imperceptibly toward some intuited infinity, away from the known, part of a hidden continuum that with each generation keeps tuning in to a new auricular frequency.

Luke White writes about "the strange 'after echoes' ... of the idea of 'the sublime'..." Today's handful of Artists, Musicians, Poets and Sound Alchemists are shaping a new paradigm, a 'sublime' that can be digitized, widgtized, Googled, YouTubed, streamed and forever archived, a new sublime that is felt in the resonance of their 'after echoes'.

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Forthcoming interview with Jonny Mugwump + links tba