TED JOANS LIVES! A Tribute, Page 10

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Ted Joans Lives! Online Tribute, Books & Resources

To contribute to the Ted Joans Lives! webpages, please email us.Pieces may be any length. All contributions received will be published online. You will retain the copyright to your work.

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Ole Lund:

Hey man, my good old friend and soul brother
Ted Joans,
your Hipness of spades
that can not be remade

I spent ten long years in Eastgreenland digging the people there. You know - the Eskimos. Actually the last Eskimo tribe to be found by the whites. Real good people. That's my Timbuktu.

Coming back I tried for eleven long years to get in touch with Idrees (Suliman) the trumpeter.
You know he used to live in Copenhagen. I found him last year on this new thing called the net only to find out that he just had passed away.

I have been trying to find you, another trumpeter, for twelve long years only to find out that you passed away as well. Years ago I asked Skip (Malone) about you and he gave me the address of a Parisian café, Café Roque. I wrote in vain. I even had a friend of mine to go by - without any result. Skip wrote by the way an article about Jazz 'n' Poetry. He mentioned himself a lot of times but your name had apparently disappeared. I asked him why - and said that he forgot. You haven't been around Cope town much I gather. Skip died some years ago. Maybe you dig each other now somewhere.

I must have something about trumpeters. My biological brother used to play trumpet.

And did you know that another friend of mine was Kenny Dorham, the beautiful bop player, who used to play with Bird? He, Bird and Dinah Washington used to celebrate their birthdays together and I was with Kenny at the Drop Inn when he had just heard the news about her suicide - must be around December 1963. A few years later I went to N.Y. to visit Gloria - whom you introduced me to, remember? We were staying at Delancey Street (It's very fancy, you know?) and Kenny had a loft flat at the Bowery not far away. He was like a father for me when we were walking in the streets of the Village meeting all kinds of hip people - musicians etc. When I went to N.Y. again he had died.

Anyway - you came to Copenhagen in the summer of 1966. A very warm summer I remember. You came from Paris and along with you came this black chick, Barbara, who became my lover. You really wanted me to have a black woman. I tell you - actually I married a woman from Guyana in 1979, a woman who couldn't be more mixed: American Indian, Eastindian, African, Welsh and Portuguese.
She came to visit Frankie, where I met her. He passed away some years ago too.
But did you know that somebody was playing the "fly on the wall" part that summer of '66? A person wrote a book about you and Frankie and the rest of the black guys in Copenhagen. You are called Ned Green. Barbara and I play a very small part, me being described as an "unattractive Danish boy". Shame on the author I say. Nobody knew the author it seems and the rumour was, that someone paid by the CIA had written this book to give Copenhagen a bad reputation in order to scare away the black GI's on leave from Germany. Skip didn't tell me about untill years later. It's called "The Lives and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger" by Cecil Brown published in 1969. Sounds like shit, doesn't it? Not very hip. But now I find out that the author is a real live person, even a black person. I guess that's why he was able to hide in those days.

You remember when we one early morning went up Noerrebrogade, you shouting "I want wienerbrot, I want wienerbrot" (Wienerbroed = Danish pastry), and we emptied a bakers machine in our hunger for real Danish pastry.

You remember, you made a collage for me - I think it was 1964 before I was drafted - I still have it and there's still a little of your beard left, hair that you used for the pussy of a nude black woman in the collage. Next to her is a picture of your hero Malcolm X. On the back it says: "Mr. Lund - Dig here is a avantgarde sensual gift for you for being a good guy to the spades that dug Denmark. Your Ted, Your Miriam Oct 28 - 6:30 - Wednesday."

Miriam, I don't know what happened to her. But Mona Lisa married an English guy. Last year I got this strange experience: I crossed a cemetery to make a shortcut from one street to another with my daughter. Quite accidentally. Something caught her eye and we stopped, and when I looked down I saw a gravestone with Mona Lisa's name. She had died 6 months before. Weird isn't it?

You wanted to make a happening in Copenhagen: the world largest woman drawn with chalk on the streets but the police wouldn't allow it. It was supposed to lead the way to Vingaarden where you where going to read your poems with jazz accompaniment.

Did you know by the way - that the first English word that I was taught (by my father) was "rhinoceros", your favourite animal. Once you sent me a postcard with a picture of a rhino. I pasted it in a book so I can't see what you wrote.

Ted, my brother, thank you.
I met you around 1963 on your way to Oslo or down south to Paris, Marocco, Mali, Timbuktu and I saw you last in 1973, when you gave a reading in Copenhagen. You gave me a name to put on myself: hipster, and you played an important part for my understanding of Afro-American culture - soul - movement - dance - jazz is my religion as well.

If you should see a man walking down a crowded street talking aloud to himself, don't run in the opposite direction, but run towards him, because he's a poet. You have nothing to fear from the poet - but the truth.
(Ted Joans' reading intro.)

All things must pass
So must we
See you some time

Ole Lund
(full name initials: H.O.W.L. - dig?)

Gary Cummiskey:

I met Ted Joans when he came out to South Africa in late 1993. I attended a workshop of his and was most impressed by his warmth, humour, humility and infectious creative spirit. He had emphasised the importance of simply 'writing down the poem', not worrying about issues of form or even reception, just get the poem out, let it live. I will also always remembers his words: 'The fantasy fades, but the surrealism remains.'

A few days later, a sleepy saturday afternoon, he gave a reading at a local jazz club, accompanied by the beating of an African drum. His powerful performance reminded me that poetry should be a shared experience, not words buried alive in a book. He had an aura of freedom about him, the freedom to move and to share and to experience life to the full. His example encouraged me to continue writing poetry and performing poetry, and shortly I dedicated a small poetry collection of mine to him.

Ted Joans - always poetry, creation, life, laughter, protest, rebellion, eroticism, the marvellous.

Ted Joans lives!

Gary Cummiskey
Dye Hard Press
Johannesburg
South
Africa

Robert Elliot Fox:

For Ted Joans

   He sprang from Ole Man River
   tracked every groove
in the diasporic
               spiral
a wailer who harpoon-
tanged on three continents

Afro-beat 
purveyor of seer realism
prowling graffiti street
   w/ rimbaud license
   & saxy moan
his blackophone antics
teasing the word
  for all he wrote

Now he jams 
in soulville
with all the gone 
griots
a band of angels
nommoing
   down the night

Trey Ellis:

I first met Ted in 1978. I was sixteen years old and returning via Greyhound from San Francisco to Manhattan. I'd only vaguely heard of the Beats but this weird bearded fellow black man sat across the aisle from me and told me the secret to making it across country in style. You see, in order to sleep you needed two seats to yourself and in order to discourage others from sitting next to you you needed to vigorously pick your nose or scratch your balls just as they were sizing you up. Well it worked and we travelled across country together, him regailing me with stories of the Beats, of Paris, of Timbuctu.

A few years later, while I was doing a school year abroad in Florence I was vacationing in Paris. There Ted was, on the Metro moving sidewalk just in front of me. I don't think he remembered me. But a few years after that, I had just finished my first novel and there Ted was again, in front of Shakespeare & Co. It was early in the morning, he was helping to open the store and he told me, "If you're serious about writing you have to help me put these racks of books out on the street." I couldn't refuse and for my reward cafe' au lait and brioche were lowered from the window by a rope.

Then, amazingly, years after that I was back in Paris, telling some friends the stories about Ted that I've just told you when...there he was again! My first novel, "Platitudes" had just come out and I thanked Ted so much for inspiring me, for giving me the courage to become a writer. I gave a reading at Shakespeare & Co and dedicated it to Ted.

Since then, and until his passing, we have stayed close, and he was and continues to be my romantic ideal of an artistic life well lived.

Alexandre Pierrepont:

The piece I send you is not exactly a tribute to Ted Joans. It is part of the summer issue of a quarterly letter called The Weavers (creative writing about creative music), published both in French and in English. But the rhinoceros is part of the piece. So...

The Collected Poem for Blind Lemon Jefferson
Cape Town Shuffle
Your Life Flashes
Like-Coping

Orange is the color of my vision. Orange was the color of her dress and the one of my vision. My heart is amber and takes place between drums and ghosts. Orange is the color of your eyes and the one of your skin. My words are orange and so are the clouds. Blind Lemon Jefferson himself, the visionary blind man, was wearing orange macaws feathers around the arms, and parrots feathers on the ears. Julius Hemphill was playing an orange fossil saxophone similar to the very moment and Ameen Muhammad was playing a blood orange trumpet under the sky's ashes. Ted Joans thought he was a rhinoceros of a yellow verging on red -- I have it from his brothers and sisters who are caravaneers in the manucured desert of cities. And this rhinoceros proclaimed and sent down in the vase of his mouth the following and astounding thing: "Jazz is my religion, Surrealism is my point of view", "I use my senses trained by surrealism. I am Maldoror, Malcolm X, Sade, Breton, Lumumba and many others, too many for you to know them all. They are my energy, my stamina, and I will continue to use any means necessary to win my freedom that will become freedom for all." André Breton was also thinking of you, Ted Joans, great liberator of forces, when he wrote in his "Ode to Charles Fourier": "And if violence was nesting between his horns, all the springtime was opening out deep down his eyes." Dear old rhinoceros, you put me in mind of Ameen Muhammad roaring with fury and delight: Freedom Ain't Free ! You've got to fight to be free! I wish those who are no more in search of stories, those who are living laboriously hallucinated, were told such a thing, but that this voice rushed from deep down and devastated them, so they know that another kind of swing is waiting for them, that once again we are just about to revolutionize the completed times of revolutions.

Ted Joans, and K. Curtis Lyle with him, who speaks, speaks, never utters a word that is not glass, who dismembers, reverses and recomposes the shimmering body of Blind Lemon Jefferson, and his many imaginary lifes, his invisible images, who was associated for so long with Julius Hemphill, aka Roi Boyé the Gotham Minstrel, that his voice ended by marbling just like for the wind to vein. Together, they held the secret of talking blues and of street rap: to crack the bones of the illustrious society. I put down the equation:

Ted Joans, K. Curtis Lyle, and Kahari B. with them, comet on the tip of all tongues and in the solar system of Ernest Khabeer Dawkins' New Horizons Ensemble, setting the facts in their true orange light, ring after ring, the truth so numerous and so lovable, and the revolving moves of passion. Your words orange, your songs orange, your voices orange, your rhythms orange -- then silk blue. Kahari B., aka the Disco Poet, and his ready tongue that's like a bars file in the ammunition depot of reality, like the flame staying in the lock and the key of the enigma: It's not just music. In a bland bland bland world of restriction, this is the colour of revolution! I put down the equation:

I tune you, storytellers, fortune tellers: Blind Lemon Jefferson, K. Curtis Lyle, Julius Hemphill, Ernest Dawkins, Ameen Muhammad, Kahari B. and Ted Joans, Ted Joans, Ted Joans. I call on you again. Through your overcrowded shadows and your magnetic skeletons, I appeal to my son's imagination and to the spirits who are his rattles. My memory is not coming back, no mother of pearl, it has always been scattered in the world. I have nothing else to declare than what I imagine: when we were child, we were bowling small street moons like hoops, we were smiling in such haste in the checked bodies of our dreams that we were mistaken for the perfect crime, and so on. My stories have been blurred, those that were telling where I come from, what I did live and what I didn't, stories about ancestors I never had and who don't come back to visit me. Griots, bluesmen, musicians and poets, storytellers storytellers syorytellers who split wood of speech and stuff the world with shelters, with inhabitable countries and inhabited beings, I lodge at the sign, your sign, of the Mystery-Tree. I listen to the ones who get words out of things, among which I rest, and where we are so numerous, visionary blind men and great liberator of forces. I put down my equations one by one:

Jeff, how I wish that men who battle transposed in a life which is never that daily the harmonies you open like the day that is dawning, and felt allowed to say in their turn:

K. Curtis Lyle & Julius Hemphill
The Collected Poem for Blind Lemon Jefferson (IKEF 05 / www.ikefrecords.com) Lyle (poetry), Hemphill (as, fl) + Malinke Kenyatta (voc).

Ernest Dawkins' New Horizons Ensemble
Cape Town Shuffle (Delmark DG-545 / www.delmark.com) Dawkins (as, ts, perc), Ameen Muhammad (tp, consh shell), Steve Berry (tb, perc), Darius Savage (b), Avreeayl Ra (dm, perc) + Kahari B (poetry).

Fieldwork
Your Life Flashes (PI 05 / www.pirecordings.com) Aaron Stewart (ts), Vijay Iyer (p), Elliot Humberto Kavee(dm).

Jeff Parker
Like-Coping (Delmark DG-543 / www.delmark.com) Parker (elg, Korg MS-20 synthesizer), Chris Lopes (b, fl), Chad Taylor (dm, vib, g).

Sandra McPherson:

The great Ted's book, Lost and Found: "In Thursday Sane," is very much in print. Please see http://www.swanscythe.com/books/in_thursday_sane.html for a copy of this small book featuring Ted's poem in his own handwriting, composed spontaneously after a visit to Beauford Delaney in Paris in 1976. Meeting him once was a privilege; no one loved the arts and their history like he did.

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