[Minorcompositions] Minor Compositions Podcast Season 2 Episode 2 Jazz is My Religion, Ted Joans is My Perspective

[Minor Compositions]

*Minor Compositions Podcast Season 2 Episode 2 Jazz is My Religion, Ted 
Joans is My Perspective *

In this episode of the Minor Compositions, we are joined by Steven 
Belletto and Grégory Pierrot, in order to discuss Steven’s book /Black 
Surrealist. The Legend of Ted Joans/. Together we explore Joans as Beat 
Generation insider, jazz trumpeter, collage artist, Pan-Africanist, and 
self-styled Surrealist griot, tracing a life that unfolded as an ongoing 
experiment in what he called a poem-life. Born in Cairo, Illinois in 
1928, Joans moved through Greenwich Village at the moment the Beat 
Generation was coalescing, opened the first Black-owned art gallery in 
the neighborhood, staged proto-Happenings, and developed his jazz action 
paintings before embarking on decades of itinerant movement between 
Paris, Tangier, Timbuktu, and beyond. The conversation considers how 
Joans swam across and between currents often kept apart – Surrealism, 
Négritude, Black Power, and the Black Arts movement – while using humor, 
performance, and chance encounter as tools of resistance. We discuss 
jazz poetry, the fugitive, undercommon quality of his practice, and the 
challenges posed by an archive scattered by design. Reflecting on 
ongoing efforts to gather manuscripts, journals, recordings, and 
unpublished works, this episode takes up Joans’s radical dreams: of 
surrealism as liberation, of counterculture as insurgent practice, and 
of life itself as a work of art still resonating in the present.

More on the book: 
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/black-surrealist-9781501379543/

*Bio:* Steven Belletto is Professor of English at Lafayette College. He 
is author of /The Beats: A Literary History/ (2020), /No Accident, 
Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives/ (2012), and 
editor of six books, including /The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac/ 
(2024), /American Literature in Transition, 1950-1960/ (2018) and /The 
Cambridge Companion to the Beats/ (2017).

Grégory Pierrot is Associate Professor of English at the University of 
Connecticut at Stamford where he teaches American and African American 
literature. His research bears on the cultural networks of the Black 
Atlantic. He is the author of /The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture 
/(2019).

Intro / outdo music: Ted Joans - Jazz is My Religion (1964)

-- 
Minor Compositions. Publishing the unruly, the radical, and the yet-co-come.
https://www.minorcompositions.info

Linktree of all our stuff:https://linktr.ee/minorcompositions
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