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<p><b>Minor Compositions Podcast Season 2 Episode 2 Jazz is My
Religion, Ted Joans is My Perspective </b><br>
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<p>In this episode of the Minor Compositions, we are joined by
Steven Belletto and Grégory Pierrot, in order to discuss Steven’s
book <i>Black Surrealist. The Legend of Ted Joans</i>. 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gather manuscripts, journals, recordings, and unpublished works,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.<br>
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More on the book:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/black-surrealist-9781501379543/">https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/black-surrealist-9781501379543/</a><br>
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<b>Bio:</b> Steven Belletto is Professor of English at Lafayette
College. He is author of <i>The Beats: A Literary History</i>
(2020), <i>No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War
American Narratives</i> (2012), and editor of six books,
including <i>The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac</i> (2024),
<i>American Literature in Transition, 1950-1960</i> (2018) and <i>The
Cambridge Companion to the Beats</i> (2017). <br>
<br>
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 <i>The
Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture </i>(2019).<br>
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Intro / outdo music: Ted Joans - Jazz is My Religion (1964)</p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Minor Compositions. Publishing the unruly, the radical, and the yet-co-come.
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.minorcompositions.info">https://www.minorcompositions.info</a>
Linktree of all our stuff: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://linktr.ee/minorcompositions">https://linktr.ee/minorcompositions</a></pre>
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