JAZZIZ
Bass legend Ron Carter and acclaimed poet Danny Simmons will release a new album, The Brown Beatnik Tomes – Live at BRIC House, on June 7 via Blue Note. The album documents a night of jazz and poetry that took place last autumn at Brooklyn’s BRIC House – a project that began as a book, became an event and is now an album.
“I was trying to imagine myself as a Beat Generation poet in the ’50s,” says Simmons via a press release, “and how my concerns would be a bit different from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s or Allen Ginsberg’s. In a way, the beatniks romanticized black people. They were hip, but they didn’t really see the plight. That scene largely was about the Negro experience but didn’t have the Negro in it.”